Server Merge: Time to beat the dead horse again.

[cdbd3rd]

....

We don't want merges. We want higher population servers.

Sadly, we're getting old.

With age comes... shrinkage.


I am no fan of merges, either, but there may be no real choice eventually. The Powers that are holding the pennies seldom hand them out to oldies like us - be it direct support or indirectly thru advertising.



Edit @ free transfers: Reduced price transfers maybe. Other than a short-term special, *free* transfers would cause all sorts of problems - and likely open up abuses.

[arkonas]

Sadly, we're getting old.

With age comes... shrinkage.


I am no fan of merges, either, but there may be no real choice eventually. The Powers that are holding the pennies seldom hand them out to oldies like us - be it direct support or indirectly thru advertising.



Edit @ free transfers: Reduced price transfers maybe. Other than a short-term special, *free* transfers would cause all sorts of problems - and likely open up abuses.

im not opposed to server merges. even if there were transfers there is an easy fix for this. limit transfers. once a week or a month wont devastate any server. not to mention it will bring some of the dead servers with more populated. i want to see merges then if the game continues to live they can make new ones later down the road, but first we need to work on the ones we have.

[Nyata]

Sadly, we're getting old.

With age comes... shrinkage.


I am no fan of merges, either, but there may be no real choice eventually. The Powers that are holding the pennies seldom hand them out to oldies like us - be it direct support or indirectly thru advertising. [...]

for sure it's a lot harder to get people interested in an old game than into a shiny new one. however... after my recent experiences with a friend who wanted to play after he saw me play and liked it... I have to say the main problem in getting new peole to play is not advertising.

firstly, I should mention I am in germany. so this is in parts specific to the german client. so the friend googled for download DDO, got linked to some german site, and that site actually provided the ancient happy cloud installer version. He couldn't figure out why it wouldn't load past 10 %, so after some days trying he told me he can't download it. he doesn't remember what site that was he got the download from, and his browser history was cleared by then, so wish I could tell them to not offer that download any more, but I can't.

so.. I whiped the happy cloud install, went to the ddo page, got the 'real download', installed. Loading Launcher, trying to create an account - oh look, account creation page is not working. Thanks again to whoever fixed that on halloween afternoon!

next - changing language in launcher to german for the guy causes the launcher to shut down because the german EULA html is not included in the setup. copied the english EULA into the german folder and bypassed that.

finally made it to the character creation screen - and what the... you cannot create characters at all in the german version, because the equivalent to the 'buy account upgrades' button covers the 'create' button completely. so.. back to english version, I explained characters and classes and buttons and paths on the fly, created character, log out, changed back to german...

finally in the game, there is a load of other glitched buttons, half- or not-translated dialogs and DM-texts, menus and so on... but it is somewhat playable so far.

Bottom line: if it is *this* hard for a new player to even try the game, they likely will not play.
Also, if a german version is being offered, it needs to be maintained, or it should just be scratched and focus set to english-speaking customers.

Makes me wonder in what state the french client version is....

[hunzi2010]

Is there a way to get Turbine to show some evidence of the population in an hourly graph on each server.
I don't think they will show total accounts per server. but it would give an idea on what servers and having high log ins at what time and what servers are already populated with enough people.
for example people in the euro time zone or asia time zone or Australian time zone would have different peeks to the usa time zone.
I know they did a serve in lotro to the Brandywine server, which was already a high populated server, next thing all the Russians came to brandywine server and it became unplayable, couldn't move at all.
so if there is a way for example to see that the thelanis server is highly populated, then this server would be unavailable to merge to. if orion was empty with activity and sarlona was medium population, then the option would be unavailable to choose orion and only offer sarlona or another medium populated server.
if you get what im saying here.