As summer approaches and people head outside, eq has always dwindled in population...any devs have info on possible server mergers over the summer?
If there was information to be had, they would have announced it somewhere official. Since that hasn't happened, I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish with this thread.
They have alluded to working on the data structures of EQ and that likely means making mergers possible again, perhaps the old method was too labor intensive or unworkable (my guess). No time frame was given. Two thirds of the servers could easily stand to gain from it IF it works well, again my guess.
If or When servers are merged, they need to have a better way to resolve name collisions; current gold subscribers should get priority over some guy who hasn't logged in in ten years.
And also deal with the fact that upon server Xfer/mergers your original name (from 99 which is still completely fine) was later added to the 'banned name filter' for no logical reason and so you get a NameX no matter what. Anyhow... to OP... yeah... the population diminishes temporarily for the most part. It rebounds in the Fall. EQ has suffered from summer attrition for years. Pretty sure everyone will be fine... and likely many of them will need a break from the TBM raid farm (although it isn't nearly as bad as TDS except for the stupid face chase-item implementation).
My guess is the instancing on progression servers and the back end upgrades test has been getting are going to make merging servers easier. My other guess ? You will see all of them merged into 3-4 with special rule sets like FV being left by itself.
Which is one reason I like FV, getting left alone. Of course that is not entirely set in concrete, nothing but logic prevents it.
Because like it or not a lot of people are not interested in TLPs and that number seems to be growing. The idea still has potential but needs a much better vision and execution.
The first thing they need to do is separate TLP and live so they don't have to bungle live to accomodate people living in the past.
I think a cross-server instanced dungeons feature would serve a better purpose.That way if you are looking for a ha you can have the whole pool of players from all servers. Not sure if it's the direction they are working on though.
This would cost so much money and time they would have to delay that next 10 updates and the expansion a year just to get it done ... for a feature that most people would NEVER use even once.
Not that I'm in favor of x-server instancing, but I think you're mistaken. I would bet dollars to donuts that assuming DBG could design and implement the entire system perfectly (yeah right), many people would use it on a daily basis. Would be gribble runs for days.
I feel like server merge topic gets put onto the forums every few weeks. It's literally the same responses every time. Against the perceived notion of what server merges will contribute to, they will in reality do nothing. The only difference is that there may be a slight uptick in the people that create pick-up groups. However, those are pretty rare these days as is. Even on a "high" population server like Bristlebane, I rarely ever saw random groups. It wasn't a rarity to walk into a current expansion zone and find it barren.
If nothing else they improve the economy just due to numbers. Guilds also benefit from the same numbers. There are a lot of reasons people do not embrace random pugs, numbers help but do not undo the other reasons at all. There are likely enough players on Live to make less than a half dozen reasonably well populated Live servers. And that is exactly what they should do.
