Server Transfer vs Server Merges and the Great Hypocrisy

I'm not sure what are they trying to acomplish with transfers, I play on an Euro realm that once was very heavy and now joined the light club.

Out of 91, let me say that again: 91!!! Euro realms, 70 are on a light status atm, in what is considered prime time.

What will character transfers acomplish exactly? people will transfer randomly into the few standard+ realms leaving the light realms...empty. Comunities will get split for no good reason.

What will you do with the 70 empty realms (on Europe alone) after transfers? shut them down? even if it still contains players that for some reason didn't transfer?

I'm not saying transfers are bad, but given the option, realm merges seem the logic solution.

I really can't find 1 point in favor of transfers 1st, merge/shutdown 2nd, unless this "Character Transfer Service" you talk about is going to be payed, and you are just trying to milk money from your already "short" playerbase.
If that's the case, it's truly pathetic.

In present time, Europe could probably have a healthy population distribution with ~25 realms.

When this game was launched every thread was a bunch of crying inpatient folks complaining about ques, mostly Aussies.
So Bw opens up more servers and folks migrated to them and thinned out the servers that had high ques.
From what I have seen we can and should get behind a goal of blaming Aussies for the server population imbalance and decrease.

Can someone answer this- Did bioware say the transfers would be done off of light and dead servers? Or too dead servers?

Life is not fair.
The servers are not populated appropriately and must be fixed.
Tough.

All I've read is that the initial free transfers would be "targeted". What the target is they haven't said. Which servers will be allowed to transfer out of and which servers to transfer to has not been announced.

Rift and now it has 15 very well populated servers and a great community.

DCUO merged (as well as went F2P) before the end of their first year.

Also... as time went on, the increasingly negative tone on the forums was remarkably similar to this place, heh heh.

This comment tells me you do not know what a merger is. What Rift did was offer transfers, then close dead servers (I believe this is the procedure they used; never played Rift, just going on heresay).

Merging requries a physical merge of the data from the servers, which is a messy, complicated business that is worth much more trouble than it is worth. It is also a bad move publicly, as the Internet would then explode that the game is truly dead on all websites everywhere and good luck getting any new players after that.

That is the great debate; those calling for mergers are misunderstanding what a merger actually is. Some will argue it's just semantics, but I think the difference between the two is night a day.

Wow some of you people surprise me in your lack of logic .... WHOLE server emrges are NOT as simple as the click of a button ... it us physically impossible to do a full server merge and if they did ALOT of people would be upset.

Like seriously step back and look at the situation
1. Legacy crossovers
2. name crossovers
3. Guild crossovers

I can tell you right now that id be upset if I had to rename my characters and half of them were already taken.

Just a thought.

No, Rift did not merge servers. You do not know what a merge of servers is (I explained above). What Rift did was offer transfers, then close their dead servers. This is not the same as a server merge.