There are two kinds of merges in the MMO genre. There’s the kind of merge a studio does to a game that was supposed to perform and didn’t and now must shrink down while pretending everything’s fine and players are panicking. And then there’s the kind of merge a studio does to an old game to consolidate the small but die-hard population after years of players begging for just that.
It’s the latter coming for Daybreak/Toadman’s PlanetSide 2 today, or at least the European servers, as the team announced last night rather suddenly that it’s merging the two EU servers – Cobalt and Miller – together into one happy family.
“We believe that this will not only improve gameplay for our EU players by creating larger battles but will also forge new opportunities for cooperation and competition between players and outfits that may have never faced off before,” the devs write. “Over the last three releases, we have been testing a character porting feature to ensure that no data or progress is lost in the server merge process. Our tests have shown that the porting is complete and lossless.”
Servers came down about an hour ago for the merge into the new Miller server and are expected to be offline three to six hours, so as early as noon EDT or as late as 3 p.m. EDT, depending.
Naturally, you’re probably wondering about the rest of the servers. It’s probably en route too, if this goes well, which will suit the excited playerbase just fine.
“We want to review the results of merging our EU servers first. If all goes well we will evaluate the options to merge more servers later.”
