SERVER MERGERS!!! CONFIRMED!

Their server list was bloated. Ofcourse you can always say "If all the servers were full = successs" But in this case the game had TOO many servers to begin with.

Considering they haven't pushed marketing hard at all except for trade shows and social media, it's stupid early to say the game is "dying" or "failing." Watch what happens over the next months when GU9 (or whatever) is in and hotfixed.

That's a legitimate concern

Really? then maybe Soltech will merge into Jaeger.

Finally i get to use my "premium" membership for something. I hope there will be queues

I wouldn't say Mattherson's VS population is "short". It's not exactly huge, but it's healthy.

Now if you go to http://www.planetside-universe.com/server_status.php you'll see names like Benson, Everett, Palos, Torremar, Voight, Apex, AuraxiCom, DeepCore, Snake Ravine and so forth. W T F about that?

You're full of it.

First GW2 has not added any servers since shortly after launch (December I think it was), and I doubt that they will be adding any more any time soon since there are number of posts on their site stating that a number of servers are lacking in population. Due to the way WvWvW works in GW2 they must add three servers at a time. They currently have 24 US servers, 27 European servers.

Second very major MMO launch in the last few years has pretty much gone off just like PS2, launch to full packed servers of all the people that flock to a new game. Add additional servers to handle the "launch" load, after a few months when the site seers have left, merge servers to a more reasonable number. This is the way the MMO market works these days.

Third judging whether PS2 is success or failure based on the ebb and flow of the population before during and after launch is the wrong way to go about it. To judge a game's level of success or failure, you would have to know what SOE has projected for profits in the first year, then compare that with the actual profits. That is the only proper way to judge success or failure of a game. Population numbers are irrelevant, as long as the game meets it's projected profit margins it will continue to be supported, if not it will be shut down.

I have no idea what they'll do with the EU servers.
IIRC there was a pie-chart on PSU or something and it said Miller was the largest server accounting for around 11% of the total pop.
I hope they don't merge, or merge a very small server into Miller. The lag is sometimes unbearable. ^______^

That will not solve the problem. Mattherson and Waterson are empty as well, so they will need to be merged too. But if they merge Soltech-Jaeger and Waterson-Mattherson, that will skew the populations even more, which contradicts the idea of merging.

I'm excited for the mergers. Can't wait to get some fresh blood in Waterson. I know that we'll be giving our new NC and VS friends a warm TR welcome to Waterson. I'm just curious to see what servers will be merging with each other. That could create some really interesting faction balance changes.

They got 32 servers: http://www.planetside-universe.com/server_status.php

Each server can have up to around 2000 people.

32 x 2000 = 64000 people max

Now, if you look at some Steam stats, some of the really popular games won't have more than 30,000 players playing at the same time: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

So, it looks to me like SOE got overambitious. They got waaaaay too many servers.

My only concern with server merge is how thats gonna affect faction population balance. As of now there hasent being any mechanisms to try balancing out each factions population and that lead to some imbalances in which 1 faction has a major population advantage. Now assume we merge 2 servers where NC or TR or VS has the upper hand... that would just further increase the issue, if they can get around that somehow im all for a merge.

Ceres is a very good medium population server, they can easily merge woodman into ceres for instance.

Thank you for the heads-up, BlueSkies.
This is good news.

Jaegar good as is? I haven't played on Esamir or Amerish in months (minus the "event" on esamir they had the other night...which took maybe an hour) they are dead, every engagement on those continents are just a few enemies per base. Even Mattherson is showing only action on Indar. This merge is much needed. I like the idea of US East going to two servers

I'm going to assume this server merger hopefully leaves Briggs unaffected in its solitary awesomeness as a beacon of light in the dark depths of Oceania.

Which is why they're merging them? There was a reason character names weren't specific to a server in the first place.

Very few games grow in population after release, and you need enough servers to deal with release load + some more in case it goes much better than expected. After the populations drop, and for a game this size they always will, server merges are just needed. It's not a sign of failure, more an inevitable next step.

As a Miller player I doubt this will change things for me anyway, unless there's a really tiny EU server out there...

It's easier to have too many servers and whittle them down than it is to not have enough servers at launch. If they wouldn't have had too many servers, people would have complained that they didn't have enough servers. Always have extra capacity and the pull it down to size.