Server Transfers for Oceanic Launch

[Cmdluke]

so the launch for Au/NZ is officially announced for march 1st. The announcement mentions that there will be a short window for people in this region who are already playing on existing servers to migrate their characters to a local server in their region.

 

I know server transfers are a hot topic around here so I thought this was interesting.

 

please discuss, and lets keep it civil people.

[Andryah]

Makes sense.

 

You want people playing in local regional server farms if possible.

 

It allows them to test and deploy a server transfer process.

 

I think the reason they are pretty quiet about server moves is they want to wait and move Oceanic folks to localized servers before final analysis of server pops and allowing some server populations to move.

 

 

A more interesting discussion would center around what methodology they will use for server transfers when they do open them up for the general public (they announced that they do plan to do this). They could go the WoW route, or the Rift route, or they could create a new route.

 

The WoW route was generally from high pop to low pop to balance populations (but if you listen to forum posters, they all seem to want to run from a light pop server to a high pop server). They were very restrictive about it early on, and then later sold transfers from pretty much any server to any other server.

 

The Rift route was to let people move at their own choosing, and while it initially was designed to balance populations across servers, in the long run what it did was cluster populations on a smaller number of servers. The Rift approach also stealth removed servers from the farm (they became "trial servers). The Rift route was good for server balancing, but by letting anyone transfer a character to a new server every week, it eventually caused server hopping by guilds to exploit content.

Edited February 14, 2012 by Andryah