As announced a few weeks ago, we will merge the Age of Conan servers before the Christmas Holidays. Today we want to give you some detailed information about how these merges will happen and what this will mean for you, the players. We will be spreading the server merges over the next few weeks so not all the servers will be merged at the exact same time. It is important to us to ensure that the merge process goes as smooth as possible. Therefore it is vital that we spread out the work rather than doing these complicated processes all at the same time in order to minimize possible risks. The first servers that will be merged are the US servers 'Bloodspire' and 'Hyperborea'. The list of servers for the next merges will be published shortly. It is important to know that during the time servers will be merged, all servers of the same territory (US or EU) will not be available. This means that during this week's downtime - where the two above mentioned servers are merged - all US servers will be unavailable. The exact duration of such a downtime will be announced soon but we do expect them to be longer than the usual update downtime. When the merge process is complete we will be giving all active subscribers an appropriate amount of free game-time to compensate for the additional downtime required for the merges. The details of this will be communicated once the merge process is complete. It's important for us to ensure the best game-play experience for you all, and more healthy populations on each and every server will make sure we maintain healthy communities for the game in the future. Once the merges are complete we will be offering a free one-use character transfer option for all characters so that if you wish to join a different community after the merge than the one you were allocated you are free to do so. This transfer will be free of charge and can be used once per character and will be available from your billing pages. Also after the merges are complete we will be opening up new 'fresh start' servers in both the US and EU territories. One each for PVE and PVP rulesets. Transfer will not be allowed to these servers after the merges. These new servers are designed to allow players to start afresh in a totally new environment should they wish to do so and forge a new community instead of joining one of the newly merged ones. RECAP * We will have to pull all the US servers down to do this small merge. * There is no official ETA on the downtime but the going rate thus far is 5-6 hours. More information on that soonish. * We are still aiming to come up after the first merge. Future merges will happen shortly after but hopefully at a faster rate. * The first set of merges are Oceanic servers and thus the two Oceanic servers are being merged.

Today Famine announced the Server Merge FAQ.

When will the server merges happen? We will start merging the first servers in the first week of December.

Will all servers be merged at the same time? No. We will do this over a certain period of time to ensure everything will run smoothly. Which merges will be happening at what time will be communicated some days ahead of course.

Which servers will be merged? The final list of servers that will be merged will be available very soon. As of now, we will merge the two US servers 'Bloodspire' and 'Hyperborea' in the first week of December. Also after all the merges are complete we will be opening up new 'fresh start' servers in both the US and EU territories. One each for PVE and PVP rulesets. Transfer will not be allowed to these servers after the merges. These new servers are designed to allow players to start afresh in a totally new environment should they wish to do so and forge a new community instead of joining one of the newly merged ones.

Will there be a possibility to transfer single characters to another server? Yes. The option to transfer characters to another server will be available after all server merges have been completed. Every character will be eligible for one free transfer and this offer will be valid for one month after the final server merges have been completed. This transfer will be free of charge and can be used once per character and will be available from your billing pages.

Can a character be transferred from one server ruleset to another (e.g. from a PvE server to a PvP server)? Yes, that will be possible.

Can a character be transferred from one language server to another (e.g. from a German server to a Spanish server)? Yes, this will also be possible.

Can a character be transferred from an US server to an EU server or vice versa? No, characters will only be able to be transferred to another server in the same territory (US or EU). ...

Resources: Age of Conan Forums

Relative storys:Age of Conan Server Merge Coming

Letter from the Game Director – December 5th 2008

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With the announced start of the server merge process not quite having gone as planned I wanted to take the time today to speak to you all explain where we are at with the merge process and what the schedule looks like. Basically, on Wednesday when we came to do the first live merges we encountered an issue with the structure of our data that we hadn’t found or experienced during testing. This issue caused there to be a risk, on some servers, under specific circumstances, of items having non-unique identifiers in our database. This in turn might have lead to some cases of player’s items not surviving the merge. It didn’t happen at all during our testing, and may have been (in the scale of all players and all items in the game) a possibly rare occurrence. However this was not an area where the team and I were willing to take any risks with whatsoever. This is also exactly why we decided not to announce all the merge schedules in advance and to ensure we could do them in a live environment first before we went ahead with all the merges. While it is never ‘nice’ to have your contingency plans called into action, this approach has meant we caught a potential issue before it could possibly affect people’s actual game experience. It also showed up a legacy issue with code that allocated those identifiers that hadn’t been apparent before. It is very important to me and the team here that we resolve these issues thoroughly and comprehensively and resist the temptation to rush a temporary, manual or ‘band aid’ fix to meet the goal of completing all the merges prior to the holidays at the possible expense of risk to players progression or items. This meant we had to make the decision and do this task correctly. That means both resolving the conflicts in the database and fixing the problem with the allocation correctly so that it can’t happen again (the ‘band aid’ solution would for example have meant ongoing character transfers might have been problematic in the future). So we have taken the decision to do everything that needs to be done to ensure that player’s items or characters are not risked, as that’s just not a risk I find acceptable. We should, and will, do everything we can to ensure that the process of the merges is done smoothly and with the least risk to your characters. Ok, so what does that mean exactly in reality I hear you ask? Most importantly this means that the merge process will almost certainly continue into January. We will now have to do some additional ‘ground work’ as it were to prepare the databases for the merges again. The community team will provide more details on this over the coming days and weeks in terms of schedules and when you can expect downtime so please keep your eyes out for details. I really appreciate everyone’s patience with this process and hope that you all understand that I want to ensure that no corners are cut or unnecessary risks taken with a process as important as this. I am very disappointed that we haven’t managed to deliver the merges on the time scales we were originally intending, but it is far more important to me that these things are done with all the care and attention such a process deserves and hope everyone sees that while unfortunate in terms of time required this course of action is better for everyone. Moving on from the merges, and on a much brighter note, the progress of the next major update is starting to shape up very nicely. Update four should go to the test server relatively soon. We hope to have a version up and running on the public test server next week and in preparation the provisional update notes are now available on the test server forums for everyone to go and take a look at. There is quite a bit there, some you already know about, some you don’t. Update four will most likely be deployed to the live servers in January, but we have to see how the testing goes first before deciding on dates. It has been very pleasing to see players enjoying the new content, changes and fixes that have been going into the game over the last few updates. The team is working very hard to both address the issues that you guys have brought up since launch, and also to add new content and features. Heading into the holiday season I am very glad to see that progress is being made and that we are hopefully managing to keep on improving your Hyborian experience!