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.

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.