never wonder why some players and future top players move up and down the realms? how they are are vip 4-6 but have all 8 armor/weapon slots unsealed, blacksmith queues all opened and in less than half a year their armor/weapons nearly maxed?
even tho you are making a strong point, i dont think you are right. there is other reasons for this. you made some examples, let me make some of my own:
blizzards game diablo 1+2 online didnt get merged for a long time, they instead removed over night 25k cd keys of cheaters that where playing online and using a very small and simple software called "maphack" designed to generate a map of the game-"room" where you enter to find key locations like borders, leg, exits. all it would do was generate a basic map of the randomly generated game-room, something most players thought should have been implemented into the game from the start. just a couple months later not only was the servers pop restored but even has increased by over 30% after players found out that cheater and bots have been removed.
the other example i like to make is about lineage2 where they have merged the servers for US+EU (originally 12 US and 3 euro) down to 3 servers (1 us-west, 1 us-east and 1 euro). at the time asia was also reduced but i dont know exactly by how much but can say that korea alone was reduced from 12 servers to 3. the game rejuvenated, developers expanded the story line. about a year later they saw such a growth in the game that had to start adding servers again (with real players and not dummies like in tynon to fill them up and give the impression of a healthy pop).
point is, get rid of the filth, inactive, cheaters, multiple accounts, bots, farmers and merge the servers into the either 10 original servers or 10+10 servers (10 original + 10 new) and expand the game.
if you are worried or afraid of the game getting killed that way, then dont, because whatever it is that you are doing right now is killing the game.



