Wartune server merges

A few years ago, I played another Chinese game, Business Tycoon online. At the beginning, they were launching new servers quite often, like in Wartune. Then, as time passed, and people quit, servers got abandoned. People were complaining that they have no competition etc, but nothing happened, and all servers got abandoned eventually. When I started playing Wartune, it amazed me that they had solutions to so many problems other games had. For example, for the above problem, they had server merge.

In the first year, we were always excited when a server merge came. How will the power balance shift? How can we play together with the new players? How will guilds change? Merge also brought some events and rewards, and a recharge event, where you could get gift packs for rewards - nonexistent at that time. Still, even at that time, after each merge, a lot of players have quit. The reason was simple. For many players, one of the main goal is to have as high ranking as possible. Either in BR, or honor, our mounts... or all. You spend time, effort, money to climb up the ranking lists. And merge kills your efforts, if you were in top 20, you might end up in top 100. If you were top 3, you might even miss top10. If you were first, you might lose that title too.

We were guessing how merges are decided in Wartune. And it seems player activity has nothing to do with it. Simply, they either do it randomly, or it is based on total spendings. The last merge we had - over a year ago - was a real catastrophe. We had a very alive server, with 3 big guilds. We got merged with a similarly overpopulated server. After the merge, a lot of players quit. Still no clue why Wartune did it. And now it's happening again. We still have a lot of players, and still we get a merge.

While I agree that when a server's population gets low, a server is necessary, I believe that merging 2 active server is a deadly blow to the players. Just think of it: WB will die faster, you get half gold. You prolly lose ranking in sylph expedition, you lose divinity soul shards. The new people might not be so tolerant about the no-plunder agreement you had on your server since long. Twice more people will rush for the lonely Atoll boss pop. Monsters in the Wilds are harder to find. People who could participate in Chaos Wars, can no longer do it. Guild battle is again a painful struggle, and half of the people will get less rewards. People will lose titles. And since the cross-server mpd team finder, people don't even need partners to do mpd together from their own server.

So all in all, a server merge is very, very bad for all players. I know, again, a lot of players will quit. In Doomlord, there are multiple servers too. But there, when the idea of merging came up, there was a vote for each territory. Some players agreed to the merge, and some not. Where people did not want it, they didn't do it. I wonder, why R2Games is unable to do such a simple thing as a vote? Ask players what they want? I know that never happened in Wartune and never will. Still, each time, I'm frustrated over their ignorance.