Ah, I see. Can't use UNIX or LINUX if you're a Windows shop developing a Windows game. Yes, they could have written the server using purely ANSI C++ to be cross-platform but I'm guessing that was a bit beyond what they were capable of at the time.
They are secretly implementing Dark Elf Rangers (finally) and Gnome Beastlords with mechanical spiders as pets. That stuff takes time.
Linux in the late 90s had terrible SMP support, no good file systems, poor RAID support, and limited hardware you could use. NT 4.0 really wasn't a bad O/S at the time if you couldn't afford to go with Sun or HP. Being able to re-use some networking libraries by keeping client/server on the same O/S could have been sorta helpful but the bigger gain would simply have been sticking to one build environment. There weren't a lot of great cross platform tools. Even building for more than one unix variant was a pain.
Trick question! There was no stable build of Vanguard before Microsoft cancelled it, they'd wasted millions on cocaine and concept art.
Good points. Also I don't think any Enterprise Linux existed at that point, so no support or other things one would need when using it for a mission critical production environment. Unix had these things, but unless they had the right team to support the servers and develop for it, it would have been highly risky. NT4.0 was pretty good, at least compared to NT3.5(.1), but more importantly it was really the only option out there. OS/2 may have been capable of acting as a server, I don't remember, but the support was spotty, and the OS was quirky.
They've had a week to think about it. I guess they're going to kick the can down the road. It's almost as if they want to kill free servers....
The fact that instead of doing one server merger, they should do multiple ones that need it. Prevent this trouble in another year or two when the need will be even more urgent.
They have had much longer than a week to decide if they wanted more server merges than what are happening. It should be pretty obvious that they are happy with the current situation of servers or at least don't think it is at the point of needing merges. Since merges are a one way action and can't be undone they likely want to be really sure that they want to do a merger before they pull the trigger. Not sure why you think that they haven't been thinking about this for a much longer period of time.
Selos have already had free server transfers, but they have to do something with the chars left, just incase someone comes back in a few months time. They cannot keep all servers indefinatly when they get too low.