Dethdlr In a break from the stock answer that has been given in regard to server merges for the last few years, Rothgar says server merges are something they are considering a little down the road. The EQ2 world isn’t exactly in the best shape it’s ever been in at the moment with zoning issues, instance lag, contested named fight lag, and broker lag so the dev team has a few issues to take care of before they can move forward with this idea. But this tells us that the idea is at least back on the table.
Rothgar writes:
We are considering server mergers but they would be a little down the road. Before we consider any more mergers, databases need to be upgraded and general server performance needs to be addressed. These are things we are working on and when we feel that we’ve achieved some of these goals we will seriously look at what is best for the EQII population.
And in response to someone claiming that Server merges = Dieing population, Rothgar responded with:
This is most definitely not the case. Our subscription numbers are on the rise.
The addition of easier character transfers through the Station Marketplace has made population numbers more liquid than in the past. We are seeing players migrate towards higher population servers like Antonia Bayle and Crushbone. In fact I’d be willing to bet that AB currently has a higher population than it has ever had in the history of EQII.
In order to stabilize the population, we’d like to increase the numbers across all servers and the easiest way to do that would be to merge some of the lower population servers making more “super servers” like Antonia Bayle.
This would also make better use of our server resources and allow us to re-purpose some of that hardware to better serve the larger worlds. When you think about the minimum requirements for each world, we need all static zones up and running at all times. This includes all of the city zones and most of the overland zones. On some worlds maybe those zones have < 20 people in them when they can easily support much more. By combining worlds we lower the total number of zones that need to be running by putting more people in them. So, the hardware that is freed up can be put to use servicing instanced zones which is where players are currently seeing the most server lag.
It’s a win-win for us and for players. We just can’t do it until we can be sure that your experience will be improved by the process.
As always, EQ2Wire will stay on top of this story and let you know as new developments occur.
A lesson SOE needs to learn about merging servers is to only merge by type. They made this mistake with vanguard. I hope they don’t mess up Antonia Bayle any worse. Right now I’m a role player / raider. AB is my favorite server because its RP designated. In vanguard the original servers got merged and we lost our only RP server. Every since, there has been no RP to be found. I consider RP the backbone of most things i do in EQ2. If they choose to merge AB with a server of a different type, it might ruin the fabric of what we currently consider RP. It wont be so easy to immerse yourself in RP if the player base are mostly not RPers. It will also agitate the players of the other server who are not into RP being forced into that type of server. It might call for AB to be changed to a regular server, which pretty much will kill RP like it did for vanguard. If that happens i will move to lucan delire and not be a very happy mousie. Now if it’s lucan delire that merges with AB that would work for me. I don’t know about everyone else, but i would accept that.
I would think that AB and Nagafen (PVP) would be fairly safe from this. You could combine the two lowest population US servers and still have a lower population than AB. If anything, depending on how big they want the server population to be, I would think they would merge AB and LDL to keep the RP alive. And Nagafen would HAVE to stay separate since it’s PVP. Certainly don’t want to merge PVP and non-PVP. You’d have a revolt. 🙂 According to the leaderboards on EQ2Players, these are the current server populations:
Antonia Bayle 301,436
Nagafen (PVP) 273,155
Crushbone 225,803
Lucan DLere 189,798
Permafrost 186,370
Najena 179,771
Unrest 177,415
Blackburrow 173,331
Mistmoore 173,050
Everfrost 167,793
Guk 166,459
Befallen 149,027
Nektulos 143,921
Butcherblock 138,861
Kithicor 131,024
Oasis 61,017
This of course doesn’t tell the full story since we have no way of knowing how many of those characters are active, how many are alts, etc.
Pretty sure though that no matter how you slice it, since I live on Kithicor, I’ll be impacted somehow with the server merges. For some of my characters it will be their second merge since some of them were born on Neriak prior to the last server merge. 🙂 I guess as the saying/curse goes: “May you live in interesting times.” 🙂
I would suspect that the aim they will go for is more than 250,000 characters on a server. It would certainly be welcome to get a merger done, to see more people and more groups around. Glad it isn’t the next thing on their list, lets get the servers we have stable and then look at merging 🙂
They should implement a decent cross-server-grouping/battleground mechanism, then they wouldnt have to undertake this effort.
Battlegrounds are not the mainstay of EQ2, PvE is. Cross-sever BGs, while not a bad idea, does nothing about the 99% of the game that is not PvP.
AB and Naggy have no worries, they have robust populations and are the benchmark for where they want the others to approach. Combining any two of the other servers makes them well over 300K. You may actually see AB drop in the population rankings (lol).
The lag makes people want to move off AB already, they just don’t want to pay $25 to get less groups and less active server.