Not Too Keen on Server Merges

Lately I've seen a lot of discussions on the topic of server merges. A couple of days ago, Bioware even opened an official thread on the forums to let people duke it out on the subject.

I have to admit I always get a bit of a nervous eye twitch when this topic is brought up. Those of you who haven't been reading my blog since the beginning won't remember, but the great server merges "transfers" of June 2012 were not a happy time for me. There was a happy ending in the sense that I eventually settled on The Red Eclipse without too much fuss, but not without first suffering a lot of emotional stress that I could have done without. I'm definitely not keen on repeating that experience.

Also, for as much of a pain as the process was back then, I could at least see the need for merges at the time and was mostly ticked off by the way Bioware was handling them. Right now I don't feel that the case for more server merges is particularly strong.

From my point of view there is only a single argument that can be made to justify that server merges would serve "the greater good", and that's that extremely low population servers give new and returning players the impression that the game is dead, leading to bad PR and spread of false information. That was certainly a serious issue back in 2012 when there were something like a hundred depopulating servers vs. maybe twenty active ones.

These days though? I dunno. As an English-speaking EU player, you are given the choice between three different servers: Red Eclipse is super active, the Progenitor is medium pop, and Tomb of Freedon Nadd is pretty dead, so you have a one in three chance of ending up in a bad place. If you just want to play through the story though, as many people clearly do, does it really matter to you how many others are idling on the fleet in the meantime? And if you are actively looking for other players, how long is it going to take you to catch on and ask someone whether you happened to pick an unnaturally quiet server? Trying to decide how much of an issue that one in three chance really is requires a lot of speculation about people's motivations and the way they play. How about we focus on the people actually playing now instead?

Most of the reasons I've seen active players cite for being for or against server merges are inherently a bit selfish. I'm not saying that's wrong, but I wish more people would be honest about it instead of doing the "greater good" chant while pretending that whatever they want must naturally be what everyone wants. In the pro camp we have:

- I want to have faster queue pops!
- I generally want to have more people around to improve my experiences doing group content, trading etc.

In the con camp we have:

- I like being on a smaller server! (...because I'm a roleplayer and I like it quiet / because it allows my smaller guild to win at conquest sometimes / because I'm not constantly fighting people for resources and quest mobs / because I love the more tight-knit community etc.)
- I don't want to have to rename any of my characters!
- I don't want to lose my guild ship/stronghold/outfits/other thing that has been introduced to the game since those early server merges and that the current server transfer tech isn't able to deal with in a good way.

It seems to me that pretty much all of these can be countered in some way except the "I like being on a smaller server" one, because once you've put everyone into the same big pool, there's just no way you can go back to having that dedicated quiet time or to being competitive in areas where you were only successful before because of the lack of competition.

If you want faster queue pops and more people around, you can already transfer to a busy server. I appreciate that it's not an ideal solution because it costs money per character, and that's a major bummer for anyone who'd like to move lots of characters at once, but it can be done. Did they ever raise the price of server transfers back up from 90CC anyway? I know that people were advocating server-transferring twice as a cheap way of getting a name change for a while... For the faster queue pops, one could also argue for the development of cross-server queueing instead of merges to get all the benefits without the downsides.

The naming issue could probably be solved if Bioware redid the whole character naming system, but I don't think anything less would do. On TRE for example it's hard enough to come up with new names for alts as it is, even with spaces, apostrophes and what not. There must literally be millions of characters registered on that server by now. Forcing a merge under the current system and potentially presenting tens of thousands of players with the need to rename their characters would be a disaster. Bioware would have to come up with some sort of system to allow names to be non-unique first.

The issues with strongholds, outfits etc. again could probably be solved with sufficient development time - to some extent that is, though some things would remain tricky. What if you have the same stronghold unlocked on two servers that are about to get merged for example? Could they implement something that allows you to keep two versions of your Coruscant home? It's probably not impossible, but unlikely to be something they'd spend development time on.

What stands out to me here is that the issues cited by the pro-merge crowd can already be resolved on an individual level, while the con arguments cannot and rely on the belief that "Bioware will fix it somehow", which is why I'm definitely more in the con camp right now. For me personally, the pro arguments also hold little water just because they wouldn't do much for me - I already have my home on the biggest EU server, so speeding up my pops by five seconds would be pretty damn irrelevant to me. Meanwhile the con arguments of potentially losing names are a very real threat to me. In addition, I've intentionally made new characters on other servers before to roll up new legacies and to re-experience playing as a character without all those legacy perks. It wouldn't be a huge deal to lose those, but it would still be a loss with nothing to make up for it.

To get back to the argument of dead servers being bad for the game's reputation though, that could actually be solved with relatively little fuss, because my impression is that there aren't actually that many of them. Again, to go back to my own experience of the English EU servers, only one of them is anywhere close to dead. If they merged TOFN into the Progenitor for example, that would already have the desired effect of eliminating all the "dead wood" and bringing all English-speaking EU servers back to a healthy population without affecting quite so many people negatively. I hope that if Bioware does decide to give in to the currently very vocal crowds that demand server merges, they'll do it in a sensible way and without listening to those advocating that we should have a single server for every region - as that would just maximise the bad (technical issues, many lost names) without actually adding much value (queue pops can't get any faster than instant).