Many players would feel surprised yesterday when they logged into Rift as they received a server wide announcement about an upcoming server merge. It seems quite a lot servers are being closed or converted over to trial servers.

As community manager Elrar explained quite some time ago in the official forum, trial servers are the ones that being used for future large scale Trial programs. Character creation is disabled for non-trial users on Trial shards. Players on these shards are suggested to transfer to any other available active shards for free.

According to Rift Junkies, there's about 11 servers involved so far and January 18 is planned for server merger. However, there is no official word released on the official website or forum by now. If you are in Belmont, Galena, Atrophinius, Crucia, Alsbeth, Estrael, Shadefallen, Sunrest, Freeholme, Dayblind, or Faemyst servers, then it is a good time now to call for your friends to move and begin new journey.