Carpone wrote on Aug 19
th, 2019 at 9:59am:
Jesus Christ, this topic will never die. There will be no server mergers. Look back at the debacle with the Codemasters server mergers -- it was a clusterfuck. It's only gotten harder for SSG to do this since then because of staff turnover. For example, Steelstar mentioned a few weeks ago that the last person who knew about UI APIs left about 5 years ago. They've since lost a master list of APIs, so they would have to redo all that engineering work to allow custom UI skins. Look at something as benign as UI skins, and then apply that same resource issue to something gamebreaking like server mergers.
Let's not forget, there needs to be a business reason to merge -- ie, does this increase revenue or save on long term costs to justify the engineering work, compared to the opportunity cost of delivering new content or other QOL improvements? Short answer: Not even close. And then there's the PR aspect of this to manage, which is not a strong suit of SSG.
The best solution would be for them to create a new server as a megaserver.
Then give everyone 2 free mergers to and from said server a week.
This would allow people to say; send a main to the server to raid on the weekends or whatever and then transfer back to their main server if they wish. Or for a player to send two characters there, etc.
But by creating a server anyone can transfer to with the main population there you create an environment of a lively game population such as the Hardcore appears to have when you log into it.
That's a lot cheaper and easier than full fledged mergers, WoW style server queues, etc.
In the case of guilds; don't let a guild transfer over. It sucks but it saves everyone the headache. When it comes to character names; Do a "Bob (Sarlona)" style deal if necessary.
Unless it's a literal DB issue I don't even see why names have to be unique in DDO.