Asheron's Call 2 Suffers World Shrinkage

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the Microsoft Games page announcing that the Asheron's Call 2 servers are being consolidated, "from the current nine worlds to a total of four worlds." Although no specific reason is given for the contraction of this PC MMORPG, it's presumed that lack of players is causing this consolidation, as the announcement also says: "Darktide will continue to be run as the PvP server. However, the population of the world is low and it may not be possible to keep it running." This merger is in addition to a smaller world merge which occurred this month.

Comments

AC2 - the perfect example of what not to do

[MBraynard]

AC1, while old, was still the 4th largest MMORPG game and it had a pretty solid player development model and combat model. I, like many other AC1 players, was hoping AC2 would be a REAL sequel, taking what was good about AC1 and building on it, making it prettier and more potent.

Well, the Devs at Turbine/MS decided to scrap what was great about AC1 completely, and made a very pretty yet very laggy brand new game. They also forgot about the content.
So to this day there are many, many, many more players still in AC1 than in AC2, sort of the definition of a failure. And I don't see that turning around anytime soon.

Sense of Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the reasons behind the cosolidation are numerous. The first reason deals with the small number of people play AC2 per world. This consolidation will help to get all of the players closer together. This means more interactivity and increased encounters in Kingdom vs Kingdom battles. This is a plus for the game.

The second reason has little to do with the players and a lot to do with the economy. The cost of server maintenance will drop when the worlds are consolidated. Less servers means more overall profits. While this is not of concern to players it does help to support the company who is running the game.

I must address the previous posts. Whether or not AC2 is better than AC1 is not relevant to this issue. To take that a step further nor is it important if AC2 is a good game. Personall opinions of this game do not factor into the decision to consolidate these servers. Those opinions and the fact that the number of people playing AC2 is less that was expected could be reasons to need less servers, but the main two reason were stated above.

MMOG fact of life

[PeteyG]

It's a fact of life for MMOGs that unless it's really really good, that the player base will explode for a period of time, and then fall off gradually (or rapidly if the next Star Wars Galaxies comes out). So this is just the natural progression of a MMOG. Eventually, there will probably be one or two servers for the die hard players.

I expect that a lot of MMOGs will go down to one or two servers, keep only a few guys around for maintenance and operation, jack up the price to 20 bucks a month, and let the fanatic players keep having their fun. That would be a good way for games to stay around, keep the dedicated players happy, and still bring in a bit of money.