Do servers persist??

its a 50/50 chance. servers do persist, but their lifetime is rather short.

@tehstepford So what happens at the end of its lifetime?
Everybody merges and all stuff left despawns?

@DaringClarky From what I've heard servers are active for 24 hrs then die out. Not 100% sure on that just hearsay. Longest session I had was 16 hours and the server was still active at least up until shortly before the crew and myself left. I have had a friend tell me that him and some friends of his kept a dead server going for 30 or 36 hours by continuing to keep the last 2 ship's going through giving them to others as they got tired and wanted to leave the game. Wasn't part of that but it's what they said so once again it's hearsay. Also when you drop to one ship on a server it will merge. I spawned in one night about a week ago at the end of a servers life and alligned with another boat and after it became a dead server our 2 ships stayed on for 8 hours until we got tired. That is the longest I have been on a dead server. Loot you leave on a dock should stay as long as the server is alive and all floating loot will despawn as @LucianSanchez82 had sad. Servers die out after a period of time just to keep things condensed as much as possible. It costs money to run servers so if a company let servers go for a very long time or indefinitely then they could have an abundance of servers with only a couple players on each. By merging it saves the company money through fewer servers to run and maintain and creates more player interaction.

@daringclarky said in Do servers persist??:

@tehstepford So what happens at the end of its lifetime?
Everybody merges and all stuff left despawns?

SoT uses the ms azure server service. servers are started and stopped according to demand.
when you get merged, you are being transferred from your (low population) server to a different server. the server you were on shuts down, and all the stuff just vanishes into the ether.

Which they really should fix. If I stash something in a bush and go to get a new ship, that thing needs to be flagged as part of my character and ported over to the new server on a merge. Despawning a quest item or Athena chest is unfair. Stashing items should be a valid tactic.

@galactic-geek said in Do servers persist??:

It's my understanding that loot stashed on islands persists for a long time, but not forever. I'm fairly certain that I've had items that I've stashed away disappear after about an hour or so. I assume this limitation is in place to prevent crashing a server. It's also why I think a lot of our stashed loot doesn't transfer over to a new server - if enough pirates did it, and all merged into 1 server together, it would crash that whole server giving everyone nothing.

Except that it would only transfer loot stashed by pirates being merged into the new server. If someone logs off and the server merges, their loot would vanish.