Server Merge: Time to beat the dead horse again.

[Urjak]

Instead of merging servers, the Auction House, the Shard Exchange and the LFG should be merged. Players would still stay on their servers and when they join a group from a different server, they cannot see the others until they enter the wilderness/quest zone the party leader entered. Doing so there wouldn't be the need to touch identical character or guild names, lag and performance would stay the same on each server, because 'foreign' players only meet in slot limited groups/raids and in instanced areas. No to the idea of a 'mega server', but yes to merging some gameplay elements. Direct trading should be disabled between players from different servers, to prevent abusing quest zones for trading only. The chat should stay server related too, only the party chat should be readable and writeable for all party members regardless of their home server.

This would probably require a lot of dev time to implement - but totally worth it!

Regarding the "Oh what would that even bring, people would still just solo":
If you now have on each server 300 people soloing and 50 people questing (spread among 28 levels) then it is pretty hard to fill lfms (especially outside main US game time) - if you combine 3 of these servers into one then you have 900 people soloing and 150 people questing (again, spread among 28 levels) => that's far more people to fill up an lfm. .... So: No, I don't think that the majority of people would change their play style (some would) - but those that want to group would have far better chances to get into a group (and newbies would not so much be presented with the ghost town lower levels can be - especially outside main US gametime).

[FifthTime]

Merging makes sense to me if retaining new players and growing the population is the ultimate goal.

If not, then merging servers is probably a waste of resources for a company looking to milk the remaining players for as long as possible with as little investment as possible.

[IronClan]

It's been discussed on multiple weekly streams with Cordovan. They've acknowledged that the players want it, but there are issues. One of the things I can recall off the top of my head was guilds and guild airships*. It would be a ton of work for them to do it, and especially not run into issues.

*All previous server mergers occurred before there were guild airships and guild renown.

Heck. Someone on Wednesday's stream said they were waiting for about a week for their paid transfer to go through. Cordovan confirmed it takes about a week or so, depending on where it is in customer service's queue. Now imagine thousands of characters (and alts) attempting to do it all at once, for however many servers they decide to get rid of. Unless there are more customer service representatives hired to specifically deal with server mergers, on such a large scale (and most likely ignoring all other cs issues until it's all done), it will take forever to get done properly.

All the more reason to give free transfers and let the players decide.

people who want more people to play the game with should not be punished due to guilds... some of the largest guilds I know of on Thelanis, I'm in one of them are skeleton crews now. I can't imagine sticking around for airships.

As far as the que goes, yeah that's a problem if they are still hand transfering. They had reportedly put the tech in for hands free transfers last I heard they just aren't using it. Maj Mal put this in during the coffee break in which he was live producer, and even dropped mentions about giving people free transfers to solve the population problem (He mentioned this on a website we're not allowed to discuss here perversely enough) it was also supposed to make using Lam much nicer. Maybe they were afraid to implement something created by someone they were shortly going to lay off... Maybe Maj Mal was full of it, I always thought he was all talk personally, but who knows...

[IntrepidBear]

Perhaps the simplest solution then, if I may say;
is put out More Advertising to/for the Game itself! Outreach to the General Public

There are enough peeps out there who may enjoy this game.
Mind you, it would take current players a bit of teaching time to embrace new blood into the servers.
Allow new people to 'choose' which server they wish, not just limit to one.

Utilize the end of the year holidays, and Turbine can make offers like; New Players get ......... .......... for the first two months, bound to account of course.
Aim new VIP accounts with something.. offer old VIP accounts something to extend theirs.
Offer ftp or premium some kind of carrot.
Not just something boring, but exciting.
What would bring or entice a friend of yours to join??

I don't mean trying to reach people who have rage quit, they will only return disgruntled until they rage quit for the fourth time.. I mean fresh fun.
I remember many moons ago,
starting out in this game, without the guild ships and buffs,
and the levels were darn tough to do in the beginning.

Do you remember, any of you;
when we were all waiting at the gates of the Twelve to open on it's first day.
I remember when there were more than dozens of instances to choose from when getting into some areas.. ( yes that is when lag started, but we persevered, didn't we? )
This will bring in revenue needed into this game to 'fix' stuff, won't it?? ??
Pulling the ring of feathers, or the Sun Blade was the cat's meow..

Who has just started a toon, with absolutely nothing, no access to what you have today, just for the challenge again? I have..
well,
I'm maybe rambling now,
but that is just an idea,
perhaps a Dev or Cordovan would like to read this and think on it?
ok,
have a great day everyone,
aka 'Lem'.

[FrancisP.Fancypants]

It's called consumer pressure, they keep the company mindful of what at least some of their customers want. it worked with the Offerwall and Ghostbane... Can't work unless people post about it.

Maybe this time enough people will care or get over their natural hesitance to find any fault in the things they like to speak up instead of defending the status quo? Or maybe the people who care about having others to play the game with will just shrug and walk away like so much of the games population already has.

There are just as many players against a merge as for it, and for equally legitimate reasons. I will never be on board with a server merge. The naming issues alone are enough for me; there are so many long-time, established guilds that people put time and actual money into, and the potential for getting shafted on that is enormous. Even if Turbine had a plan that satisfied everyone as far as those things- and that's a pipe dream anyway- I wouldn't trust them not to fall out of the "oops" tree and hit every branch on the way down.

I'm not denying the population is waning, but if it dwindles to the point that I change my position on merging I'll just call it a day.

[IronClan]

There are just as many players against a merge as for it, and for equally legitimate reasons. I will never be on board with a server merge. The naming issues alone are enough for me; there are so many long-time, established guilds that people put time and actual money into, and the potential for getting shafted on that is enormous. Even if Turbine had a plan that satisfied everyone as far as those things- and that's a pipe dream anyway- I wouldn't trust them not to fall out of the "oops" tree and hit every branch on the way down.

I'm not denying the population is waning, but if it dwindles to the point that I change my position on merging I'll just call it a day.

This is exactly why they need to allow us to migrate, none of the things you cite matter to me very much, if they matter to you, that's fine, with free transfers I am not stuck on a dead server because someone else's guild or vanity of their character or guild names.

Why should my play be adversely impacted because other people would rather "call it a day" than have the populations condensed some?

Free transfers solves lots of problems and creates none that are significant enough to be a deal breaker.

I'm ready to call it a day right now some nights I don't even log in, it's just shear stubbornness and investment in my character and a little dilemma I will call "the game is fun when there's stuff to do and people to do it with" factor that complicates matters.

[FrancisP.Fancypants]

This is exactly why they need to allow us to migrate, none of the things you cite matter to me very much, if they matter to you, that's fine, with free transfers I am not stuck on a dead server because someone else's guild or vanity of their character or guild names.

Why should my play be adversely impacted because other people would rather "call it a day" than have the populations condensed some?

Free transfers solves lots of problems and creates none that are significant enough to be a deal breaker.

I'm ready to call it a day right now some nights I don't even log in, it's just shear stubbornness and investment in my character and a little dilemma I will call "the game is fun when there's stuff to do and people to do it with" factor that complicates matters.

Free transfers would solve exactly zero problems in terms of population. Where a merge would roughly double a population, allowing people to transfer for free would be more or less musical chairs.
A lot of people complaining about server pop. seem to be convinced that their server is particularly low, and moving to X server would fix that. Unless you're on Wayfinder (obviously) it's about the same on every server.

I'm not at all against free anything, but a free transfer is a placebo at best. And my understanding, at least from way back, is that transfers are a hands-on situation- which is why they cost so much- and dev time spent not making content that could draw new interest for the sake of appeasing current players is economically backward; but hey, I could be mistaken and even if that's the case, if you're already convinced, these are the forums dammit, why let logic stand in the way?

[Severlin]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

[Dragavon]

You should set up completely new servers and only move active accounts to those servers, not just merge old servers with all their 9 year old data.

You must ofc find a way to keep old accounts, so people coming back to the game can get their old characters moved on to the new server when they need.

I believe this would solve a lot of problems in itself

[Thar]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

Rage would ensue if losing my names after 9 yrs?

voluntary moves would be a good move first and see who's left on said servers that would need to be moved if it was shut down. lowest volumn servers i would assume. i think guild wars recently did it that way with less anger...

[Thar]

You should set up completely new servers and only move active accounts to those servers, not just merge old servers with all their 9 year old data.

You must ofc find a way to keep old accounts, so people coming back to the game can get their old characters moved on to the new server when they need.

I believe this would solve a lot of problems in itself

you assume people would know or could find their old friends?

[HatsuharuZ]

If there is to be any server merging, then try combining Orien and Wayfinder.

[HernandoCortez]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

Now thats some good news.
Server merge + free transfer /signed.

[The_Human_Cypher]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

Should the new data center host with better hardware reduce lag significantly?

[Qhualor]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

Despite what some people may think from my posts on server merges, I actually am not against it. I think separating a gaming population on different servers is never a good idea and instead should be on 1 mega server. My biggest concern is and will always be unless some changes are made, addressing the real reasons why it can be hard for players to get a group together and run some quests. Addressing the reasons why lfm activity can be low, but the Who list seems pretty active. I know devs have made some balance and difficulty changes, but we aren't close to improving pug grouping.

[Deadlock]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

Why?

People don't want server merges. They want higher population servers. Spend the time and energy in marketing, bug fixes and new content instead. Speak seriously to WotC and WB about cross-channel marketing efforts.

Mergers are regressive and you'll rightly be slated in the media channels for doing this. Take a progressive stance against their short sighted attempts to inform you on how to run a games company.

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

[IronClan]

We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.

We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.

There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.

Sev~

Thanks for the news Sev your candor and openness is still something I find impressive as hell.

[Cordovan]

Should the new data center host with better hardware reduce lag significantly?

We do expect and hope that moving our operations to the new data center will have some improvement on game performance; quantifying that improvement in terms of "small", "significant", "huge", etc. is probably best done when we actually see the result.

[cdbd3rd]

..., "huge", ....

Every time I see or hear that word any more, Jimmy Fallon's impersonations of Trump saying that word always come to mind.

...which in and of itself is pretty insignificant, I suppose.

[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.