What’s that? A Crom joke? You aren’t the boss of me, mom! As we mentioned way back in the long ago days of July 2012, Age of Conan is still on track for a server merger that will mimic that of The Secret World’s single-server technology. That said, it’s been a while and not a whole lot of information has been released about how exactly Funcom plans on merging the services down to just one hub. In this month’s Game Director Letter, those secrets have been spilled all over our nice new carpeting, so let’s dive and and see what Funcom has stored in its coal hole.
The server transition for Age of Conan will take place in three phases. Phase one will see the movement of the physical servers to one physical location, setting the stage for phase two. Secondly, servers that share the same ruleset will be merged, including US and EU servers being merged together. After phase two, players will be left with one mega server for both PvE and PvP. Finally in phase three, cross server network layers will be implemented, allowing players on the PvE and PvP rulesets, although segregated, to queue for the same instances.
You can read the entire letter, including notes about upcoming changes to the tradeskill system and more. The team hopes to get the server mergers underway during May.
It appears that wiping your game eight years after release may not be as popular as Ryzom’s developers anticipated. Following the announcement that Ryzom would be merging down to one server, wiping all characters in the process, community response has resulted in those plans being nixed partially. As long as a player is subscribed at the time of the servers going down, they will not be wiped.
All subscribed accounts on the day of closing of the current servers will keep the appearance, the name but also the levels and skill bricks of all characters that are on the account.
Additionally, the server merge has been pushed back to September 29th.
Good news, TERA players. Since the MMO launched, you have created two and a half million characters, formed more than fourteen thousand guilds and over a thousand Vanarch candidates, and over three hundred fifty thousand of you newbies died on the starter island. What more, you newbies dying are precisely the reason why En Masse will be merging servers later this year. Of course I’m exaggerating. Due to low population metrics on a large number of servers, En Masse Entertainment has decided to perform a merger this fall.
But they aren’t seeing this as a bad thing:
Where some might look on this as a negative, I feel differently. By combining our servers, we facilitate a more unified community and give players a more full, alive world where finding groups, locating rare items (for lower prices!), and getting into dungeons quickly are the norm. Most importantly, combined servers will allow us to run more regular, player-focused events where we get to interact with our players.
There are plenty of plans for new content on the horizon, with player events and holiday events coming soon. The eleven current servers will be merged down to three: one of each game type (PvE, PvP, RP). Players will be required to delete characters if they have more than 8 on a server post-merge. Names will be offered on a first-come first-serve on who logs in first after the merge.
Since I know how much you all love hearing about server transfers, I’ve lumped both games in the same article.
You may be aware of TERA’s pre-launch woes, particularly a lacking in space on player vs player servers. Alongside the release of a new PvP server, En Masses is opening temporary free server transferal for all players. Transfers are immediate, free of charge, and will remain so until the server populations level out. You can not transfer between PvP and PvE servers, and your character cannot have any chronoscrolls. For a full list of the restrictions, check out the announcement here. After the announcement, transfers will remain free if used for the purpose of balancing server population.
Now for games that have been released. Over on the Old Republic, Bioware has announced that server transfers will be held in waves, beginning in early summer. Players will be limited in which servers are able to transfer from and which servers can be transferred to, with more details to come as the time approaches. After, server transfer limits will open up, allowing anyone to transfer anywhere, although not necessarily for free. Presumably, if servers drop enough in population, Bioware may take the Warhammer route and retire servers.
We’ve known about Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming server mergers for a long time, since December when Square initially announced them. At the time, Naoki Yoshida commented that Square would be taking a look at the server populations after billing began and judge how many servers to merge afterward. He also stated at the time that the mergers were expected to be temporary, until FFXIV 2.0 launches in late 2012 and an anticipated surge in returning players necessitates for more servers.
On the Lodestone today, Square Enix is finally ready to discuss brass tacks. The original eighteen servers will be merged down to ten, on March 27th. Players will have much of the month in order to designate a destination server to move to, and worlds will be locked as they fill up in order to prevent overpopulation.
Name duplicate rules on characters and retainers are based on whoever has an active subscription as of March 26th, and then on which character is older. Linkshells will be deleted, as will friends/block lists.
“I have seen several reports in the forum and at least two media reports claiming that we are in the process of doing server merges.
That information is FALSE.”
Good to hear, although contradicting two separate GM’s (Padreic and Klazgon) confirming that the mergers were “on the schedule” and “will be coming soon,” and that the mergers were a “priority item,” and to expect more information “rolling out very soon that will give more details on the matter.”
The population is growing steadily and the game is growing at a steady clip. Thus is makes no sense to merge servers when in fact we will just end up opening other servers at some point in the future anyway. Especially given the advent of the third generation of Alganon.
So mark this one down to a miscommunication that resulted in false information being posted by staff, and that Padreic (who may or may not be locked in the Quest Online dungeon fighting Ograns to save his own soul) simply posted information before it was confirmed.
So, the final word is that there are currently NO immediate plans to do a server merge.
Everquest is one of the few ongoing MMOs to dive into experimental servers, generally temporary servers featuring anything from permadeath to progression (the server starts at the base game and expansions open as players progress), and more. The 51/50 server, for those not in the EQ-Know, is where players start at level 51 with 50 levels AP, in order to get them into the meat of the game as quickly as possible. The servers, sadly, have not been very popular, and for a while now the air has been all about mergers.
Mayong, Zek, and Fioriona are the three 51/50 servers on Everquest, and after great discussion between staff and players, Sony has begun the process of merging, starting with Mayong. Currently, the 51/50 ruleset has been removed, and no new characters can be created at level 50. The Mayong server will be merged in September, although players can ship their characters off early for $10 (a discount on the normal fee).
SOE has stated that new information regarding this merge, as well as the upcoming changes to Zek and Fioriona will be coming “soon™.” As one developer put it:
“It’s not as simple to merge servers as it is to, say, merge a little rum into some cola. We’ll be choosing the server that Mayong merges with by the usual method (dart board).”
Everquest’s next expansion, House of Thule, goes live in October this year. More on the Everquest mergers as they appear.
In the process of merging a large number of their servers, Aion has run into a number of snags, the latest of which brings a temporary delay to the character transfer program. In a post on the Aion website, NC announced that the transfer service was put on hold due to unforeseen issues.
Because my other Aion image isn't working...
In the process of merging a large number of their servers, Aion has run into a number of snags, the latest of which brings a temporary delay to the character transfer program. In a post on the Aion website, NC announced that the transfer service was put on hold due to unforeseen issues.
Character Transfer Services have been disabled while we troubleshoot technical issues that arose this morning. You will not be able to initiate a character transfer during this time. If you have already initiated a transfer for a character prior to the maintenance window, you will not have to repeat the process. Your character transfer will already be queued when we re-enable transfer services.
NCSoft has promised to give players 24 hour notice, but cannot give any more detailed information as to how long the transfer services will be down. More on the Aion transfer service as it appears, hopefully I’ll be able to get you some news soon on this event which has turned into nothing but a pain in the backside for all parties involved.
You would think that, given NCsoft’s history with MMOs, that they would offer their wisdom to the Aion Development Team in regards to the upcoming server mergers. On that thought, Aion could go to virtually any MMO that has run a server merger in the past and see how they accomplished what must feel like an amazing, never-before-performed feat to the Aion team. As much as I hate to say it, the old method works fine, as follows:
Character creation for existing accounts is shut off temporarily until the server merge.
Characters without conflicting names are transferred as-is.
Characters with conflicting names are given based on seniority (age of the character), presuming the senior character is active.
Characters forced to change their name are offered free name change tokens.
Instead, Aion is opting to require everyone to change their names, with the inevitable result being that the more famous players will lose their names, players who preordered the higher priced editions just for the early name reservation will be out of luck, and the ensuing clusterload to the servers will end up with thousands of people all trying to get their names back at the same time.
The story gets better. Aion wants you to know that they recognize what a name means to a person. It is not just an identifying set of symbols for you meat sacks, but it gives personality and depth to your toon. So instead of making the process more efficient, Aion is adding another layer of bureaucracy to the mix:
“If you’re unable to regain your name after the server merges, and feel that another player took it to consciously harm you or your reputation, we’ll have a way for you to submit an appeal for manual review (‘manual’ equating to ‘live human being’).”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to waste hours trying to access the name change service after the server mergers, only to lose my name and then spend a month or two on the line with customer service trying to negotiate and explain exactly why I think I deserve the name more than the other guy. This is of course before NCsoft tells me that the other person did not constitute name theft.
NCsoft should be paying special attention to players who paid for the ability to reserver their names, and those who paid for the ability to change their names. Those players should either be given priority access (characters who reserved their names should be entered into the new database a day or two early), or at the very least compensated for the money they spent specifically for their names.
According to Community Manager Ayase on the AionSource forums, consideration is being given to name change ticket buyers and preorders (collector’s edition), but nothing is set in stone as of yet.
I can only imagine that NCsoft might have something to do with NCWest’s inadequate tools. More on Aion’s Server merger as it appears.
But wouldn’t it be ironic if enough people left over this that another server merger was needed?
Despite my hope that this announcement won’t come for another few years, I don’t think there will be many shocked faces when the shut-down notice is given for Vanguard. Late last year, Sony announced in a pretty solemn notice that several features had been canned completely, including alternate advancement and various dungeons, among other things. We were informed at the time that server mergers were planned, with no additional information at the time.
Fast forward almost six months, and the announcement is here: In July, more specifically the 7th, Vanguard will begin the process to merge the remaining three US servers into one, with the Halgar server being merged in August. Each server merger is expected to take 24 hours.
On the plus side, however, this is expected to be one of the more user-friendly server merges than you would normally find. Guild names are not affected, even guilds with the same names will be able to transition over with no issues. Players will be reimbursed for their houses, both in the cost of the house and the materials used to build it. Mail, friends/ignore lists will be kept, and items on dead players will be available to them at altars. Items in escrow and at the market will not be merged, however.
I must question, for another time, why Sony is performing a double merger, requiring players to make the same land rush twice for housing space.
MMO Fallout 