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You may have heard that some Age of Conan servers will soon be merged in both the North American and European regions. New game director Craig Morrison made the announcement in a letter to the community just over a week ago. That revelation was a tacit admission that the game is not performing as expected, but Morrison has made it clear that he wants Funcom to brush the dirt off its shoulders and move on.

Will the mergers encourage you to jump ship, or do you take them as a sign that Funcom is aware of the situation and ready to take decisive action to improve the game? Morrison claimed that the decision was made in response to player demand; were you demanding it? And regardless of whether you plan to stick with AoC (or return, if you've already left), do you believe the game has recovery and a positive future ahead of it?

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	Having fun in Conan's homeland? Make sure to check out all of our previous Age of Conan coverage, and stick with Massively for more news from the Hyborian Age!

Planning on creating a Death Knight when Wrath of the Lich King comes out next month? Blizzard posted a Death Knight creation FAQ at the EU World of Warcraft forums in an effort to reduce the number of question and answer threads popping up. It's short but sweet.

It's so short, in fact, that we can give you most of the info right here. You'll be able to create a Death Knight on any realm on which you already have an level 55 or higher character. Eventually, you'll be able to create one on a different server, but for now the only way to get a Death Knight to a totally new realm is to create it on your current realm and then do a paid transfer.

Don't worry -- there's good news too! If your level 55 is Horde, you'll be able to start up an Alliance Death Knight and vice versa, so long as you're not playing on a PvP realm. You're only allowed one Death Knight per realm though.

[Via WoW Insider]

There's been much talk of late about EVE Online's servers and the underlying technology that powers over 5000 solar systems in New Eden. CCP Explorer's latest dev blog, "EVE64", focuses on the tech side of EVE, and discusses StacklessIO, the blade cluster, and the migration of the EVE servers to 64-bit.

The server enhancements, while not without some issues, are showing some promise according to CCP Explorer. "This Monday, 29 September, we saw a fleet battle with over 1100 pilots reported in local. Field reports indicate that the fight was quite responsive for the first 10 minutes but then the node 'missed its heart beat'... and was removed from the cluster...," he says. Despite such setbacks, it's good to see that CCP is doing something about the server issues resulting from an ever-increasing number of pilots in New Eden. Player response to this dev blog seems positive, with a few reporting their experiences being in combat with 1100+ players on the official forums, and even more players weighing in on the server changes at Scrapheap Challenge.

If you're a World of Warcraft player looking for something completely different, head over to CrazyKinux's blog and read what he has to say to WoW players looking to make the move to the alien beast that is EVE Online. It reads a bit like one of those articles designed to ease PC users into a transition to Apple's Mac computers.

EVE blogger, Drone Bay podcast co-host, and former Massively contributor CrazyKinux covers many of the bases, noting many of the strongest differences (skill-based instead of level-based character advancement, everyone is on one server instead of scattered between hundreds of small servers, etcetera). He also links to several articles written by him and others that are helpful to newbies.

It's a fantastic post -- a perfect starting point for anyone considering the switch, or even for folks just curious about what EVE is all about. CrazyKinux ends on a pretty funny quote, too: "EVE is like a sandbox with land mines. Deal with it." But don't let that scare you. Really. We named it our #1 Sci-Fi MMO a while back; admittedly that's not saying much, but it ought to count for something, right?

Do you know where your developers are tonight? Chances are the guys and gals over at Mythic Entertainment are busy scrambling to triple-check everything for the second time today. Meanwhile, the rest of us are awaiting one of three "launch" days with bated breath. Many of you are probably waiting for Tuesday, when the general pre-orders get to join the head start. However for a lot of players day one is coming tomorrow. So on the eve of "Hurricane WAR" approaching, I felt like going over some random bits about the game before it's no longer a beta and instead a newly launched MMORPG.

Have you played or do you currently play Dofus? If so, Ankama games has something they'd like you to see. They've been in the process of completely upgrading the entire game with the Dofus 2.0 update, as you know. However, now they can finally show you what they've been working on with a video and information page! The game code is being rewritten for improved performance all around and the visuals are -- as you can see -- getting a very nice overhaul as well. Our only complaint is that characters in-game are still incredibly small, which is something of a bother for players who love to customize and stare at their avatars for hours on end.

Ankama is promising more information soon, but they did make it clear that no characters will be reset and no servers will be shut down. This is only a visual and internal upgrade, it's like an MMO version of a face-lift only not as painful and probably more effective overall. If you're really jonesing for more information you can check out the Dofus 2.0 devblog.

As massive as we like our MMOs to be, the realities of modern networking have made sharding, the creation of identical game worlds hosted on separate servers, a practical necessity. Last week, Awen, Jumpgate Evolution community manager, elaborated on why the NetDevil team was looking at sharded server architecture. Understandably, players maintain that the ideal MMO minimizes sharding to allow players to interact with the greatest possible population of other users.

As Awen explains, this isn't exactly possible with Jumpgate Evolution. While their spaceserver architecture--which is similar to EVE Online in that different regions of space can be hosted on different hardware and scaled to the server load--is technically capable of handling most of the challenges of going unsharded, the central-state server on which all the non-combat activity is managed, does have a physical limit. In a game that is focused on real-time space simulation, their focus is on minimizing latency, and that's why they're going to use sharding.

SOE's new Living Legacy event seeks to lure people back to their two main EverQuest games (EverQuest Online Adventures for the PS2 and EverQuest Macintosh Edition get no love here) by using shiny new armors and abilities and super-fast leveling. Both EverQuest and EverQuest II have changed in so many fundamental ways in recent years that SOE really wants you to come back and try the games again.

Which server to play, though? Both games have many servers. Nothing like World of Warcraft's hundreds, but enough so that its not immediately obvious which one to choose. SOE has prepared a couple of pages that briefly list the servers and tell you what the odd letters next to their names mean, but in this article, we're going to try to examine servers a little more deeply, so that you can create your character knowing the sorts of people you'll find. More details -- LOTS more -- after the break.

If keeping just one computer running and up-to-date is a hassle, imagine keeping six to seven thousand of them going, 24/7, with any unexpected downtime sure to draw the anger of extremely vocal gamers. That's the challenge faced every day by SOE's Director of Technology Operations, Mark Rizzo. Rizzo cut his teeth running the back-end for MMO legend Ultima Online. Back then, he and his team were building things by hand and learning as they went. Now, things are a lot more complicated. With eight games already and more coming online all the time, handling all the users and simultaneous transactions is more like working in the data center for a stock exchange rather than your typical web-hosting service.

Says Rizzo, "We did an April Fools' prank in one of the games and we had to have some server code updated to pull the prank off. Change management allowed us to know who approved it, and know where it's from, and where it's going." It's said that if you like sausage or law, you should never see it being made. This peek behind the curtain at the code and hardware that keeps swords flashing and spells weaving just deepens our appreciation of this difficult task.

[Via Slashdot]

Meridian 59 is a game with a pirate problem. A while back, the server source code leaked onto the internet and seedy players began hosting their own servers without subscription fees. Pirate servers are a problem for many MMOs, but because of M59's comparatively small scale, it has a lot more to lose to the trend.

Amidst these troubles, some M59 players can be quite loyal. Case in point: the blog of game developer Patrick Rogers tells the story of two former M59 players hacking into a pirate server and mass-killing all its residents with powerful admin commands. The vigilantes hoped to make life (and death) on the pirate servers as unpleasant as possible so as to encourage the residents to migrate to the legitimate servers hosted by Near Death Studios. That's not the most amazing bit, though.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has announced that they're shutting down seven of their servers and opening transfers for characters on the closing servers as of Tuesday, April 15th.

Out of the 11 total servers PotBS was running with, it's now down to just four. The upshot of this news is that servers will be far more dense with players -- which is the main reason Flying Lab gives concerning the shutdowns. Another reason given us is that recent updates have allowed for more characters per server.

I'm not sure if anyone's still playing Shadowbane since its release five years ago, but its developers are about to do the most radical thing you can do to a virtual world: they're hitting the reset switch.

As of Patch 22, showing up soon on the test server for the game, the team has decided that "it would be best for the longetivity of the game" to completely reset all server and character data. They also say that there are certain items in game that make it unbalanceable, and so they're just starting over from scratch. There are a few other big fixes coming in the patch, but as they say, this will definitely be the "most talked about" change.

And players are taking it surprisingly well. Over on the forums, most players seem happy that developers are taking major steps to fix the game. The servers will apparently use the Vorringia mapset, and lots of players are happy about that, as it's a popular choice. A few players are unhappy that they're losing everything, but the general consensus seems to be that making the game balanced is more important than keeping individual player data.

Interesting. It's hard to imagine a more major game flipping a reset switch like this and surviving, but maybe Shadowbane will prove it's possible to reboot and keep a core audience that loves the game more than their own assets.

[Via Wired]

Time for a little nap. All of the US game servers for CoX have been brought down for extended maintenance. NCsoft is anticipating a full 6 hour downtime window, which started at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern) this morning. The lengthy downtime is required in order to upgrade the server hardware talked about in The 2008 State of the Game address.

Hopefully the lights come back on when they flip the switch later today.

Wilhelm of AGN is one of the many players setting sail in the PotBS pre-order preboarding, and he's dealing with one of the hardest decisions MMO players ever make: choosing a server. OK, maybe it's not really that hard (choosing a class probably is), but there is an art to it.

The first thing that determines where you want to play in a multi-realm MMO has to be your previous in-game friends-- if there's anyone already in the game that you need to play with, then you want to make sure to be on the same server they are (as Wilhelm says, "go play with your friends" trumps his rules entirely). After that, everyone's got their criteria. Me, I like a server with a little higher-than-normal population-- it can't be so high that it's overcrowded, but I don't want to play on a low-population server. These are massively multiplayer games, after all. Wilhelm says not to pick the first or last server on the list-- clearly, he's a man who avoids extremes, and probably the highest populations as well.

After that, it's as arbitrary as you want it to be. Wilhelm goes for the most complicated name, but usually by the time I've punched in my criteria, the game only gives me one recommendation, and then I take it. Any other factors that go into choosing a server when you first fire up an MMO?