Since the populations on many of the live servers are dwindling perhaps a round of server mergers would be appropriate? Anything planned?
Perhaps, the REAL question (after reading a dev quote) should be. Dev's / Mods are you guys / gals past the back-end work yet ?
Hate them or love them but they are coming at some point. The game doesn't need as many servers as it has now with the low population we have and once you get over your displeasure you'll find more people to group with and a better economy and more active raiding among other things.
I don't care about mergers one way or another, but I disagree with your premise about the results from a server merge. The problems with grouping these days has a lot more to do with game design than with populations. Everything is instanced with specific tasks to be completed. You need to find people who are looking to do the same specific thing you are doing. This also relates to the linear nature of "progression" on the Live Servers now too. If people aren't at the same point in progression they won't group, there really isn't much reason for them too. Add in the limited amount of content that most people are finished with in 3 months time and you get ghost towns outside of raid times. Even at a "casual" pace of 1 zone per week, that means only 5 weeks of content until your basically done. Then there is the inherent nature of grouping these days as well which is a reflection of game design. Everyone has their own box group or set cliques that they play with. PUGs are largely gone, even in many of the more family/casual guilds unless people happen to be doing one of the specific things someone else needs at that specific time. As it relates to raiding, it will result in fewer raid guilds as it did last time. After a short feeling out period core groups from some guilds join other guilds creating one stronger guild while gutting others. The gutted guilds will linger as shadows of themselves, sometimes attempt to merge, but then poof due to lack of core classes, high caliber players to carry others, inability to down raids, and the retirement of even more players. That means fewer raid guilds with fewer raid slots. Instead of more active raiding, you get even more consolidation of those who can lead guilds, understand game/class mechanics to teach others and generally carry weaker players and provide opportunities for new raiders to get into that scene. Granted, the current raid scene isn't pretty on most servers, but mergers will just hasten the death spiral of many guilds.
Kunon, Well communicated opnion there. I agree that a lot of what you said happens; however, I am not totally sure the cause is mergers. I think that you more than likely hit it on the head as in design faults. Specifically as far as raiding and it really applies to grouping as well, make as much content as possible accessible to as many people as possible. Make group progression nonlinear so more groups happen. Make raids smaller or have options for 24 man raids as well as larger ones. The more accessible the raids are; the more likely people will raid. I have raided over the course of my EQ days enjoying it all. The amount of time that it takes to raid and keep raiding is just more than most people care to do. Hence why a raiding organization which needs mid 40 to 50s in numbers to be successful has problems. Add in a lowering population meaning less "next raider up" less and less likely. Rykard
Server merges would hurt DB's market for server transfer tokens and they have no compelling reason to bother with mergers (I doubt they would save any hardware or support costs). They would have to have some financial benefit to doing it. Not to mention that a server merge would give the (seemingly accurate) appearance that their population is dwindling, and that would be bad publicity. I do not believe merging servers has any real impact on grouping. New content (giving people a reason to group) is the only thing that helps create groups. I think most of us who do not need groups (because we box or solo or whatever we do) are motivated to solo or box because we've already done the content once with a group, and now we're looking for a different challenge. I love grouping with people to do something new. I am much less excited with the prospect of "grouping" with people who I am actually just carrying. And it's always tough to avoid feeling that way if you've already done the task once or twice.
The brilliant thing about their declaration of "back end" work taking up their time is that they never need to have anything to show for it. Bravo!
I imagine if they did do merges it wouldn't be any "big" servers that can hit high and are medium half of the time. It would probably be servers that never go above basically permanent low status like Vox and Trakanon, or some TLP clean up like Vulak and Fippy. Maybe the couple lowest regular ones. Probably Lockjaw and Ragefire when the back end stuff is done in a few months too. If Medium contains at least 50% of a servers realistic capacity for players then most normal servers probably can't be merged without suffering for awhile until people quit or move. TLP's going higher doesn't count because they don't have any of the stuff normal servers do, like Trader and Buyer limitation count in Bazaar that every "real" merged server would have on Day 1, they also have pretty much full instancing of zones, Live could get this as well, though it seems like it would add a lot of work for the Devs to do so for pretty much every zone in the game.
I've speculated about the server population indicators and how they are programmed. Are they: 1) based on an actual population # threshold (<100 low, 101-200 med, 200+high), or 2) based on a percentage of highest population server (whatever the highest population server is, any server over 3/4 of it's population is considered high, 1/2 of it's pop would be medium, 1/4 low) The second option would be far better for marketing and would require no further maintenance on their end. And it would also mean that there would always appear to be some "heavily" populated servers, even if they only had 50 people online. Anybody know for sure how these are calculated?
I have a couple of toons on AB, if you do server merges. Can you merge povar and AB together? Thanks in advance =)
Too little, too late. In a guild that had 40 people on every night, we're down to 4 people except on Thurs, Friday and half of Saturday. They're monitoring populations all right, monitoring EQ's death.
I'm always amazed at the "more people to group with" argument. That's never happened in either of the last mergers. Briefly you have extreme overcrowding in the Plane of Knowledge and the Guild Lobby that rapidly clears up as people begin to quit. I know that after the last merge I saw people who I'd played with for several years disappear, some briefly showed back up for TLP but those are gone again
It's been several years now but I remember the last mergers bringing new life to Prexus when they merged it with The Rathe. I'm sure a lot of people acted foolishly and quit instead of letting the dust settle and seeing how things played out. Honestly I don't know why anyone would quit now because there is a lot to do and they are constantly making mostly positive changes with a few /grumble inducing nerfs.
I look at the servers twice a week every week and if Day Break would merge some of the progression and do something with Vox. Servers like Tunare, Erollisi, Rathe, Bertox could do well with a merge too. Xegony Bristlebane, Cazic , Luclin, Povar, Drinal doing fine for population. Clean up the code then do a very well thought out promotion to entice players to return. That would do more for the game then a merge of all the servers.
What is the perceived benefit of merging servers, especially from DB's point of view? Presuming that there are no additional hardware or support costs, and knowing that the rest of the world would view server mergers as a sign that the game populations are dwindling (bad for business), and knowing that they make money from selling server transfers, why would they want to make the effort to get rid of servers? The only reason I've heard so far is that people who already play the game THINK that it will mean somebody new will play with them (unproven and unlikely, imo). But those people already play, so again, why would DB do it? Of course they will give the politician's non-commital, placating answer like the one quoted above from the Dev Q&A. But what would motivate them to actually spend time/money on it?
