The grinding XP part sucks but they make up for that by putting lots of XP in the progression tasks and generally speaking while both are small expansions the content is fun to do at least once.
I think that's a good idea that wouldn't have hurt anything other than their desire to repurpose the resources Brekt was using but Brekt merging into FV didn't cause a huge boost to the FV population. I had characters there from the Quarm event and had several friends on Brekt but it was usually 75 or so actual people active there and a lot quit the game over the merge or claimed they were anyway.
I mean let's be honest what they need to do and have needed to do for a long time is merge about half the servers together to get levels up where they need to be on servers. Now im not complaining as I play on Miragul and we basically have our own private server but would it be nice to have a baz and other stuff at times sure.
Mergers do not fix servers. They just put the worse off server out of its misery. The number of guilds and people playing just ends up leveling off again after the initial burst.
Not true at all, at least when done properly. You don't just mash 2 tiny servers together or 1 tiny and 1 medium server together and expect that to change anything. There has to be a lot more merging going on than that. Server merges bring life back into the game for people and should be utilized more often, not less. Usually after merges are done (again, done PROPERLY) you see how grateful people are in-game and out. Merging Selos into Povar and that being it is kind of a big insulting joke. AKA not done properly.
No, they do not. Perhaps if you're one of those people who need a new supply of people who've never met you before to play with you'd like merges but I saw guilds collapse and large numbers of people leave the game after both the '05 and the '10 merges. A few years back had an old guildie who quit in '10 come back and he restarted and abandoned his Beastlord without even trying to play in the merged server. General selfishness by unpleasant people seems to be the most common source of calls for server merges
And what do you think the reasons are that those people quit the game and your friend couldn't get back into the game? So you don't think that most people who want server merges don't just... want more than a handful of people to play with?
server merges have in might experience resulted in overcrowding and toxic behavior. It also projects a sort of "death" vibe for the server population that was merged. That's why they kept both names in the '10 merges but it didn't help much. So it caused people to feel like they were either refugees from a dead server or that they were being invaded by characters that were crowding you out. People quit, that's the bottom line, and the populations will level out to what people find comfortable in the various static zones.
Oh please, anyone who gets a "death" vibe from server merges is just being unrealistic and dramatic. It's completely silly to expect every single online game to live on always and forever. We already have an issue with too many MMOs and not enough MMOers to play them. Both of the dates you mentioned, 05 and 10, people were probably actually leaving for WoW instead. In 05 WoW was new, and 010 was its peak. That's probably what's actually going on here, you're just still bitter all your friends/guildies left for WoW and you're blaming it on server merges. EQ ain't never had no overcrowding issue rofl.
wednesday morning @ 7h30 am ( east time ) who got less players to play usually at that time ( compared to saturday afternoon ) general chat = 545 general chat 1 = 254 general chat 2 = 121 general chat 3 = 10 newplayers = 197 for a total of 1,127 for a wed morning , btw , how can you see the player number in a zone like bazaar when the /who request say : * your who request was cut short .... too many players *
I agree with this. The thing is, most people are at end game, 115. Doing a server merge wont impact people still under 100, because its a barren wasteland on both servers, merging 0 + 0, its still 0. Now at end game your merging say if a zone usually has 24 people, well now it has 48 people. Everyone wants to farm that one named, now you have everyone + everyone. You have kill stealers, merging merges those kill stealers, now more of them to worry about. Merging only works if one server has newbies another server lacks newbies, merge them together and now you have experts and newbies. Also, if at end game and the T1 zones are empty, well its empty on both servers, don't expect people 'I'm going to stop farming T4 and go farm T1', more likely it will be this 'this is overcrowded, kill steal is perfectly ok', thats how it is on progression server with ancient cyclopes, he spawns it don't matter whose there, kill steal is perfectly ok, because there's usually some boxer or bot there and they going to kill steal, so its ok if you kill steal since they aint following rules. (After being a victim to kill steal so many times, it turns you into a kill stealer, you start to get dog eats dog mentality). It's server related too, like I wouldn't kill steal on a live server since people are friendly, but progression, overpacked, its dog eat dog, I'm kill stealing. Live server, oh you camping here, ok fine Ill come back later because usually not camped 24/7. Progression server, seafuries camped 24/7 giant hill 24/7, theres people here camping these, well its 24/7 camped, dog eat dog here. Server merge live servers just causes more people in those end game zones, the popular ones. No one wants to goto those unpopular zones. It may become dog eat dog, if you wanted this because another reason besides end game popular zones having more players than, I would not suggest server merging. But yeah, if some zone is empty, and its empty everywhere, don't be expecting a merge to solve the issue of that place being empty. The issue is not population, its more likely that zone is not worth sticking around in
Leerah, you know where I went (<Drake) you should have the entire guild come over this way you lose nothing and gain an entire community. For the sake of reasons I will not state what server I am referring to. I'll even throw some toons in your guild over here if you want =-) and always feel free to ask for help.
The irony of the move to a heavily directed on-rails progression system is how it funnels players into a strict pattern of zone occupation on fewer & fewer zones, meaning that as the game got older, smaller & expansions shrank the server mergers would be increasingly cramming more players into fewer zones. In earlier expansions there were a variety of high end zones for players, without pick/zones edit- having low enough thresholds in modern expansion zones - you have a far more restricted game in terms of places where players can get meaningful benefits. In my opinion, before we can have live server mergers that mean players have a greater chance to find groups without overcrowding in just one "end" zone we need to be in an era where expansions are big enough to contain multiple zones for max level players to have fun in and for the "progression" to not be quite so damned linear.
Judging population by chat channels is like the worst thing you can do, considering someone can be in every single one of those channels. Or none of them. This is a multibox heavy game, there's no way to know how many boxes are in or out of the channels, or how many mains for that matter. The Bazaar tells you how many traders there are when you zone in. But again, many Bazaar characters are boxes. The amount of accounts online at any given time is nowhere near the amount of actual players. Older MMOs tend to have very skewed population numbers due to multiboxing being way more common than modern MMOs. A lot of them also have reasons for you to stay online while not actually playing, like the Bazaar.
Why on earth does Live not have pickzones? Also players have made it out to me that Live is heavily instanced now so KSing can't be that big of an issue there.
Live has /pick.. don't know who told you it didn't. The only problem is the threshold at which a /pick can be obtained.
I would interject that it doesn't matter how many people are on a server, its more about how many people are in your guild playing and making groups. I'm on Luclin and can get / find a group most anytime I feel like doing something. Now sometimes that consists of 2 or 3 guildies and a couple plucked out of general chat but can always get things going if wanted. Also General chat as a means to finding a severs population is kinda on the iffy side. Some servers have healthy general chat and alot of folks join in, some are extremely toxic and most opt out. Its hard to sort through which are which and put numbers on servers.
If they do more server merges they need to be treated the same way as old server merges. Once merged those players get a chance at a free move to any other server. Many times server merges happen, but the players don't like their new home, other players playtimes don't meet there own, don't like economy, etc, etc. The best thing about the BB & Sol Ro merge was that the euro players who were stuck in deadend guilds could transfer to AB and play with other players in their time zone. I'm interested to hear what they are doing with Phinny now it has hit live servers and Miragul which is due to hit live soon, neither have a large player base from what I hear.
History and community, Drake. We have dead players like Xabaz on our roster. I wish Neularie had been guilded when she died. Sometimes, people log in from 10 years ago and it makes them happy to see they are still guilded and can find people they know. That said, I also control Knights of the Round Table from when Arthur quit it. (I couldn't let the name die.) If anyone wants to take it over, let me know.
