Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Nodes rise and fall in any case.
With a server merge, all the Nodes fall at the same time...and then players work to rebuild them on the reborn server.
Having a World Event before the server merge should provide some "consolation prizes".
And that should help players progress Nodes faster than on brand new servers with brand new characters.
While it is nice to have this kumbaya moment of everyone coming together from disparate servers to start again fresh on a new server, Intrepid has never given any information or indication of which way they plan to handle server merges. Taking dying population servers and merging them into existing ones with healthy populations is the industry norm, not opening new ones.
This fixes the issue and stops the constant lemming behavior seen of "ohhhh, shiny, fresh start server. Server Q, X, K, and Y have populations below what is needed to keep node upkeep going. They are getting a new one. I want to go there too. Quick everyone, let us leave our server that is just fine and glom onto the new one!"
This other thing I saw earlier of making it a drawn out timed event over several months is probably not going to happen either. Once the population has declined to whatever metric Intrepid has decided, they will announce and close. Why waste money on server upkeep when it is dying. Get the minor population who have been already struggling back into the game and put them on servers that are already established. This removes the whole having a new fresh node map with level 50s running around with all the last content goodies they were able to achieve from their previous server totally screwing the balance of a new server.
The devs have not said what they will actually do about server merges.
It's highly unlikely that Ashes will follow the industry standard because the industry standard of merging with an existing server because the industry standard is to have static servers that are clones stamped with the exact same cities and buildings and mobs, while Ashes servers are dynamic, with disparate cities and buildings and mobs.
It's unlikely the devs will destabilize an existing server by dropping in a bunch of players with gear, resources, recipes, achievements and titles that were never unlocked on the existing server.
This is a speculation/suggestion thread. The devs have not shared designs of what they actually intend to do about server merges.
Perhaps for some temporary period, what if the server to be closed and the server players were to be moved to were connected.
And then during the notification period between server transfer, the lands opened up bridges, portal and shipping ferries, or similar logistical equivalent means to physically migrate in-game and move real-time to their new server.
Create ways to stop players from the new server to go back into the soon to be closing one
Provide incentives for the players that must move; ie carts, gold, backpacks.. cosmetics and make the whole event a real event.
Progressively shut down what players can do on their soon-to-close server.
Do the merge over a period of a week and the remaining players that either did not want to, and/or forgot to get physically moved at the end.
Just a weekend muse!
xcept they can then use the mechanic of spawning waves of mobs to attack settlement and thing for world events all they would do it insanly beef up the sparnrates and str of mobs to destroy settlements on the merge
3000? some servers on new world had 50-200 actives lol but that was an extream player drop off and it bled for months and months before they got a server merge :P
Just create a random starting point on the map from which corruption exudes and corrupts and kills players if they stay in it. That point on the map enlarges and in the end swallows up the whole world in corruption.
Players who die can now respawn as monsters and attack players.
Meanwhile at the same time make it so corrupt mobs spawn all over the world.
Goal: Players have to reach the divine gate and hold that position until it opens.
Nope, you will just have to choose another name. Intrepid met their obligation. They provided you the chance to choose a server and reserve a specific name on that server. Player actions (well, inaction) caused you to lose that perk. From the number of packs that have been sold that have name reservation vs the amount of total players at launch, the chance of you being put on a server where someone else had chosen Stinky Wizzleteats in the exact same way you had spelled it would be extremely small in the case of the inevitable shrinkage. And if the game was to suffer a catastrophic loss of player base,(cough New World cough) they will have much bigger issues to try and fix than whether a handful of people are worried that they can't be the only xXNoobSmasherXx on their server.
bummer... if there is a server merge maybe the person with the name perk will get the higher priority to retain the name, similar to all the other methods of determining name clashing, like last log in, total hours, account start date, etc