Game population

Right, and the only way for players to get access to the characters over the limit would be to delete existing characters that they never would have deleted before the extra characters were forced to transfer to the new server. So the players are put in a position where they are forced to delete characters

agreed 110%

One only has to look at the outrage many EU players are expressing over the same thing happening to their Global names which is a minor inconvenience compared to character names.

The way I read the suggestion, if you had, say, 40 characters on the servers to be merged, the merged server would have 40 active character slots. You couldn't make any new characters on that server but you could access all 40. It didn't say characters above 36 would be inaccessible, so I should give the suggestion the full benefit of the doubt in that specific circumstance.

The concept of temporary overflow exists in other parts of the game: you can have more transaction slots than the maximum if the game requires them to, say, split up a group transaction, and we know from past testing that if the game is forced to send more recipes or salvage than you have space for for some reason, you're simply temporarily allowed to have more than the limit, but you cannot do anything else except remove items until you drop below the limit. I'm assuming the suggestion follows similar lines.

Its possible, but not nearly enough to avoid the huge number of problems a merge would cause, because most of the problems with a merge are inherent to the merge itself, and not its collateral damage effects. Some players fundamentally do not want to see their server community and its assets merged with another. That's an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution. Some people fundamentally do not want to change character names. That is an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution in a merge.

In any case, if I was of a mind to do a server merge, I would go all the way and go shard-less. Rather than have to deal with this problem multiple times, I would go all the way once and come up with a way to preserve server communities within a singular global structure. And I wouldn't claim it would be problem-free: I would only do this if the problems I know would occur were worth the benefits.

Is it possible? Well, hypothetically one way to do this would be to put everyone into a single global space but tag all players with a shard tag of their original server, and then use phasing to allow players to see essentially only things with the same server tag. In effect, Freedom, Virtue, Champion, Triumph, and all the other servers would be occupying the same space but invisible to each other. Voluntarily, however, people could unlock their phase locks and see everyone and everything on the global server, either permanently or temporarily for cross-server teaming. If you're on Infinity and you want to team with someone on Virtue, you could unlock your tag and see the Virtue people, join their team, and run with them. You could stay permanently globally visible and see everyone globally, or return to your own "Infinity dimension" once that was done. While teamed, your Superguy character would appear as Superguy: Infinity to avoid name clashes with Superguy: Virtue. It wouldn't appear like that: it would appear as Superguy with the server tag below, so it actually looked like a tag rather than a continuation of the name, so we don't mess with players' character names.

There are a ton of problems with executing such a thing, I won't deny. But I would explore ideas like that before contemplating a server merge. Because while a server merge might be more technically easy, it actually might be far more disruptive because in a normal server merge the problems of name space and community just get punted. In something ambitious like the above, those problems get addressed front and center.

We have a winner!

Less

http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quar...x?BID=&BC=2011

Thank you for explaining your point of view, it was one I hadn't considered possible. That being said I don't think the person who said there wouldn't be a problem put as much thought into this as you have.

Agreed shardless or cross server teaming would be far better than merging servers.

I supposed one way to do cross server-teaming would be to create a merged server with everything on it (using the tagging idea to ID what server it's actually from); activating 'cross-server teaming mode' would log your character onto that server, staying in 'normal' mode would leave you on your normal server.

No idea if that's a sensible way to do it, however.

So that would be merging the servers and not calling it a server merge because people feel that merging servers looks bad.

BITE
YOUR
TONGUE!

No. Seriously. Bite it! HARD!

No. No it wouldn't. It'd alienate people who'd lost names on toons, supergroups, etc. It'd also send a lousy message to players who've been told thus far that the game is quite population-stable (and possibly even growing) and possibly bring about a wave of account closures.

Just...no.

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NO. NO! NO! HELL *BLEEP!* NO!


Do you even know how groups in a coalition are hooked to one another "under the hood"?



In other words you break SG with your "back in the queue" idea.

Sorry. Bad idea is really bad.

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So kinda like this:

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.