Server Mergers

[Gnasch]

I had heard something about this and Ive been looking for some announcement and cant find it. This is the clearest post I can find about this, it hasnt been locked or refuted, and several of the people from the asian servers have responded.
Some of the comments are pretty harsh.

for the whole thread
http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=gameplay&message.id=53420&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

Zarfto wrote.

EQ2 East is a seperate entity run by Gamania, the people who brought us the SOGA Models. Recently I had heard news that it had not been doing well and was scheduled to be shut down.

Fast Forward to March 30th, 2006. Unrest, Mistmoore and Najena servers go down during regular down time but are not brought up for over 7 more hours.

No announcement is made as to why these servers are suffering extended downtime, not a single word from SOE regarding the issue, Many people just assumed some hardware or software fixes were going in.

The truth:

On March 30th, SOE Merged 3 EQ2 East Asian Servers into Najena, Mistmoore and Unrest without telling anyone on the affected servers. Many of you have been wondering about all the wierd names and people with ??? as last names showing up all of a sudden after the down time, and of the many new characters that have appeared since that date.

I have Been told.

Chinese Servers were merged with Mistmoore
Taiwan Servers were merged with Najena
Korean Servers were merged with Unrest.

My Question to SOE, why was such a significant event not brought to the attention of the players on those servers, and why did soe try to hide the fact that it occured at all. Why did SOE not inform it's customers of the long downtime and the reason for it.


This is an absolute disaster in Customer Service to try and sneak something such as this by them and hope they don't find out, SOE should be ashamed of itself for attempting this without informing their affected customers.


Let me close by saying this, I welcome our Asian friends with open arms and no ill will, I look forward to working together with them and forming an even stronger community, Had this issue been brought forth by SOE then no complaint would have been raised.

In the end, I just wish SOE had communicated this issue with the customers instead of trying to sneak it by us and hoping we didn't find out.

Blackguard Replied
I'll start off by apologizing for not calling this out explicitly to US customers. The moves were intended to be completely seamless and would primarily impact the Asian customers who transferred over.

So, first up, who transferred over? Any of our Asian customers who are dedicated to EverQuest II and interested in playing on an English-language server. Will this disrupt your server's economy? No. For characters or guilds that did have more coin than was determined to be within the average range for the destination server's economy, they were capped out, which didn't occur to more than a small handful of characters.

Why did we do it? Because we wanted to provide an opportunity for those customers who wanted to continue playing EverQuest II to do so. This also has the positive side-effect of bolstering the off-peak population on a few of our servers

Was this intended to slip by unnoticed? Not at all. I'll take the blame for dropping the ball on the information front; I honestly thought this transfer was still a ways off, and it was my bad for reading the wrong date on the transfer. This was announced to the customers we thought it would really impact (i.e. those who had to transfer to a new server) some time ago, and it should have been communicated at the very least to the destination servers as well.

The new players will be held to the same standard as existing players. If they break the rules of conduct, they will be banned. I'm not going to comment on the racist remarks from those in this thread, which I will immediately and permanently ban for if I see any more of them.

The boxes and other strange characters you are seeing will be going away. At the moment, they are still able to use characters not in the English alphabet in a few places, and that is a bug that will be smashed as soon as possible. Again, I apologize for dropping the ball on communicating the downtime and transfers, but you should really not notice much of a difference overall in your play experience
Ryan "Blackguard" Shwayder