As is typical with games like this, the various regions of the world are broken up into their own regional servers. This is both to help deal with latency problems and so that different localizations can have their own features if necessary. The latter of those two explanations is common in China, where trade laws require strict control over services to remain in the hands of a Chinese affiliate.
PlanetSide 2 at one point operated servers inside mainland China, but as is the case with many Chinese ports, a lack of support and substantive changes drove players away. Such as the case with EVE Online‘s Serenity server. But the geopolitics of the Chinese gaming market aren’t the focus here, instead where here to talk about the rest of the core Asian market, many of which play on Japanese and Australian servers in PlanetSide 2.
Here’s the full text of the announcement:
At 6AM Pacific on August 27th the Briggs server will be merged with the SolTech server. All characters currently associated with Briggs will become SolTech characters. That same morning we will be opening a character transfer window between the SolTech and Connery servers. That window will stay open until the end of September (9/30/2019 @ 11:59pm Pacific). Merging the Briggs server was not a decision we came to easily and we hope the Briggs players this merge is effecting will understand why this has to happen. That reason being the population of players on Briggs is not able to sustain the costs of continuing to operate in that region. We appreciate the support the game has received from all of the Briggs players and hope they will continue to play PlanetSide 2 on either SolTech or Connery servers for the foreseeable future. Our apologies if this announcement seems a bit late, we spent a very long time weighing all our options as to how best to proceed.
A small note on character transfers. We recommend you wait at least 10 minutes after ending a game session with a character before performing a server transfer of a character between SolTech and Connery. This should prevent any lost progress such as XP and Cert gain from your previous game session.
Judging from the player reactions to this announcement across the web, people knew this was coming a long time ago. The Briggs server based in Australia will be merged with the SolTech Japanese server. This is being done as the actual population of the Sydney-based realm is simply too low to justify paying for it, according to Daybreak.
In some good news though, the developers are leaving an avenue in place for characters on the SolTech server after the merger to move to the US West server, Connery. This is where many of the Australian players already played anyway, so it’s not a huge deal for some. That transfer window will remain open until Monday, September 30th.
