[2022] Trimming official servers

Greetings, Exiles!

Conan Exiles had a year of solid growth in 2021, and with what’s on the horizon we’re very excited about 2022 too! However, before we get to all that exciting new stuff, we have some house cleaning to do.

TLDR: we need to reduce the number of official PC and PlayStation servers.

Scheduled server closures/merges are listed on this page. Servers listed here will have an in-game notification about the closure/merge.
We will update here as we complete the list for each region so please keep an eye on it.

• Update 2022-02-15T15:35:00Z: Asia Xbox servers added. These were opened in the incorrect region. Characters will be merged to the Oceania region.

Why?

The goal with the official servers is to provide easy access to exciting gameplay in Conan Exiles through meeting and interacting with other players, whether there is PvP or more friendly encounters. On these servers, travelling across the Exiled Lands or the Isle of Siptah should include encounters with other players and their creations, whether a massive fortress or our beloved default 2x2 hut near the river.

Both with early access in 2017 and when Conan Exiles launched back in 2018 official servers filled to the brim. Then players found their preferred play hours, and server population stabilized at a healthy level. The same happened with Isle of Siptah servers when the expansion launched last year.

But official servers have their limitations. We have more than a thousand of them across the different platforms, regions, modes, and now maps. To keep this manageable we run all of them with default settings. Many players seek a different experience with regards to gathering and XP rates, purges, player limits, et al., and of course – on PC – one or more of the amazing mods the community has created.

Over the years, and even over the few months since Isle of Siptah launched, we have seen a continuous shift toward player-run servers and solo/co-op play. While activity in the game is higher than ever (outside of those crazy release months), several official servers see few players online during any given week.Less than a handful players on a server doesn’t provide the experience they were created for, especially when a server is essentially someone’s solo game. Hence why we will consolidate onto fewer servers.

How does it work?

Perhaps most importantly, we will not just shut off the power to servers and leave it at that. When a server is shut down, we will transfer all characters – active or not – to another server along with everything in their inventory. This transfer is not subject to the “no encumbrance” rule which applies to free transfers. However, transferred characters log in at the starting area so bring something to help you carry!

No constructions will be transferred. We realize this is not optimal. The main concern is that there can be a building in the same spot on the destination server already – especially on the popular PvP server base spots. Another is that this would complicate the database merge operation significantly.

Players on a server which is closing will be notified ahead of time through Message of the Day, and we will also provide a list of servers and dates here as they are decided on.

How many servers?

Having looked at the current player activity trends and making projections for that exciting new stuff to come later this year, we aim to close about one third of official servers.

This is not distributed evenly across platform, region, mode, and map, however. Thanks to the success of Conan Exiles on Game Pass, Xbox servers are well populated, and we will only close a few Xbox servers that were opened in the wrong region last summer. Thus, this almost exclusively affects PC and PlayStation servers.

Exact numbers for each of the combinations of platform, region, mode, and map varies greatly, and will be available once we share the servers and dates.

How are the servers decided?

• Characters from a closed server will be merged to another server in the same location. For example, someone connecting to a server on the US east coast will not have to suddenly connect to one on the west coast.
• Goal is to impact as few players as possible, so low population throughout January 2022 is the primary factor. Both average and peak population is considered, with most weight on the former.
• Among low populated servers, we put some weight on the number of structures on the server.
• Destination servers for the character merge are chosen based on population, with the aim of increasing average population across the board and not creating login queues.

What about the future?

The shift toward private servers and games and a more customized game experiences is expected to continue. But we also expect Conan Exiles to continue to grow. How exactly that will pan out over the next year and beyond is hard to predict.

It’s possible we will do more closures in the future. It’s also entirely possible we will need to open new servers! This we will have to come back to sometime after that exciting stuff we can’t say more about just yet.

Thank you for asking this b3l14l.

Clans from the servers getting merged (into another server) will be automatically be disbanded and not moved.
Yes, anything that is not in your inventory (building pieces, thralls, pets, items, etc) will be lost.

Yes. All players from server A will be merged into server B.
We will have more details about this once we have the server merges list ready. Keep an eye out for that.

Thank you so much for sharing your feedback with us. We will pass this to the rest of our development team.

Regarding the combat music, please keep an eye out on our future game updates as we are always working on improving Conan Exiles.

Yes you can still move to the new server if your character is encumbered.
Everything you have in your inventory (encumbered or not) will move with you on the new server.

Thank you so much everyone for these great questions.

I will try to answer as many as possible but I apologize if can’t answer all right now.

• Carrying capacity will not be modified

• We aim to provide at least 10 days heads-up.

• This information will be available on a web page as soon as the first closures are scheduled. Link will be added to the forum post.

• That’s certainly a good idea and something we will investigate and consider for potential future closures, but we do not have this functionality at the moment and won’t be able to add it for now.

• If this is the case, the character that was online the latest will be kept, and the other one will be removed.

• This will be coming soon.

Please remember that we will be posting more information about the server merges as soon as we can.
In the meantime feel free to post any additional questions in this thread.

Characters will appear in the two known starting areas:

• The Desert in Exiled Lands
• The Corner Beaches in Isle of Siptah

This should work exactly as a normal character transfer. The character will not appear on the server until the player logs in said server.

Here are some more answers to your questions

Seen this question asked a few times in this thread:
Will we disable the character transfer cooldowns during the server merge period?

• We will ignore transfer cooldown (during the merging period), but we don’t allow transfers into a server that is about to be merged.
  This means you can leave to any other server and not get penalized, but you cannot go back in the server that is about to be merged.

• We currently don’t have any plans for wiping servers.

• This is great point so we’ve passed this over to the rest of our development team.
  Currently we have no clear answer but we will update this information when we know for sure.

• Yes, sigils and obelisks will get transferred along with your character.
  Please note that you will lose your death markers and bed/bedroll markers.

• For now the server capacity will remain at 40, because of performance issues.

• We will have this information available soon so keep an eye out.

• Yes as mentioned in a previous reply, all players from server A will be merged into server B.
  We will have more details on the servers that are being merged soon so please keep an eye out for that.

• Just a little bit
  Trying to answer as many questions as I can but I apologize for not being able to reply to all.

Please keep this thread clean and tidy.
We are trying to answer your questions so make sure you only post questions about server merges in this thread. We will do our best to answer as many as possible.

Feel free to create other threads if you wish to share any concerns or feedback about the server merges.

In this case the character that was online the latest will be kept, and the other one will be removed.

Answered this question in one of my previous messages

Not quite. New characters cannot be created on servers that are about to be merged.

We will have a message set up indicating this. Message along the lines “Character creation is no longer available. This server will be merged into the server (info).”

These merges will only affect Official servers.

More info regarding this can be found in our original announcement.

The server merge process will start soon. I know soon is not a specific timeline but this is what we can share at the moment.

We will however be making additional announcements this week regarding these merges so please keep an eye out.

Updated the original post with the following information:

Update 2022-02-15T15:35:00Z: Asia Xbox servers added. These were opened in the incorrect region. Characters will be merged to the Oceania region.

Thank you for continuing to answer questions regarding the closures/transfers and updating the original post.

List is slowly but surely getting updated with all the servers that will be merged.
You can keep an eye on that list here: Server Merge Info - Conan Exiles

As for your suggestion, I’ve passed this over to the rest of our development team.

It’s UTC time we will update the list to reflect this as well.
Thank you for pointing this out!

Even more servers have been added to the list

Yes, the source servers will be merged into the target servers and those are here to stay (for now).

Passed your suggestion over to the rest of the development team.
For now as a workaround you can use Ctrl F to search for a specific server in the list.

Yes, players on the target servers will not be affected by the merge. They will be keeping buildings, items, thralls, etc.

Thank you for trying this out and pointing the encumbrance issue.

These new settings are only applied/picked up after a server restart. The restart happened 14 hours ago so this might have been why you could not transfer in the first place.

If you can and want, please feel free to test this again. It should work now that the server has been restarted.

Let us know if you encounter any other issues.

Passed your suggestions over to the rest of the team

We’re currently working on adding more servers to the list

If you check the list now you will see we’ve added European servers.
Some servers will appear with the incorrect Merge Date (7th or 9th of March instead of 8th or 10th of March)

We are working on fixing this so we apologize if you will see some servers being removed and added back to the list.

Switched them around hope it’s easier to follow the updates now.

Hello everyone,

We are currently working on adding more servers to the list.
We’ve just finished adding all European servers.

Next week we will be adding North America servers so please keep an eye out for that.
We will also be answering even more server merge questions and concerns.

Until then, have a great weekend everyone!

Hello everyone,

Just added the North America servers to the merge list. With the addition of these servers the list is now complete.

We’ve also made some corrections, which should show up in 30 mins:
3521 is merging into 3566, not into 3556
3534 is not merging into anywhere; it is already receiving a merge from 3511
3532 is merging to 3531

Please make sure to check the list out and see if the servers you are playing on are being affected by these merges.
Thank you again for being so patient and understanding with us while we worked on this.

We’ve just updated the news feed in game to reflect the upcoming server merges.

As mentioned previously, please remember that new characters cannot be created on the servers that are being merged.

We now have a message set up indicating this. Message along the lines “Official servers scheduled for merge will not allow character creation or incoming transfers"

Can you please let us know the number of the origin server and the destination server?
Are you still seeing this error in game?

In the meantime we will look into this issue further.

Now that the server merge process has started we will be closing this thread.
Thank you all for your feedback, questions, concerns and generous support comments.

If you are experiencing any issues with the merges please feel free to use Bug Reports sections on the forums.
For questions please make sure you use the General Discussion section.
For any feedback or suggestions, feel free to use the Feedback section.

If we have any additional updates on server merges then we will post new messages here.

Hello again everyone,

Server closures/merges have been set up again, we’ve simply moved everything to one week later. The exception is the servers that didn’t process correctly the first time around, will be merged tomorrow along with the rest of the South American servers. Thank you for your patience.

Hello everyone,

All South America server merges are now complete as well as the first batch of Asia server merges.
We will be moving the remaining Asia server merges to 2022-03-10T13:00:00Z

Now that we’ve resumed the server merges, make sure you check out the server closure/merges list as well as the original announcement post for any additional updates.

Good News!

Asia server merges are complete!

Please take a look at the server closure/merges list as well as the original announcement post for any additional updates.

Greetings Exiles!

We are currently updating the schedule to spread the closures out. We expect to take 2 weeks for Europe starting March 21, and 2 weeks for N. America starting on April 4.

Details to come next week.

Greetings,

We received reports of rare issues happening to some characters after this week’s merges. This time we were able to help all the players affected. But we decided it would be best to put other merges on hold until we can pinpoint exactly what caused it.

The default character transfer settings will apply and new character creation will be possible as well.
Edit: Please note that the changes above will only apply after the next daily restart of each server.

Thank you all for your ongoing support and patience.

Hello Exiles,

With the previously reported issues resolved, we’re ready to resume server merges.

The next sets of servers to be merged will be from the European region, beginning on April 19 and concluding on April 28. You can review the server merge page for the exact date of each merge.

As soon as new information is available for North American server merges, it will be announced here, so please keep an eye on this thread for additional updates.

Your continued patience and understanding in this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your support.

Greetings Exiles,

We’ve just finished updating our server merges page with the last remaining servers from the North America region.
The list is now complete so please make sure you check it out.

As always thank you for your continued patience and understanding while we work on these merges.

Greetings Exiles,

Following our initial announcement, we observed a large number of players populating the server in addition to reaching out to us to request we reconsider merging the North American Server 3652 into Server 3555.

After careful and extensive review of the situation, we’ve decided to cancel the upcoming merge. 3652 and 3555 will both remain open for play.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this change. Thank you for your understanding. We hope you will continue to enjoy your stay on Server 3652.