The Guide for Stating in Age of Conan
Stating that AoC is closing out over half their servers does sound like a fairly doom and gloom sort of announcement, I will give the naysayers that. The vast array of server choices were necessary at launch after an encouraging initial sale of the game AOC Gold but once the shiny newness wore off, many were headed back to older games or off to check out the new ones and this left AoC server populations looking more than just a little grim.
A staggering 48 servers, spanning across regions, were all open for business and yet it seemed like no one was around and this panicked a lot of players and made the game Age of Conan Gold feel a lot more isolated than it actually was. We have not yet played a MMORPG that has never merged servers at some point and yet the term seems to hold a stigma that convinces us that this surely is the beginning of the end.
While the cunning herding of characters eased the fears of some players, others still saw it as a sign that WAR was also doing badly. People start hearing about declining populations and safety measures being put in place to protect what is left, and they get worried and companies frantically start reassuring.
The truth is that server merges are very common and not at all unexpected after a game launch.