Feldon 
Last week, the EverQuest II team initiated in-game polls to ask players what their new servers should be called after the upcoming Server Consolidations Mergers. Players on affected servers were provided three choices, all based on various zone names from specific expansions. Not surprisingly, a solid majority of players chose the shortest names offered. One could speculate that, like passwords, people keep things short that they have to remember and use daily. An alternate hypothesis suggests that the idea of sending cross-server tells to characters on a server called Palace of the Awakened was giving players the shakes.
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums:
Greetings Norrath!
The vote for the new server names is complete! Here’s how you voted…
·Butcherblock, Crushbone, and Oasis servers voted for: Maj’Dul
·Everfrost, Guk, and Unrest voted for: Halls of Fate
·Freeport, Nagafen, and Permafrost voted for: Skyfire
Another note on the server moves… We are going back to the “merge” methodology for this effort. Changing the entire way our data works for this process was very risky and we didn’t want to rush it and test it on your characters. That said, we didn’t want to wait on taking care of our server populations. The teams are reviewing all the areas we need to update the merge process. Still, all the questions and concerns we addressed in our FAQ are still in the plan. Also, after the U.S. merges, we will run a free one-week transfer period that will include free transfers for Antonia Bayle players to other U.S. servers.
More to come when we have it. We are looking at October, but before the expansion release.
Maj’Dul = /vomit
Nailed it, with my predictions in the first thread.
So, any one care to guess when we’ll be merge into one server?
Really depends on the quality of the expansion, is my guess. If this expansion is a dud, it will happen next year imo. I hope this expansion turns out to be great though, EQ2 really needs it.
As a soon to be denizen of Hall of Fate (or will it be Halls or will it be Fate or will it be Halls_of_Fate – I am not sure), I am pleased by the result of the poll as I felt that this was the least of objectionable of the five final options given.
As Feldon’s post suggests players seem to choose the path of least resistance in their name choice. When player’s remove the history and their emotional investment in the zone names (good or bad) – they chose the “easiest” names on the list. And I think this shows a certain amount of understanding what impact this will have to day-to-day gameplay.
To me this whole “choose your server name” seems to have been an exercise in Passive Aggressiveness. Daybreak set the ground rules of “from this expansion” and “must be a zone name (not location)” and “cannot be a reuse” and thus handcuffed the players to a limited amount of choices.
Special characters, complicated wording, and length all factored in the best of OUR abilities to get to the simplest solution and even then some ‘compromise’ had to be made to get to the final answer.
So while we as players look at the final answers and think ugg, Daybreak can sit back and say well, this is what YOU chose. But my reaction is – – did we really get to choose or were we forced down this path of options so Daybreak can feel good about inclusion of the customer base in the decision making process.
We were forced Dellmon, and you know it.
So which ever Daybreak person wanted those three names got exactly what they wanted, while saying “see what the players picked”
Daybreak will never lose the SOE mindset, as long as these kind of things keep happening, and Eq2 will continue to slide to oblivion.
Apparently I missed that voting was going on at all while being buried in a pile of homework.
Anyway, also a soon-to-be-denizen of Halls of Fate… what in the world were they thinking not giving any single-word options for voting? They could have shortened some of the choices or actually went with what players chose to be more popular on the forums.
I gotta agree, I think this one was pretty forced. Halls of Fate is a decent name.. for a zone.
I still wish they would have given those of us on guk and others the ability to pick a one name zone instead of a multiname zone. I was not happy with what we had to pick, and voted tor TT but oh well we got halls of fate.
I wonder why we are only going to have a week to use our free transfers? Must be a reasonable reason?
Really disappointed that ‘Halls of Fate’ will be the name for the newly merged server I will be playing on.
Whilst I know it’s just a name at the end of the day and doesn’t really equate to anything meaningful, ‘Halls of Fate’ seems daft for a name of a server, i.e. an entire virtual world having the moniker ‘Halls…’. In fact it’s more than daft, it’s quite bizarre. As were many of the other choices, particularly when many great and more majestic sounding one-word names were suggested. ‘Awakened’, ‘Whisperwind’, ‘Blacktalon, ‘Fate’, ‘Bonemire’ etc.
Why call a server ‘Halls Of…’ or ‘Palace Of…’? Anyway just a name, but not particularly enamoured with it.
Right now I’ve been waiting since Saturday to hear back from a real person in any shape or form at Daybreak customer services over an erroneous double charge on my card for my yearly EQ2 membership. I’m not holding out much hope from what I’ve been reading on hearing back from them and getting a refund from what I have been reading and if I do, I may have my account banned for the privilege apparently.
After being a loyal customer since EQ1 days and spending probably several thousand pounds down the years on expansions, memberships, merchandise, station / daybreak cash, and singing EQ2’s praises from the rooftops, my loyalty is wearing very thin, and this might well be the icing on the cake the way I feel right now.
Such a great game, and a great dev team, but let down by tptb in the company and their decisions time and time again.
Just a quick for ‘the record’ on the above. Just heard back from customer service and a refund for the erroneous double-charge should be processed in the next 5 to 7 days.
No mention of an account ban (I’ve read this can be the case where refunds have to be processed). Hope not, but we’ll see I suppose.
Thankfully sorted hopefully, but not before a few hairs had been torn out lol.
Maj’Dul —- not the one I voted for — yuck, hated that place