We first heard about Server Mergers in an initial announcement in October. The first possible date for the merges was put forth as November 16th. As revealed by SOE’s answers to some questions about Server Merges by EQ2 ZAM on November 8th, 2010, SOE aren’t simply using the same old Server Merge scripts which have been used in the past. It seems more attention is being paid to make sure there is less work for players, and less issues for Customer Service as well.

Amnerys posted this today on the Everquest2.com forums:

As of yesterday afternoon, the decision has been made to hold the merge until next week. We want to be sure we have full staff on hand to make everything goes smoothly.

Commentary: Some of you are probably wondering what the heck is going on with the merges and thinking that if they’re pushing it this many times, this probably isn’t going to end well.  From what I understand, they needed to give people 30 days notice of the upcoming server merges (not sure exactly why but sounds like a good idea regardless).   So I’m guessing that they asked their devs/engineers when they thought would be the earliest that they could be ready for the merges and they said Nov 16th if all goes well and we don’t run into any hiccups.  So they announced the merges would take place starting on Nov 16th.  When Nov 16th rolled around, they were down to the final rounds of testing the process and hit a few hiccups.  They are now in the process of working through the final hiccups in their testing environment before inflicting running the merge scripts on the live servers.

I’m personally glad that they are taking the cautious approach to make sure as few hiccups as possible make it to the live servers.  In the software industry it’s all too often that management forces devs to push something out the door whether it’s ready or not just so they meet the deadline that was announced.  I’d much rather have quality pushed a little late than bugs pushed on time.  These delays are a good thing.  It shows they are taking their time to get it right rather than rushing it out the door.  Even with the delays, I’m sure some things will still go wrong, but hopefully it won’t be very many.

From the EQ2 Forums, the Blackburrow -> Everfrost server merger has now slipped to sometime next week.

Update: No new updates at this point. We’ll be aiming for sometime next week. Enjoy your weekend in Norrath!

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re doing another QA pass on the merge process tonight, after making some additional changes to the procedure. If all goes well, we would most likely start the first merge early Thursday morning.

We’re going to go out on a limb and estimate the downtime could be 8-14 hours, but we may be surprised in either direction. As soon as we know which servers are being merged next, we’ll let you know!

Amnerys posted several messages on the Everquest2.com forums today about the upcoming server merges. The first one happening is Blackburrow into Everfrost which may happen as soon as tomorrow (Nov 16th, 2010). As for the rest of them:

I can definitely tell you that we’re not going to be announcing a full schedule ahead of time.

From this post it looks as though the plan is to do the first server merge tomorrow if they get everything in place in time:

At this time, we are still getting all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed, and we cannot confirm just yet if the merge will happen on 11/16 or if there will be a delay, but Blackburrow to Everfrost will be the first merge to take place.

As soon as we have official confirmation, I will update this thread and its subject line with a date and time.

It has been asked if at least the order of the merges can be released even if there are no firm dates. We’ll let you know what we find out.

Update:  It doesn’t look like a schedule is forthcoming.  Amnerys posted this on the Everquest2.com forums in response to the the questions about the order of the merges:

We don’t have a schedule that can be shared right now, because we’re still working on things on the back-end, and the details that go into deciding the order could still change. Because this is a very fluid transition, I don’t know that we’ll be posting a master list of order at all. We will definitely announce each one before it occurs, but I’m not sure if we can post an overall sequence.

Also from Amnerys on Everquest2.com:

 The first merger will not be taking place on Tuesday. Possibly Wednesday. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.

The folks over at EQ2 ZAM were able to seed some questions to the EQ2 team about the upcoming Server Merges. Their  answers to those questions have now been posted. Questions covered topics such as purging of old character and guild names (not happening), character rename potions (they’ll need to /petition if there is a conflict), EQ2Players stats and discoveries (good luck!), and Server Titles for the target/destination server (nope).

The largest pool of questions cover  items placed in bank slots, shared banks, houses, and guild halls. Some characters and guilds have thousands of items so this is a substantial concern. It sounds like there may have been some improvements in the Server Merge automation scripts because unlike past server merges, it sounds like items placed in houses and guild halls will in fact NOT be reassigned to the house or guild hall owner, and items will NOT need to be re-placed in houses after the merger. This conflicts with the initial announcement, so there must have been some programming breakthroughs.

Server Merges start on or about November 16th. It’s not been announced which server is first or what the ultimate schedule will be. More as we have it…

Initially released in an email message sent out to players and posted on the official forums by Xalmat, word comes to us that the long awaited server merges will begin on 16 November 2010. The following servers will be merged: 

• Nektulos merges into Guk
• Najena merges into Unrest
• Befallen merges into Oasis
• Blackburrow merges into Everfrost
• Mistmoore merges into Permafrost
• Kithicor merges into Butcherblock
• Runnyeye merges into Splitpaw (UK)
• Innovation merges into Valor (DE)

More info after the break…

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.