There was a large group of players who were (some of them militantly) against server merging.
A) we lose the merged server's "style" of community
2) merged server's "style" of community may not play well with the target server's "style" of community
III) some people prefer small servers
d) people who wanted higher-population servers already had two to choose from (arguably three, with Exalted, but it was behind a pay-wall), there were an abundance of mid-pop servers, and only a couple who were truly "low"
While those are definitely valid "player" concerns, it also would have been a logisitical nightmare,
particularly for like-named supergroups across different servers -- who gets to keep theirs? (Who
wants to write the SQL queries to identify/verify those conflicts? Better not miss one, or you likely
end up trashing someone's SG, base, and any/all items they had in storage at merge-time...)
Additionally, in the early days, the Vets were guaranteed to have their main character name across
servers, and many of us have several different alts with the same name on the various servers (I
had several toons named "FourSpeed", for instance). Another thankless issue to resolve.
Then of course, Minotaur's point is equally a pita for name collisions (owned by different players)
across the various servers that would need to be resolved (again, more problematic query work
with no margin for error).
Sorting those issues out, mistake free, would be a major risk - and mess it up? It would lead to a
sh*t-storm that would make the ED brouhaha seem like a minor squabble between two sparrows.
Further, add on the numerous, mindboggling (and occasionally hilarious) bugs that showed up with
every Issue release, and I personally, would have had ZERO confidence that a server merge would
have been successful.
And that's not even counting the other (simpler) "tech" stuff like SQL DB migration/merges, server
maintenance, data mining & reporting script changes, DNS adjustments, etc.
In short - a major headache of a job, and unless the server hardware is leased, the consolidation
wouldn't probably even save much if the hardware is already on the books as purchased, which
would likely be counted as depreciated material assets anyway.
I'd guess that everytime it was mentioned and considered it came up as a fail in a Cost Benefits
analysis. The upside benefit would be minimal, and the downside fubar would be catastrophic.
Edit: As for the OP - I too am hoping that the folks Ironwolf is fronting for are successful.
For all of its many issues, CoH/V was unique and still one of the best MMOs ever (imho).
Regards,
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