I agree with the first half. Off topic as such. Not a fan of the perception that things are "anti-boxer". I don't think they should adjust any mechanics on the basis that a person may be controlling more than 1 character. If they are tuned around anything, I think the easier zone or mission should assume 3 real players and 3 mercs(consisting of at least 1 tank and 1 healer Merc). Just not tuned around boxing.
These people don't care. They made it through the previous merges without directly experiencing a great deal of downside and don't understand what a horrible mess they may themselves be facing in the event of any new merges. I would actually feel some sympathy for some of them if in a merge their own guild collapsed, many of their former guildmates took the opportunity to move to another server entirely and they began having account problems. Maybe then they'd realize why so many people are a lot less than enthusiastic about merges. I recall within a month of the last round of merges people in general on my newly created server complaining that we already needed another merge. It was and is ridiculous
I would like to think that is a person has to many characters due to a server merger, that there would be some sort of system in place that would allow them free sever transfers for any that may not fit. Did they make people just lose those characters in past mergers?
Since characters come in alphabetically, I know people who could not access their mains on previous merges and the solution was to delete other characters so they appeared on the list. That said, my account that has 9 characters on Luclin says I have only 8 slots...but all 9 are available for me. My 10 character account on Fippy is 10 of 10. I certainly would not want to risk a level 105 Wizard with 16k AAs not showing up, but that is on the table for me if they merge servers, specifically Fippy (since his name starts with a "U").
And I would argue that you possibly dismissed without proper consideration the view of some with experience with casual guilds where after server merges things were better. It did help. I just think Absor was pointing that even if a merge was a slight positive...a positive is still a positive.
I think most just want TIME to read, react to emotes, move boxes, etc. All we are talking about it maybe allowing group players who happen to be boxers access to more TBL zones(instead of just stratos)
I could be wrong but I suspect it would be two mergers merging not multiple so we would only have to deal with double the number of characters. In a perfect world just doubling the number or character slots would be nice if it was technically not a big deal. They could add banks of character slots per server... .slot one has your 10 character slots or however many you have slot two has another set of the same. Its an idea.
If guilds collapse after a server merger they already had problems. Guilds that MUST HAVE a server merger probably already have problems. "These people just don't care" You do realize that every time you say something like that and it can be turned around on you right? These people who had bad experiences don't care that a lot of people had good experiences. See what I mean. You had a bad experience and I am sorry that happened to you. Given a choice I would like everyone to have only good eq experiences. I think server mergers would be good for the majority of the players in the game. That's what I believe. It is not based upon what I would think is best for just me. I can't help the fact I saw no problems at all due to server mergers in the past. The only mass exodus of players I saw was due to other games. From WoW to EQ2 etc etc etc.... other games make folks leave and for the most part not mergers. And when you talk about people taking an opportunity to go to another server even if it is my own guild members I say good for them. You can't force people to stay in your guild. And you can't be against mergers JUST so others won't have a choice to go to another server. A guild has a real problem if they worry about losing all their members due to free server transfers after a server merge.
As I recall from the previous mergers is you had a limited window to move your overflow character with the movelog function. Having too many characters mostly impacted those who were not playing at the time and missed the window, and those who actively played 2 servers that just happened to merge together and had to choose which toons stayed with their 2 separate networks being mashed together.
If they did server mergers again I would really love for them to find a way to give people access to all their toons.
This would be great, if doable. I am only opposed to mergers if I would lose access to my characters. If they can do this, I wouldn't have any issues. My names are already messed up from previous mergers (I have characters with 3 added "x" to their names), so I just leave them like that. This is also assuming all the issues from mergers have been resolved (lost housing, lost characters, etc). As others have stated, names are important to them (whereas they are not to me). How they resolve that is also a touchy area that I don't know how they can resolve that is adequate to prevent mass complaints/CS issues/departures.
Well the funny thing is I am three years short of 60 but in favor of mergers so he really missed his mark besides playing the insult game which is lame. What you say above to me is actually a statement in favor of mergers. You may say the shine of playing with hundreds if not thousands has lots its shine but in reality it was never there in the first place. Back in the day and now in the present we all formed our groups of peeps we wanted to play with and having hundreds online didn't change that. Thing is people do leave the game. There is attrition and the people you hung with 20 years ago are probably not the same people you hang with now. I have run a casual guild for over 19 years and I see the gradual changing of the guard in the guild as people leave, come, go again etc. Server mergers help ensure there will be enough folks out there for this to continue and for there always to be enough folks around because people will come and go not all are like me and got here at the beginning and never went anywhere. And lets face it server mergers won't result in you gaming with the thousands of folks you never gamed with even when there were thousands of folks on a server. A larger pool of players gives everyone a better chance to find a play group that want to hang with. Some of us have that or some of us box and aren't impacted by server populations. Some benefit from low server populations because they like playing alone or are already set up with a stable group so forget about everyone else. But long term it will still benefit everyone because over time people leave the game. Your play group today may be gone tomorrow.
My cousin actually works for Blizzard and does all the server coding and stuff associated with it (it is all outside my realm of true understanding, I just get a surface understanding). But it was interesting to hear how they do cross server groups and raids while allowing people to have the same name in the same party etc. It's absolutely possible to resolve the issue depending on the limitations of the system and how creative they want to be regarding it. Something like our cross server tells showing a hidden part of the displayed name when multiple people with the same name are loaded. Anyway.... Most of the issues people have could be resolved.
And no one is going to be squashed up like sardines. Sure we might have 4 or 5 pick zones in popular places instread of 1 or 2 but most newer zones dont generate ANY pick zones a lot of the time. There will be no sardine squishing. I will have to disagree about the fresh blood issue. Mergers are going to bring more bodies to the table. Will there be some consolidaton? Probably. Two guilds without enough hard chargers can merge and become one guild with them. A bit of a shake up from a server merger might be just the thing to jostle those under performing guilds. The issues I see with server mergers are technical ones that DBG would have to work out.
You know, it is a mood thing. I call out LFG, hear crickets, and think, "time to merge servers". I go to zone X to work on Hunter, only to find mob corpses everywhere, and think 'the damn server is overcrowded'. If they allowed people/groups/raids to request private picks of all zones on demand, and made char slot limits accountwide, they could probably merge ALL severs into one without TOO many complaints. Char name collisions would still be an issue though.
My WoW speak is dated, but I was sure you do a /whisper <charactername> to send a tell to someone. I get that the name is not the unique key in those cross server groups, but when all you have to go on is a non-unique field (in this case, character name), how does the game know which "Gana" I was intending the message for (if the syntax I put above is correct, it can't)? If it requires the servername.charactername in the whisper (or some other unique identifier), then the same holds true as EQ (cross server tells, in game email, etc)...but it certainly does not solve the charactername crisis when they share the same server.
I am pretty sure I recall Phinny having issues with crashing because pick thresholds were too low. If we lower the number of people required to spawn a pick, we could be inadvertently crashing all the servers. I don't think this problem was ever solved other than raising the pick requirements.
It just occurred to me that seeing zones full of mob corpse is caused by those pesky trade skill peeps
For the group game aspect, the answer is cross server instancing. Will we get it probably not but a dungeon finder type experience would solve some of the grouping issues we have for missions. For the raid game its finding a way to have 24 man raids, its not that there isn't enough players its hard to herd 54 people together. It's hard to get all 54 people to do a good job also where if you had 24 man raids its much more manageable to kick (or fix) people that suck.
