Producer Letter: Addressing EQII Server Populations

I, too, have a similiar feeling that this might be the "real" problem. Peeps often complain that they can't get groups. We have an unwritten rule that if you have guildies in game that want to group, they have first priority. I'm sure that is true with most if not all guilds. We are also in an "alliance" of other guilds and they are mostly (like mine) comprised of a few close (in game) friends. We have about 8 people that play often enough. But we ask the pool of the people in the alliance if we don't. Rarely is there not enough people to get between those two choices.
Also someone else mentioned about being booted because you didn't have the uber gear that people would like you to have, though you can't get unless you do those zones. I wouldn't drop someone for not having good enough gear unless it was just a matter of them dying every step of the way. But even then, it would have to matter that they are dying every step of the way, which it rarely does. If you can't get groups, it is mostly because, as has been stated, people are comfortable with whom they play with and have maybe had a bad experience with non "friends".
Also, the name issue, I would truly like to keep my name as is, but if not, I will still live. People will still be able to talk with me that need to, and if they can't, it is probably because they don't really want to.
I personally think the amount of people on the permafrost server is fine. I get in groups often enough, and still have issues with trying to get the silly weekly named kills in TS and PS since EVERYONE needs and no one wants to see if anyone near by would like to group first, sigh.
We will all take what happens in stride, EQ2 is still a very solid game, and I suspect there aren't any out there with the staying power right now. However, if we have to continue to pay 15 bucks each new zone, that will probably spell the end for me.

Has Anyone ever considered that they might merge more than just 2 servers in too 1 server?
if they do more like 3 or more servers into 1 server that more players to compete with for our names

there is a lot for the devs to consider , and i know they can do this right. just have to give them time.
just some food for thought

I am actually originally from Nektulos server and was merged to Guk. Since then, I am currently one of 3 leaders of Den Of The Dragons-The largest active casual guild on that server. We current have 1035 members and 435 accounts. So remaking the guild for us would be a huge undertaking. I remember moving to Guk though and having to reform (it was a previous guild) I can't imagine trying to do that with a guild this size.

I don't remember the house situation, but I do know you can save layouts, then reload. I would assume since guild halls are just houses.. it would be the same?

Name situation: Biggest pain with that was when someone had your name(or something similar) and they were an jerkweed on the server..and here you were tryin to explain that wasnt you!

Names were terrible:/ I understand the placeholder thing and that was cool. They should just do it according to hours played, status, level, maybe membership in a guild of higher lvl, there are all kinda of things to consider..But I definitely think guilds with higher memberships should take precedence.. just because for us, its a lot more difficult to move. Its like comparing moving a 32 room house and 500 kids to moving a 6 bedroom house and 24 kids!

Even having the devs send out an email to the larger membership guild leaders? I'm sure we are all happy to help with ideas!

I think a merge will be a good thing though. But I'm excited for the cross server option!

When Lucan de Lere merged with Crushbone years ago, we were given the suffix title "of Lucan de Lere". All of my toons on Crushbone wear that name today.

I think EQ2 needs to advertise. I can't ever remember seeing an advertisement and I have been playing for 10+ years now. Seriously, WoW had an advertisement during the Super Bowl and EQ2 has never had anything. I think it is long past time that the marketing people need to wake up.

As part of one of the more "recent" merges (Vox --> Nagafen), we had no issues with guilds or guild halls moving over, aside from name conflicts. As with characters, the "losers" of whatever logic was used to determine who got to keep the name was given a free rename of the character/guild.

I wouldn't mind seeing any old and unused names - on any server - get the z treatment, i.e., getting a "z" tacked on to their name, regardless of whether there's a merge conflict or not. One of the reasons I hate trying to make characters on "popular" servers is because tons of "good" names have been taken by people who haven't played in so long they don't even come up in census, not to mention the ones that played for like a month or two and haven't been seen since.

IMO, if you haven't played a character at all in a year, there's no reason why that name should be locked up in perpetuity. Maybe give active subscribers a pass from the haven't-played-it-in-a-year criteria, but come on, people, if you can't be bothered to even USE the character in a year, why do you care whether you get to keep the name?

The US outnumbers other countries. What country would you like them to start with?

My name is incredibly important to me. It's always the first thing I think about when mergers are announced so I went digging to find out how it worked last time. I found this information (thank you EQ2 Wire!) about the 2010 mergers. Of course there's also a possibility that they handle names some other way this time around.

http://eq2wire.com/2010/10/18/server-merges-begin-16-november-2010/

Remember, the following information is from the 2010 mergers, not the recent announcement. To the best of my knowledge there's been no announcement yet how names will be handled with the upcoming mergers.

I'm in the same boat. Never see any guild members anymore. Once in a while I see they've logged in here and there,but we never seem to connect these days. Lots of donated items, that cannot be removed from the guild, were left behind by those who do not play anymore. If I have to rebuild my guild, is there a box or something I can check to have the guild items transferred to me? Or do we leave the no-trade donation items behind forever?

Good memory! I can't remember back that far. Been playing since EQ1 Beta, too much water under the bridge for me to remember those details. Thanks for clearing it up.

I think you nailed it! Totally agree!!

It seems that this is a topic everyone wants in on, 4 pages already and I just now saw the post this morning. All I can say is that I'm on Freeport. When I signed on originally it was one of the few servers that had guilds. I have a large family of alts, all of which are on separate guilds, with their own housing, some prestige, some not. If you can move all the guilds, and all my alts on the SAME server, great I'll move happily. Otherwise it might be a rough day for you.

Perhaps we should think about fixing all the zone crashes post rum cellar before adding any new content that we have to pay for?? Permafrost does indeed need a server merge. Fix zone crashing first. Thanks.

Yep I remember the renames as well.. someone always takes advantage of that so thats a good deal

When The Bazaar was merged into Freeport in December of 2011 we retained our guild hall and houses. What we did loose were our personal achievements such as World and Server Discoveries. Our character creation and guild creation dates were unaffected, unlike when we voluntarily moved our toons from Everfrost to the Bazaar in 2005. Some folks with common names had an X appended but for the most part people were unaffected by the merge. Personally, I like a smaller server, but since lots of folks have been begging for it I will just go with the flow on it.

Remember the game has come a looong way since the last server mergers. I do think its fair to consider number of days played as well as how much status, the lvl of the toon, ect. There are all sorts of ways to be fair when determining names. It will really come down to how much effort they want to put into it. I dont think SOE really cared.

While I love EQ2, in my opinion SOE started and Daybreak seems set on continuging to drive it into the ground.
Over the last few expansions it seems that all focus has been put into the end-game content, top level players and raiders. The game has deliberately been turned into a complete solo grind until you reach that point, and if you aren't equipped the way everyone else thinks you should be you are shunned for groups.

Add to that the fact that crafting is a mess and has been neglected for years and (as far as I know) replacing the long-missing tradeskill dev has never even been considered.

There is no advertising, as many have already stated, so there will not be new blood coming to what is unarguably the best MMORP on the market at this point, even though it is more than a decade old.

All that said, it is quite clear that there is little interest on the part of the company to ever make EQ2 what it could have been to the player community or profits in the bottom line. The future seems to be all about new, inferior games no matter what the customer feedback says. Everquest Next doesn't appeal to many that I have talked to, for various reasons. Even so, I see a push to get people to start that and kill EQ1 & 2 in the very near future.

I doubt server merges at this point will help at all.

The 2nd merge an x was added to the end of one of my toon's name. The other toon had long been abandoned but that toon's creation date was a month before mine. SOE always had a firm stance on toons keeping their names, even if they created a character and played for only 20 minutes. Just in case they maybe came back years later. Maybe Daybreak will have a different stance and look at changing that policy.

Lavastorm>Nektulos>Guk for me. If Guk is to be merged, please keep the Guk name; I like that it's short and easy to remember.

I do remember that with each merger there were some hostile talk in chat for a few weeks and then things calmed down. I expect the same will happen even for a wanted merger, and people will be disappointed over some thing or other.

I would like to see the mergers be sooner than later as the TLS, so I'm guessing that they want to see which servers will be affected the most from the new servers before merging the remaining.

Advertising has always been the fatal flaw of this game. I don't "get it" why they refuse to do it, but they do. I do know that it takes a "good" computer to play EQ2 and WoW will play on just about everything, so that is to WoW's advantage. But advertising would make a difference even with the higher requirements of EQ2.

I've tried several other MMOs and I have to say, even with some features I hate in this game, EQ2 is still the best over all MMO, more people should be made aware of it.

They also offered free server transfers, I believe it was just before the first merge.