EA has a conference call scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday) at 2 pm PT (5 pm ET) to discuss their business results for the quarter ending 9/30/2011 and do their usual brief projections for the future. If Jeff's letter is going to contain any kind of unusual news for UO, I wonder if its release is being timed to coincide with tomorrow's call.
Maybe, yeah.
I wonder why the previous people stepped out (Cal, it is said). It makes me think of a few things. I picture how I would feel if I were in his position and perhaps saw things I knew needed to happen, but was prevented from making them happen for whatever reason. It would be frustrating to be stuck in that position, and who's to say someone like him wouldn't want to take a transfer to elsewhere in the company if that's how it is. Pure speculation/wondering here, nothing more.
The question of "closing low population servers" or "merging servers" is more involved than just the idea of "hey look, almost nobody's on this server, it should be closed".
Higher population servers can in fact be a touch negative from certain perspectives. They stress the hardware more (and maybe even the software) and in the event of a server problem, it represents more downtime for a larger number of players. Lots of people spread out over medium population servers can only be more desireable from a quality of service and administration standpoint than clusters of high-pop and low-pop servers. Closing your lower population servers doesn't put you on the road toward that more ideal, lots-of-medium-population server structure.
And then, there is the question of, is it necessarily significantly extra money/resources/ and so on to allow the low-pop servers to live on. I think that when hardware upgrade time comes, it's real then. But during the between-times, maybe not.
If for some reason it was wanted - - - which it may in fact NOT be. The one and only genuine complication factor I see regarding server merge type operations is the fact that player housing exists in the public world areas, and those dwellings are really important to the players who own them. The other stuff is already handled from a technical standpoint. Character slots can be increased, and we already know that character+item server-to-server transfer works.
If a brute-force thing was not to be used, an idea comes to mind but, it would be quite some work behind the scenes. The final result of such a "merge" would be, for example, a final server which is effectively the combined result of 2 low population servers, and that server exists in a configuration which has more than the original number of facets. The moongates would have... more stops in them.
Not saying such a thing should be done or is worth the amount of behind-the-scenes work that would be required, just that it could come together well enough from the player perspective.
With how good hardware has gotten lately... I bet all of UO could run on one big fat machine if they wanted it to (probably with a touch of virtualization). Well, not counting the european servers, which I'd hope would stay in ... europe.
) can show you (and many others) that it is worth staying involved. I do hope EA continues to value UO, and will be more positively involved. It seems they continue to; but only time will tell how much they will respect what UO has brought them and us, all..
