Players Aren’t Pleased With The Planetside 2 Server Mergers, Go Figure

I’ll admit it. Any time a dev talks about merging East and West Coast North American servers together (or any other merge involving servers a great distance from each other), I cringe. I understand that sometimes a population drops so low that, in order to keep the game worth playing, the devs have to make that decision. But all I can think is, “The lag!”. It might not be as bad if the merge meant moving everyone to a server located somewhere in the middle of the continent, granting more equal access for everyone. But that would mean building a whole new server, since NA servers are typically located on either coast.

So, when it was initially announced the mergers for Planetside 2, my initial thought was that this was going to suck for someone. How could it not? That said, I would have thought it would be the server with the smaller population that would be integrated into the more popular server. This, as it turns out, was not the case. Rather than moving the players on the mostly empty Connery west coast server onto the east coast server, Emerald, the devs decided to go the other way.

The result? As pointed out on MassivelyOP, a whole bunch of former East Coast players now find themselves on a server that not only lags because of distance but that wasn’t running all that well before the transition. Of course, players are making their dissatisfaction felt on Reddit, as one does. In fact, one player even offered $10,000 to reverse the action.

Whether it was a joke or not, it, and other posts like it, at least got the devs to respond, though, probably not exactly in the way the players want. The post detailed reasons that the merge was necessary for the F2P game and then detailed their plan to deal with the issues. Currently, none of these solutions involve moving the server. That said, they didn’t rule it out. They just made it clear that it’s one of the last-ditch efforts.

I imagine that as long as they get it fixed, players will be happy enough in the end. That said, it seems that this issue could have been avoided altogether if they’d just chosen to merge everyone into the more populated, faster server. Particularly since this is a shooter game, which lives or dies based on lag issues. Yes, some players would probably still experience lag, but it wouldn’t be the majority. In the meantime, the devs have announced a Double XP event.