Age of Conan to Get Server Mergers

Funcom's PC MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is to have its servers merged, meaning that all players in the same geographic region will play together instead of on several identical but discrete versions of the same game world. As new game director Craig Morrison wrote on the game's official forums:

I can today confirm that we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America. It's important for us to ensure the best gameplay 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. Still, there are many complexities involved in this, and we want to ensure that everything happens as fair and streamlined as possible. That work has now started, and we are naturally making sure that guilds and players can get to new servers in the best possible way. We will come back with more info on this, but I hope that this will serve as a positive injection to the social scene in the game.

Morrison, who has been acclaimed as more "player-centric" than his predecessor, hints that boosting populations will improve the quality of the game for players. But the need to do so alludes to a serious problem: the game lacks players. While the game boasted 700,000 players earlier this summer, it has proven unable to seriously pull players away from the 10-million-plus juggernaut World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, Conan's problems are sure to worsen with the rapid growth of rival Warhammer Online.