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.
There is a poll going on at Vanguard’s forums to decide the name of the server, with Telon currently winning at over 80%: http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=53367
MMO Fallout 