Disclaimers I am not suggesting that anybody do it. I am not saying that ONE SERVER TO RULE THEM ALL is a good thing. I am not advocating for the merger of servers. What would happen if... I wonder what would happen if everybody put in a character transfer to the same server? I'm not talking about community nor economy wise, but rather, I am talking about the technical side of the scenario. If every single player was playing on the same server (let's say the FV server just for example), would the server be able to handle it, or would the hardward implode? Would the parcel system grind to a halt with all of the activity and the increase in sheer number of data entries? Would the zone servers be able to handle the overload of players in the latest expansion's go-to-zone, guild lobby, plane of knowledge, and bazaar? Would the simple act of logging in to your character selection screen take for ever? We may never know.
I think we would have 50 threads about the lagpile in pok/lobby... Old zones were designed to handle a significantly larger amount of players, most zones were huge compared to today. A stress-test on a single server would probably reveal that the content were not designed for large populations. Technical-wise, I would imagine that server performance would be a noticeable bottleneck, and people with slower computers would have severe gfx lag in lobby/pok(unless they run with stickfigures). I remember the original bazaar, and having to look into the wall to be able to move my mouse-pointer smoothly... I think many people underestimate the total game population a lot!!!
Biggest issues Chat channels, having everyone on one server with a 400 cap per chat channel would make it harder for people to communicate Hub zones would be terrible until they added pick zones Obviously, I don't actually know but... it feels like there's actually a physical server for each server and we'd need a major patch to fix that issue I don't think we need one server to rule them all, Everquest just needs cross server instancing where trading is disabled in the cross server instance and this could be the new feature of next year's expansion (I doubt they already did it for this year). Cross server instancing solves a bunch of the issues that make people want a super server for, you dont have to worry about names and such. Don't make individual loot drop in the instance just give each person their own chest at the end with currency + some normal trash loot like diamons silks and hides with maybe a chance at a low tier item and a very very low chance at a chase item. Maybe even allow the players to pull an instance of the base zone so people from other servers can work on quests together as long as players can't actually trade I think it keeps the integrity of the game intact. Inside the above instances, the people from other servers show up as firiona.dweeb or cazic.failadin like they would in chat.
Phinny was handling a very large population in a relatively small world at its peak population, but it was "built" for it. Even if they do what I predict, and maintain Phinny as a paid sub "preferred" server with bonus conditions in place as well as the current benefits I don't see a wave of live servers failing. Many players like where they are and the size of their existing community. We've been through mergers on most older servers already --those that get unhappy already move themselves around. Maybe a few live servers trickle down in population to the point where free moves off and an eventual merge is needed but that won't be many at once. History shows us that a very small server population must still be viable from a $ standpoint.
Instead of merging existing servers they should use the TLP server architecture with every expansion enabled then move 2 to 3 existing server pops to each new server. And just give them new server names. And in case it isn't obvious that is just my opinion. No idea if there is some technical issue that would make that problematical.
I believe servers have a cap to the number of characters they will allow to be logged in simultaneously. Certainly the TLP severs have a cap. On Emarr, I notice already that I get more lag on the weekends. However, I doubt we're ever all that close to the character cap since I'm never denied logging in. So I expect that if everyone transferred one character to a given server, (aside from probably putting considerable strain on the transfer process) the server databases would probably be fine, but not everyone would be able to play their character on that sever.
