Ghost Towns
This DXP weekend brought something to light for me. Since the character transfers were implimented, a lot of the servers are ghost towns and this appeared to be especially noticable (at least to me) this event. I'm wondering should the Dev's consider merging some of the servers. I know some player like low server populations -- at time I do as
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I think "ghost town" is a really bad description, though, since those servers are far from abandoned. Triumph is not a high-pop server and yet I can always be busy on there since I know where to look on that server. That's a server where I ended up becoming more a part of the community (at least to the extent that a multiserver altaholic can ever be part of one server's community), so it is pretty rare for me to have to be scrambling to get or make a team of complete strangers. If I am on other servers where I have not taken that time, I can see how the server can look empty.
Guardian, for instance, is my first server but I have not stayed involved there and the folks I knew when have since left the game. I know there are happy communities of players on there since I sometimes end up teamed with them, but if I don't follow up on those experiences, then I don't become a part of those communities myself.
Freedom is a -lot- easier when it comes to finding teams of strangers, but it is more of everything, both bad and good. The X% chance of getting a sadmaking team is a bigger factor when you have a higher population. Another problem is that the flake factor is way higher. People ditching in the middle of missions, people Afk WithOut Leave during a mission... every kind of lame behavior. If it is easier to get teams, there is less cause for them to be more responsible when on the teams. Switching existing characters from a low-pop server to a high-pop one may be most attractive to people like this, which may be exacerbating the problem.
On the surface, that sounds a bit sad, but it still comes down to communities, even there. I have been focusing on PuGing some of my Freedom characters that happen to be in the same level range (or were, before d-xp weekend... not s'much now ^_^7) and I am, once again, building friends lists of my own and finding my way onto other people's flists. Increasingly, I am joining teams and building teams based on tells from people I know rather than by random invites. If I keep going with that, eventually I will be sending invites to (and relying on invites from) strangers on Freedom about as often as I do on Triumph. To a stranger, I might well appear to have disappeared from the Freedom population, for all practical intents and purposes. (Actually, in my particular case, I'd never disappear 100% since I prefer to always have some strangers on any mission team I am running, for various reasons, but that is a personal quirk.)
I guess what I am saying is, a server (like any community) can be home to a thriving and happy bunch of people without that immediately being apparent to a stranger who only has a shiny search comment to recommend them. Those people aren't looking for a server merge since they can be busy with teams they enjoy whenever they log in.
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Just consider what merging two servers would mean. There will be thousands of duplicate character names. Who gets to keep their names and who gets screwed? And what about SG/VG groups? There's sure to be overlaps there too. And what are the odds that everything will transfer perfectly? Think of the screams if whole bases vanish into the ether, taking their storage bins with them.
Because it wouldn't be the same as an individual character transfer where you can make choices. It would be mandatory, with everyone at the mercy of whatever system the devs came up with. If it were my server, I'd be breaking out the pitchforks and torches.
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