Few days ago we where witnesses of first Aion’s servers merge. By many people it was long awaiting moment, which had to bring a life back to low populated servers, for the others it was seen as begin of the end. To spice everything even more NCsoft made contoversial characters name change procedure. Result? Please read the following part of article.

What is your name now?

When population of players is gerring low, server’s merge is quite most obvious step from publisher side. It allow not only to lower maintence cost of servers but also gathering players from few servers on one – increasing it population which make it more fun for everyone – it’s easier to find a group or enemies to PvP with. So it’s looks like win-win situation for both sides, publisher and players alike. Well, as we can see nothing is so simple, even if some reasons are… insane.


So what’s the thing? First thing is characters names conflict. It’s obvious thing – when we merge two servers into one, it’s more then sure that we will find characters with the same name on both (gretting for all Legolas’s and Naruto’s ;P).
NCsoft noticed the problem pretty fast and decide to give every single player an item which allow to change character’s name for free – so you could say everyingh is fine. Well not really, the case is that many players decided to buy Collectioner’s Edition of Aion just to be able reserver a name for they toon few days before oficial launch. I’m personally pretty much attached to my nickname, so even if this problem doesn’t touched me i feel little disappointment from whole this situation and how it was handled. This could be done in many different and better ways, for example by giving some kind of compensation to those players which simply got cheated by NCsoft.

So there is a blanace or there is not?

Another thing which resulted in whole cry river at various Aion forums is server balance after merge. We are talking about proportion of Asmodian and Elyos players. I have to admit that there is nothing to complain off, because in most cases we got ideal ratio which is 50/50 (of course with some round-off). In worst case the ratio is 52% to 48% – which happened only at one server – Suthran, and in my opinion this is totally acceptable.

But as we can see some players have a bigger issue with this, reasoning that on some servers Elyos side took control over bigger part of Abyss. As we go deeper and deeper into the topic, it’s became quite clear that Asmodian side simply gave up and refused to fight there. Such situation we had on Spatalos, the server I play on. So instead of fight, some decided to transfer off the server to new one where “our side” have everythign under control… and we don’t have to fight at all… in PvP game, … in aread dedicated mostly to sieges and PvP fight… Well I don’t know how about you, but I personally failed to find any sense in this behave. We can only dream that in some near future tchnical progress will be such big that AI will be able to balance even our mental capabilities ;)

To sum this up – merges where done, and from my perspective they are sucessfull. Increase of players amount peer server resulted in much nicer gameing expierience we get. It’s much easier to find group or an enemy on our or his own territory. What’s more bigger activity draw up new players to the game – which you can easly find out by visiting lowe level areas.
If there would be no nickaname problem – all would be almost ideal.