Shorth

Merging Servers in Multiplayer Games

Massive Multiplayer Online Games have become very popular in the past few years. One of the most important aspects of those games is server population, as those games revolve around user interaction. Recently, the practice of merging underpopulated servers in massive multiplayer online games has become more popular. When I read what is happening in the gaming world, very often I notice that servers are being merged completely or partially, such as transferring of only some characters. While this practice may be widely accepted, I do not believe it is beneficial, and in the long term it might reduce the population of the servers. That is because massive multiplayer online games are suppose to imitate our world, and are a place where thousands of players invest their time in hope to become known and respected among fellow players. New players often join new servers, because they hope that they can accomplish more, but what if more advanced player characters are going to be transferred to them from some old servers? If that happens, then there is going to be a problem. Basically, it will result in new players unable to compete and the “new server” would actually not be an accurate description due to the influx of veteran players. Another problem is that relocating players to new servers might also result in the need to change their nickname, in case of duplicate names. This poses a problem as a lot of players are very attached to their character names.
It seems that there is a solution to this problem. Massive Multiplayer Games should have a new server every few months where no character transfers would be allowed for at least a year. In the meantime, older servers should be merging with each other. This would result in new players having at all times a choice to play on new servers.