Ashes of Creation Fresh Start Stress Test Coming This Week, Leaving No EU Server for Months

Intrepid Studios recently extended the Alpha Two phase to August, and announced some server merges and additional details to be aware of. Now, there’s a wipe coming and Europe will be without a dedicated server for a while –deliberately.

Recently, the team announced the alpha extension and that they would be testing their realm merge system by merging Vyra and Lyneth to form Resna, located in US-East. Resna won’t be long-lived.  Lotharia, the EU server, will not be merged, and will go offline. On May 1st, Resna will go offline too, and only Shol, a new fresh start server, will be available to all, and you'll have to create a new character.

This means there will be no EU-based servers available. This is a deliberate and temporary move and Steven Sharif has responded over on Reddit:

“An EU realm will reappear at the start of Phase 3 on August 4th. We will be stress testing a single realm on US East during the extended phase 2 testing period.”

While we thought we were getting a simple extension to give the team more development time, now we know that it’s an extended stress test too. The team wants to concentrate everyone on the same server for stress testing and to have the biggest number of available players in this next phase.

Still, some feel like this move is damaging to the relationship with and interest from the European AoC community.

“I feel like the way EU people are treated during Alpha 2 so far (Downtimes during primetimes, forced late night activities after server restarts to contest bosses, now the temporary removal of EU servers) can harm the playerbase permanently and maybe more than you think. It feeds the idea that EU gets and will get less priority in the future as well. Noone likes to get treated like Faramir. Everyone wants to get treated like Boromir,” user McWinterTV responded to Sharif.