There is no need to jump on Arishanya as moderators are volunteers and can't be blamed for decisions we make.
Me however...
I've been avoiding posting because people need a few days to get used to things, but I will jump in here.
We moved the servers because:
a) We had to do something about the long term viability of Conan as a financial product.
b) We want to implement the single server tech to consolidate the player base.
c) We believe that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase will not have a reduced experience because of this.
Let me be clear, this has been signed off by the tech leads, the operations leads and the the upper management layer. I was the biggest holdout in making the decision, because I am the guy who has to shoulder the blame for this.
I agonized over it, because we can't change the speed of light and the additional MS will hurt some players and for others it doesn't matter if the difference is not noticeable, a perceived downgrade is still a downgrade.
In the end, I signed off on it because I do believe it is the only way forward for the changes that the community has asked for.
Why the US and not the EU? We pay for our server farm in the US and it supports AO, AoC and TSW. The US server farm has the newest hardware and it has more connection links than the EU servers. It is, in short, technologically superior.
I am not saying people don't have a right to post their opinions on this and if you only care about your experience playing AoC, I understand and apologize if this has impacted your experience. Unfortunately we have to make decisions so that we can keep these games and services running, and keep them financially viable in the long term.
I hope that clarifies my position on this and at least provides some of the reasoning behind it.
An addendum - lag spikes are not latency. We are actively working on removing the lag spikes from the game.