I am curious if they have addressed the potential issue of returning players overwhelming the current servers. I think it’s reasonable that we may see an influx of returning players with Brimstone Sands. All of the original accounts are tied to the remaining servers. I feel this is a crisis ready to happen. Have they considered unlinking players from their old servers, if they have not logged in for over 6 months? They would then simply have the option of selecting a new server upon logging in again. Hell they could even select their original server if they wanted and it’s not overloaded.
Most players won’t even know what server that is anyways because of all of the mergers. This gives them the choice and doesn’t force players into a server they don’t even care to be in, and prevents overloading the more populated servers. You can lock a server and prevent additional influx, if they are still connected to the server you cannot block them from entering the queue. This creates issues for existing players and returning players frustrated and maybe choose not to give the game another chance.
We went from like 200? servers and 5 million? - 10 million? accounts down to what, 20 servers? and 100k+? active players? As a result we saw a massive condensing of accounts onto servers. What used to be maybe 10,000 players connected to a sever (making up numbers), then with mergers it might be 100,000? so even if a small fraction of those players return and become active then that can overwhelm a sever. Most notably the higher population ones with little wiggle room.
There are definitely considerations to be had. Some might be worried that they will be removed from their beloved server. The reality is that the server most people were on 6 months ago? Nearly 1 year ago? probably doesn’t even exist, likely merged into another. The company they were in likely completely gone. They can also choose to go wherever they want upon logging in again, if that servers is not already locked to protect the players already actively playing on that server and protect incoming players as well from massive queues.
Feel free to discuss other picture solutions or issues with the idea of unlinking inactive account to protect servers from being overloaded. This is not the place to say that players are not coming back haha, we got plenty of threads already for that and hey that’s a legit argument as well. We are currently low on numbers right now, but this thread requires you to be slightly optimistic haha. Let’s say 5%? 10%? come back? Are we prepared for that?
Tldr: Did any 6 month+ returning players need to reselect a new server when logging on or were they still in the same server they were in when they last logged in? (or whatever their post merge sever was intended to be) If not, would this be a good idea to prevent significant chaos in the event that we see 5%? 10%? 30%? of the playerbase coming back?