PlanetSide 2 fans in North America who have been waiting months for the merge of the North American servers were supposed to finally get their wish this week – but it hasn’t gone exactly to plan. Or at least, not to player expectations.
Daybreak/Toadman had originally announced the server merge of Connery and Emerald would take place yesterday, April 8th. What ToadBreak didn’t announce until almost server-up was that it would be merging Emerald into Connery and not the other way around as players expected. According to folks on Reddit, Connery, which is located on the west coast, was all but abandoned by players because of its notoriously terribly server lag. (For those who aren’t aware, the US population is not distributed evenly; 80% of the population lives on the eastern half of the country. Canada is very unevenly distributed too.)
There are rumors and counter rumors floating around social media right now that claim Daybreak was only renting Emerald, hence the decision, but ToadBreak has not confirmed any of it, so take all of it with a pile of salt. We’ve also seen some rumors that this is wrong and that Daybreak owns all of its servers. There’s literally no formal public statement on any of it. Please continue with your pile of salt.
The end result is that players are reporting much higher pings than they had before; some Americans now say their ping to the European server is better than to Connery. Others are at least claiming they’re canceling their subs. “This server merge might be the thing that kills PlanetSide officially,” said one Redditor. People are just as mad on what’s left of Twitter, as well as on the official forums, where people are reporting errors and ping problem. One person actually reported the merge as a bug. Daybreak locked it, so apparently it wasn’t as amused as I was.
Unfortunately for ToadBreak, the timing couldn’t be worse. If you’ve swung by the game’s Discord over the last week, you know that the mood has been sour indeed, owing largely to disbelief about the fishing patch (which was real even though it launched on April Fools’ day) and the farming patch (which was a frankly bizarre April Fools’ day joke that didn’t land whatsoever).
ToadBreak community manager Mithril has said the studio is following the feedback and “could possibly touch base on this topic” in the next dev letter, but no clarifying statements have been made.
