Gamigo announced that server transfers are now available to/from the fresh start servers (that were launched on March 25th). The last time transfers were made available for all servers (including the prior fresh start servers) was earlier this year in January. Just a month later, Gamigo announced they would be merging the servers (server evolutions); the mergers for Unchained took place on March 4th.
From what I’ve heard, both Godfrey (NA) and Carmilla (EU) fresh start servers have depopulated over the past 2-3 months (much worse compared to the first two fresh start servers which were merged together with the original launch servers). In the March merger, two servers per region was the end result; Hieronimus (*) and Okape on EU and Akmit and Marmas (*) on NA. The “*” denotes the most populated servers as of now.
Gamigo allowing for transfers into Carmilla and Godfrey is somewhat a ridiculous braindead decision because players there have been clamoring to get out. Considering what they did last time, where players transferred to one of the other servers that ended up getting merged anyway (when they made the merger announcement while the original transfer system was still buggy, and ended up merging the most populated servers together), shows they don’t care except to make money from the transfer.
Merging servers again is going to be messy especially if they decide to try to evolve them down to a server per region anytime soon. Fresh starts in Unchained are essentially player churn with already mostly existing players since access to them didn’t require another account. While the existing servers are still populated from the merge back in March, there has been some movement between them (land on Marmas is still fully occupied; though there are a lot of squatters who don’t do anything with those plots). The prior 3-4 months before transfers were opened in January, there were properties demoing often enough that large open plots were always available on Wynn. This happens only occasionally on Marmas so the existing servers aren’t even close to the point they were when the first merge happened.
Both Carmilla (EU) and Godfrey (NA) will likely depopulate even more since it is expected more players will transfer out than in. If that becomes the case, Gamigo should not even bother attempting to evolve those into the existing servers; they should just give remaining players a transfer ticket out for each character to self-transfer to one of the other servers.
But I know they won’t do that (because if they can merge everything to a single server per region, makes it easier from a maintenance point of view, and allows them to promote another fresh start server which can then be easily merged later with a single existing server). The merge back in March was a headache; even though I got back 80% of what I had before, I personally decided shortly after, that I would take a break if another merger/evolution happens again within an years time. I’m looking at the opening up of transfers in/out of the fresh start servers today as a heads up warning for the next server mergers.
