Open RvR Closed

The Eltharion server is about to go bye bye.

GOA will shortly start transfers away from the last open RvR server in Europe. Eltharion's player base has only Karak Norn and Karak Azgal left to choose from. It’s always a shame to see a server die and WAR has certainly had more than its fair share of server deaths, but this closure brings us to a very unimpressive 2 English speaking European servers. This news raises lots of questions and isn’t exactly the positive news we wanted to hear after all the Mythic lay offs.

Will this be the last transfer?
Is this a consolidation of a stable population?
Or is it only a matter of time before we have 1 European server?
Will the future see us being transferred to US servers?

I don’t know the answers, but let’s just say it’s hard to put a positive spin on this. Mythic really need to announce something big to promote confidence in the game’s long-term prospects. An expansion announcement is about the only thing that would do to be honest. Unless the fortress replacement is bloody amazing, but their last comments about forts gave the shocking impression that they’re undecided on what to do with them…

As for the here and now… I don’t know about Azgal, since my Order alts are on Eltharion, but Norn is still very busy and it will be interesting to see what effect the transferred players will have. I just hope we get more new Destruction than Order. Norn still has both cities being sieged, but Order most definitely has an edge and from recent events it would appear an advantage in active and motivated numbers. It would be tragic if our server had its balance ruined by a mass of Eltharion Order arriving. That would no doubt accelerate us towards a single European server.

Right back when WAR launched we came very close to starting our guild on a oRvR server, but people who were in beta for longer than I were saying the chicken mechanic made oRVR a joke, so we decided not to risk it. A shame really, because over time it seems it was nothing more than scare-mongering. There’s little difference between core and oRvR to be honest (other than levelling), it still has masses of wasted terrain outside of the central RVR lakes due to the lack of objectives or incentive to go there. Anyway it’s a shame it’s going, I had some fun messing around in the lower tiers with my Order alts.

All in all, another bleak few days for WAR.

[ update ] Something I'm wondering after a discussion this evening...
How many active European servers are there in total?

I'm looking at the server list now and I can see:
4 English language
4 German
1 Spanish
3 French
1 Italian

The list is odd, since it includes Karak Eight Peaks which is a dead server having had transfers off it and tbh I thought was already closed, it's certainly marked for death. Obviously it's still got Eltharion on it for now... but in reality it will very shortly be 2 servers only. So how many of those other language servers are actually active? Anyone know?