Vindictus to Merge and NA and AUS Servers in Early November
This just in folks - Vindictus has announcing it will be merging three of its servers - US-EAST, US-WEST, and AUS into one, massive "NA" server. This could mean a number of things, but first, lets break down the details and simplify them as they come to us.
- EU to be unaffected
- As it stands, players can have up to 20 characters per server. This won't change, but if you have more than 20 characters across 3 servers, your characters will NOT be deleted.
- How will Vindictus deal with players and guilds with the same name? - If you have more playtime on a character than someone else on a different server with the same name, the other person will receive an EA_, WE_, or AU_ prefix to their name, as well as a free Name Change coupon
- The Guild with the higher level will retain its name, with creation date acting as another factor in whether or not a server prefix will be added.
- VVIP time across all servers will be merged together - 10 days of VVIP across 2 servers? Enjoy 20 days of VVIP!
- Marketboards will be wiped and items returned to inventory
- Shared Storage time will also be merged
- This server merge will happen sometime in November
What does this mean for the future of Vindictus?
It's no secret that Vindictus has been in a bit of a slump as of late. Historically, Vindictus gains and loses players often, and during times of severe slumps, the game can find its server populations dwindling. Based on how Vindictus hosts its parties and raids - with Peer-to-Peer networking instead of dedicated servers - a person in Australia could end up joining a party hosted by someone in the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Lag, anyone? Connecting from the old US-EAST to someone on US-WEST shouldn't be too much of an issue, however. Additionally, with more players on one server, the economy should grow stronger as well - making drops from raids to craft weapons more available, as well as increasing the number of players hosting parties. Lets face it - if you're a night owl playing Vindictus at 3 AM Eastern Time, on US-EAST, you might as well be in a ghost town of bots.
Is Vindictus dying?
It's hard to say. I can hardly imagine anyone in Australia plays much of Vindictus, and since Nexon's financial model requires reeling in a few players who are willing to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on Vindictus, Australia might be a dry region for Nexon. However - what to do with the region? I suspect that Nexon couldn't decide whether or not to merge Australia into US-WEST or US-EAST, so they decided to centralize US-EAST and US-WEST specifically for the purposes of folding Australia into the new North American server. The future of Vindictus is a shaky one - in Korea the game is doing well enough at least, but the future of NA remains to be seen. Chances are, Vindictus NA is not going anywhere - not as long as there are people willing to sink money into the game.
