HFS Part 3: The Server Merge: What it means, and what it REALLY means...

One of the more controversial subjects about the events at VanaFest last Sunday was the announcement that, in fact, Square-Enix was obligated to reduce the number of servers by a factor of 1/4, from 32 to 24.

Again, for those keeping score, there were 16 "safe" servers, 8 servers being merged into, and 8 servers being merged out of existence into the previous 8, due to low character traffic.

Fairy goes to Sylph.

Kujata goes to Valefor.

Remora goes to Leviathan. (Poor Remora.)

Midgardsomr goes to Quetzacotl (or however they are spelled)

Hades goes to Cerebrus

Seraph goes to Bismarck

Garuda goes to Lakshmi

and Pandemonium goes to Asura. (Yuck for Pandy.)

and all this happens at the next update this month.

Gyogi, on my linkshell, says this is a signal of a failing game.

He's right!

HOWEVER...

This needed to be done. It was clear, as I have said at least once directly on the blog, that many parts of this game were becoming abjectly unplayable during the week (like Campaign, for example), and that there was probably going to have to be some server consolidation.

But EIGHT servers, *without* a Third-Party Program banhammer with it??

Makes you wonder how many they'd have to yank if they did ban all the App users...

But there was one other thing that they said by juxtaposition (and, no, I don't mean the LBR little troublemaker) that I found interesting...

The person reporting on the Special Task Force added the server merges on the end of the RMT report -- appearing to infer that RMT was the only thing supporting 32 servers on FFXI - once the STF got rid of a lot of the RMT (hardy har har har...), they basically found out that, without loss of generality (and of great gain to the playability on some of the servers), they could dump 8 servers already!

Makes you wonder how many more are going to be dumped, say, June.

That said: It had to be done. You're not going to have many people playing high-end content if there's nobody doing the likes of Campaign and the like.