Age of Conan to Get Server Mergers
I can today confirm that we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America. It's important for us to ensure the best gameplay experience for you all, and more healthy populations on each and every server will make sure we maintain healthy communities for the game in the future. Still, there are many complexities involved in this, and we want to ensure that everything happens as fair and streamlined as possible. That work has now started, and we are naturally making sure that guilds and players can get to new servers in the best possible way. We will come back with more info on this, but I hope that this will serve as a positive injection to the social scene in the game.
Morrison, who has been acclaimed as more "player-centric" than his predecessor, hints that boosting populations will improve the quality of the game for players. But the need to do so alludes to a serious problem: the game lacks players. While the game boasted 700,000 players earlier this summer, it has proven unable to seriously pull players away from the 10-million-plus juggernaut World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, Conan's problems are sure to worsen with the rapid growth of rival Warhammer Online.
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Visceral Monkey
replySame server but still spread out over 10,000 instances. It's the one game flaw they cannot fix.
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This was a large problem even at launch. I couldn't understand how they boasted all of these numbers and yet in the core cities there's practically no one. Too many servers, too many instances. Not being able to get a good group of 8-12 in a single area is a right pain. Until their network code gets cleaned up to the point it can support larger player sizes, this is going to keep nipping at them.
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I don't think they can fix it. They took instancing and abused it so much that it was an exercise in futility to claim it was a true mmo.
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Sounds like this MMO could be doomed. I don't know what it costs to run AoC but it better not be in the millions. Best case, it sounds like they are going to end up with a hundred thousand or two regular subscribers.
Conan never sounded like an MMO setting with endurance anyway. WoW's high fantasy and EVE's space strategy and corporations models seem like the only Western MMO concepts that have staying power.-
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It's funny how all of the "Massively Multiplayer" games these days, even WoW, funnels you into small little groups. I know EVE completely shits itself when you get over a hundred people fighting, and I think Lineage 2 has castle raids or something with tons of people, DAoC had huge fights, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the way these games are headed. Sure there are hardware limitations, but shit, even Battlefield had 64 man battles running on some dudes server in his basement.; it shouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for a big game company to throw some cash at this problem and fix it.
I'm curious to see how Warhammer pans out once people start hitting the level cap and the 500+ person battles get going.
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