After seeing how server merges are being implemented in Star Wars The Old Republic, it makes me wonder why UO can't follow the same methodology.
Speaking only of the USA servers for now, 1 East Coast (Atlantic) and 1 West Coast (Pacific) server are more than enough to support the current player population. In addition to those 2 primary servers, Origin could be kept around in the same capacity as today and Siege Perilous could be left unchanged.
So how do we get there? By following a plan very similar to that of The Old Republic. Enable free transfers from any USA server not listed above to either Atlantic, Pacific, or Origin and allow a substantial amount of time for players to willingly transfer. No new characters could be created on all other servers and no transfers would be permitted back to those servers. Free transfers could be enabled for as long as 6 months or possibly even a year. This doesn't have to be accomplished overnight. There may need to be some sort of limitation to prevent people from continually creating and transferring characters, but I'm sure that could be figured out.
Once the free transfer period has passed, I expect that most active players would have already transferred willingly to secure housing space on the destination servers. At this point, it would be time for forced transfers and those would be a little trickier, but I still think they could be done. Simply deleting all non-transferred characters is much to harsh, so my thinking is that some type of "holding server" could be created where all non-transferred character data is dumped to. That way if someone didn't transfer their character for whatever reason, that character still exists in a location where it can be transferred from at a later date. The problem here is that some people have 7 characters on every server, meaning a lot of space would be required to maintain all this character data indefinitely, but I still don't see why it couldn't be done. At this point, any items still remaining in a house, along with the house itself, would probably be lost unless they can be somehow incorporated into the same "holding server". That is just one idea and I'm sure there are others for implementing the forced transfer.
In the end, the benefit of this whole process would be a condensed server population to help ensure the health of the game for the coming years. Of course there are a few negatives, such as houses being lost, but given enough time to transfer freely I believe the impact would be minimized. The other potentially larger negative would be the loss of transfer token income for EA, since we don't know exactly how much money they make from selling transfer tokens. I find it hard to believe that they make a huge amount of money from transfer tokens alone, but I'm sure it also not completely insignificant. They would be making an investment in the future of the game which may cost them a little bit in the short term.
I know there will be some people who steadfastly maintain that they like their servers and don't want to transfer, and I do understand that mindset, but I also believe that this is a sacrifice that may need to be made in order to keep UO viable in the future. So I ask, why not begin the process now and work toward an end goal of moving everyone to more populated (and therefore significantly more active) servers?
Speaking only of the USA servers for now, 1 East Coast (Atlantic) and 1 West Coast (Pacific) server are more than enough to support the current player population. In addition to those 2 primary servers, Origin could be kept around in the same capacity as today and Siege Perilous could be left unchanged.
So how do we get there? By following a plan very similar to that of The Old Republic. Enable free transfers from any USA server not listed above to either Atlantic, Pacific, or Origin and allow a substantial amount of time for players to willingly transfer. No new characters could be created on all other servers and no transfers would be permitted back to those servers. Free transfers could be enabled for as long as 6 months or possibly even a year. This doesn't have to be accomplished overnight. There may need to be some sort of limitation to prevent people from continually creating and transferring characters, but I'm sure that could be figured out.
Once the free transfer period has passed, I expect that most active players would have already transferred willingly to secure housing space on the destination servers. At this point, it would be time for forced transfers and those would be a little trickier, but I still think they could be done. Simply deleting all non-transferred characters is much to harsh, so my thinking is that some type of "holding server" could be created where all non-transferred character data is dumped to. That way if someone didn't transfer their character for whatever reason, that character still exists in a location where it can be transferred from at a later date. The problem here is that some people have 7 characters on every server, meaning a lot of space would be required to maintain all this character data indefinitely, but I still don't see why it couldn't be done. At this point, any items still remaining in a house, along with the house itself, would probably be lost unless they can be somehow incorporated into the same "holding server". That is just one idea and I'm sure there are others for implementing the forced transfer.
In the end, the benefit of this whole process would be a condensed server population to help ensure the health of the game for the coming years. Of course there are a few negatives, such as houses being lost, but given enough time to transfer freely I believe the impact would be minimized. The other potentially larger negative would be the loss of transfer token income for EA, since we don't know exactly how much money they make from selling transfer tokens. I find it hard to believe that they make a huge amount of money from transfer tokens alone, but I'm sure it also not completely insignificant. They would be making an investment in the future of the game which may cost them a little bit in the short term.
I know there will be some people who steadfastly maintain that they like their servers and don't want to transfer, and I do understand that mindset, but I also believe that this is a sacrifice that may need to be made in order to keep UO viable in the future. So I ask, why not begin the process now and work toward an end goal of moving everyone to more populated (and therefore significantly more active) servers?
