The heart of Lineage II has always been its clans and highly competitive PVP, be it grand-scale castle and fortress sieges, or one-on-one combat. I think we can all agree that being a part of hundreds of players on a castle battle field is an incredible adventure that all should be able to partake in. We recognize that in order to offer the best experience equally for all of our players, some population balancing is needed.
In an effort to improve the overall health of our servers and maintain the very highest quality Lineage II experience for all of our players, we will be combining several of our North American servers. We aim to make this as smooth and painless a transition as possible for our community and believe that the end result will be a more lively and thriving server community for all.
Over the next few weeks, we will be here to answer your questions and address your concerns. We would like to stress that we are not combining servers because of a lack of players or because Lineage II is on the decline. That is not the case; the Lineage II community is as strong as ever, and our players remain dedicated, enthusiastic, and active participants. Our goal is to balance the population for the health of the servers, and in the spirit of Lineage II, to ensure the best possible competitive environment for all and, in turn, promote server growth. Please read on for all the details.
Server Merge Date
July 8, 2008
Servers to Be Merged
The server merge plan is based upon current server population balancing needs and the physical locale of the server hardware. Servers 1 through 5 are located in North America on the West Coast and servers 6 through 8 are on the East Coast. As such, only servers in the same physical location are eligible to be merged. With that in mind, below is the server merge plan.
Server 2 (Sieghardt) + Server 5 (Erica) = New Server A
Server 3 (Kain) + Server 4 (Lionna) = New Server B
Server 6 (Gustin) + Server 8 (Hindemith) = New Server C
*Please note that the new servers will not experience any latency issues as a result of two server populations being combined on them. The new populations will still be below our very highest population servers.
The new server names are yet to be determined. We will be requesting server name nominations and creating an official poll from the top picks. This will be done in each individual server forum on the official website. We will take nominations until June 19th at 5:00 PM Central time. The names will be voted upon and ultimately chosen by each of the server communities.
After the merges, the old server names will be deleted and not used again.
Servers 1 (Bartz), 7 (Devianne), 9 (Teon), 10 (Franz), and 11 (Luna) will not be involved in these merges.
Account Services
In order to facilitate the smoothest possible merge, all account services will be turned off one week prior to the merge. We are also turning off all transfers to the affected servers on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 (after the regular weekly maintenance).
Characters
Characters will transfer over with all of their individual belongings, including all items and Adena in their private warehouse, inventory, and equipment slots. Individual character status and info, such as quest info and karma, will also transfer over intact with the exceptions of hero status and Olymp
