bleh, instanced cites suck.. i mean they're good if you can't/dont have a actual plot of land.. but i dont think anyone wants to give their city in *insert zone here* for a city in a bottle.
and that does'nt take into account WHO should get to keep their cities and who should have them moved to instance.
gonna pull names out of a hat?
combining all servers would be good short term.. but the question that needs to be addressed is why are people leaving? and why are not enough new people coming in to fill their place?
the first one is a little harder to answer the 2nd one i think it's because a lot of people have never even heard of AO.
they need more advertising, sure AO is not a new game but i think if it was publicized more people will come, the froobs program is what got me in the door, but back then not as many "Free" games was out there so it might take a little more effort now.
that still leaves the question of why are they leaving? is it a serious flaw of the game driving people away? or is it just that leaving players are about avg %ratio and the new players are just below this break even point.
also even though AoC is'nt the same type of mmorpg it seemed to have stolen some of the AO base, some of them came back to AO, some of them did'nt
the upcoming secret world will probably take some more.
either way when it's possible that 1 server could support the entire world of AO, there is a problem.. one thats been there for a long time but seems to only be getting worse.
i dont ever expect AO will become popular to fill a dozen or more servers, but i'd like to see rk1 & 2 packed.
anyway i hope after the new engine is done they advertise like crazy, otherwise they may have to drop the first M in mmorpg to avoid false advertisement lawsuits