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

What will happen in other games with property?

[Krellan]

This kind of thing, server consolidation, seems inevitable as the player population of certain online games dwindles.

I wonder what's going to happen to games that have player-owned infrastructure, such as buildings and property? I don't know if this game, Asheron's Call 2, has this. Everquest 2 is supposed to have this, though. Other games might also have this already. I wonder what will happen when the inevitable conflict occurs: one player owns land on a server, another different player owns the same land on a different server, and those two servers get merged together.

Has this happened to other games before? If so, what was the outcome? Do they randomly determine which player gets the resources, auction it off, or just give it to the player that's played the longest or reached the highest level? It seems that merging servers would be the fastest way to lose players and finish an online game completely off, as they anger players by taking away the resources they have earned.