Server merge

This event occurs only when a population of a server permanently dips so low as to make the server almost unplayable due to lack of total unique people playing on it. Essentially all characters from the merging server get copied over to a specific different server in hopes of bringing the player population back up to a healthier amount. This occurs very rarely and only under the most serious of circumstances.

In fact, this once happened to North American Servers of DDO, in 2007 July.

Server merge announcement from Turbine, in 2007
We have some very important news for our players regarding Dungeons and Dragons Online™: Stormreach™ (DDO).

Dungeons & Dragons® has always been about having a good time with a party of your friends. With DDO, we bring that experience to life online for the first time, and appreciate all the time you, the players, spend inside Stormreach fulfilling the promise of D&D®.

Over the last few months we have seen an increase in the number of players asking us to make it easier to find groups. Since grouping is such a core part of the DDO experience we looked at a variety of ways to make the grouping process easier for players of all levels. Various options were considered, but the best way to make a change that improves the situation for everyone is to concentrate active players on a smaller number of servers.

To this end we have developed a plan to merge the game’s servers which will greatly improve player experience across the board while also improving the performance of the game by upgrading to a stronger infrastructure on the back end.

We want to thank you for all of your patience as we implement these changes to the game.

New Server Details
We'll be combining the source servers on the left into the destination servers on the right.
 * Mabar becomes Argonnessen
 * Fernia becomes Ghallanda
 * Lhazaar becomes Ghallanda
 * Aerenal becomes Sarlona
 * Adar becomes Sarlona
 * Aundair becomes Khyber
 * Riedra becomes Khyber
 * Xoriat becomes Thelanis
 * Tharashk becomes Thelanis

Before we get started with the complete server merge, we are planning to run a public preview on Risia. On Wednesday, July 25th, we will be bringing Risia up with the Mabar/Argonnessen server merge and we'd love it if you'd hop onto Risia and help us confirm everything is operating as expected. Any players that have created a character on Mabar or Argonnessen before July 23rd are invited to participate in the merge preview.

Once we have completed the merge preview and evaluated the results we expect to begin merging the main servers starting the following week.

The process of merging the servers will be divided into two downtimes.


 * Khyber, Aundair, Riedra, Thelanis, Xoriat, and Tharashk will be offline on Thursday, August 2nd, between 2am and 7pm EDT. Around 7pm, Khyber and Thelanis will come back online and contain all of the merged characters and data from their respective servers.


 * On Monday, August 6th, Fernia, Ghallanda, Argonnessen, Lhazaar, Adar, Sarlona, Aerenal, and Mabar will be offline from 2am until approximately 7pm EDT. At about 7pm, Argonnessen, Ghallanda and Sarlona will come back online and will contain all of the merged characters and data from their respective servers.

When all service resumes on August 6th, the DDO servers will be: Argonnessen, Ghallanda, Sarlona, Khyber, and Thelanis.

On August 13th, all servers will be offline from approximately 7am until 1pm EDT, for server maintenance and optimization after the merge.