When Servers Collide

Server mergers -- they've been looming over the game well since late last year. With the game opening to huge initial numbers, as many MMOs do, and servers were handed out like candy, it almost was inevitable that some of them dwindle and die as the population contracted into its more steady playerbase (unless WAR had drunk from the same magic pool that sent WoW soaring into the stratosphere).

Handling servers with a MMO is a tricky subject, particularly from the perspective of the company. It's almost a lose-lose proposition: you release too few, and the ones you have fill to overflowing, forcing people to wait to log in and causing more server instability (remember the first couple weeks after WAR's launch?). You release too many, and then you end up with server ghost towns that have to be merged. Both are PR blows, and the only way around it is for hawk-like vigilant monitoring of server populations and a large dose of luck.

Compounding all that is the sense that when a player chooses a server, they're essentially setting up "home" in the game there. That's their neighborhood, and over time, memories and identity grow attached to the server name. When players are forced to uproot and move to a strange new land, there's not just a little apprehension and uncertainty that goes with it.

Still, it needed to happen, and with all of the hoopla around patch 1.2, Bitter Rivals and the Slayer/Choppa, it might as well be now while there's enough good PR to combat this news. I said that mergers were looming over the game, not just because of the subscriber numbers, but also because Mythic's been actively transferring populations (through free server transfers) for months now. Low pop servers have been hiding for a while under the sneaky "more" button, because they didn't want anyone rolling new toons there. They've been prepping for this time, and now it's here: the herald of the first server closings.

I'm pretty okay with it. You can take the cynical view by throwing Mark Jacob's infamous "adding servers" quote back at them and say that this is a sign of Warhammer's impending demise, but practically, that's not it at all. High populations are the key ingredient to successful RvR, and WAR is all about the RvR. If server merges and transfers have to happen to get those populations boosted, then so be it. Retire the ghost town servers, get the game absolutely pumping on the active servers, and then who knows? Perhaps in the future those servers will reopen as the population expands once more.