Thanks to all of you, EverQuest II is growing.

We've been attracting more and more people over the past months. That's one of the big factors that went into our decision to spend time improving the progression for new characters. We've been getting a lot of feedback on it, improving it as we go, and we look forward to it going live this week as a part of Update 19!

There's another topic we've been listening on that I wanted to talk about today. Server growth, and the perception of the size of the worlds.

In reality most of our 36 US, Europe, and Asia EQ2 servers currently house the same number of people as your average server from any MMO. Because of the size of our game world, some of the worlds feel less full than they should for them be ideal, fun places to play.

When we first started out, EQ2 had 369 total zones or instances of zones. The game has since expanded to having over 600 of them, just about doubling the playable space.

On some worlds, it can seem like there are fewer people to make friends and group with, fewer opportunities to bump into others. Nothing makes a world feel more alive than other people. When you don't run into enough other people, folks who otherwise love the game are more likely to drift away.

It's no secret. It's a problem that's been discussed on a few of the server forums, and it's one that we've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about as well.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to do something that might seem counterintuitive on the surface for a growing game, and combine a few of our existing servers reinvesting in the ones that remain.

Some people who don't play EQ2 will have bad things to say about this move. Yes, this is a controversial decision, but our primary concern has to be making sure that the worlds are all healthy, fun places to play for the people who enjoy playing EQ2.