As far as free to play goes, Age of Empires developer Gas Powered Games will not rest until their MMO is completely free. I have already discussed the Alliances update going live this month in part. Once Alliances goes live, Age of Empires Online will use Empire Points as its real-money currency, allowing players to earn said currency through the Alliances game.
Unfortunately, all silver linings surround a cloud (or however the saying goes), and the update isn’t all great news. The Alliance update will only be implemented on the most popular eight servers. Players on the remaining six servers will need to transfer over in order to enjoy the update, and several weeks after the Alliance update goes live, the six servers will be shut down with anyone remaining transferred off. What GPG would like you to know is that the server mergers are not due to population issues.
We are closing the servers not for financial reasons, but for game design and player experience reasons. In fact, the player base tripled after the Spring Update (Celts, Steam, and more). We are doing it because the game is more fun when more people are concentrated in fewer places. If we start running into performance issues, we will reopen servers as needed.
Check out the patch notes below:
(Source: Age of Empires Online)
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