Age Of Conan Servers Merging

Age of Conan's new game director Craig Morrison announced yesterday that Funcom is "actively working" on merging its servers in both the U.S. and Europe.

Despite a positive initial response, including a reported one million sign-ups for the game's beta program, Age of Conan has been plagued by a host of bugs and other issues, ranging from the amusing harmlessness of under-inflated boobs to more serious technical issues, long-promised but still absent support for DirectX 10 and even a bizarre incident in which a Funcom Game Master was canned over a cybersex encounter with a player. In mid-September, longtime Funcom employee and Age of Conan Lead Designer Gaute Godager announced he was leaving the company, although an insider told The Escapist that Godager had actually been fired over the game's numerous failings.

In a lengthy message posted on the official Age of Conan forums, Morrison, Godager's replacement, spoke on numerous topics relating to Age of Conan, explaining various planned tweaks and changes to gameplay, and also confirmed that the company will be merging servers soon. "I can today confirm that we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America," he wrote. "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," he continued. "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."

And that elusive DirectX 10 support that Funcom delayed all the way back in May? Morrison promised it's coming, someday. "It's now almost ready for the full test server," he claimed. "Once the next gameplay update is out expect to start to see the DX10 functionality coming to the test environment. How long it will take to transition to live will depend on the testing of course, but it's starting to shape up nicely." Morrison refused to speculate, however, on whether the DirectX 10 patch would be ready in time for the game's cancellation and shutdown.

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Server mergers are a tricky bunch when it comes to MMOs. On one hand you make your active player base happier, but on the other this is generally looked on as being the beginning of the end from those outside looking in.

It will be interesting to follow Age of Conan for the next several months.

well it does sound like there trying To Save the game from being shut down..

Slycne:
Server mergers are a tricky bunch when it comes to MMOs. On one hand you make your active player base happier, but on the other this is generally looked on as being the beginning of the end from those outside looking in.

How do you mean?

Danny Ocean:

Slycne:
...

How do you mean?

Well when you merge server our player base gets more consolidated, and this in general makes the game more enjoyable. Especially is your game is remotely PVP based. The more people to PVP with the better.

However, from the outside looking in a server merger means that the game no longer has the player base to support as many players as it once had. This can be viewed that the game is slowly collapsing.

Every single time a MMO has announced that it's performing a server merge, it's death usually follows a bit later.

TOGSolid:
Every single time a MMO has announced that it's performing a server merge, it's death usually follows a bit later.

WoW. Battlegrounds.