So it's not enough that they're server merging, they're also realm merging within the few remaining servers? Doooooom.

*sigh* And you know the funny thing about this? If they'd triaged the game this hard back when they first realized that there was no way to ship the game that they designed on schedule and within budget? This could have been a viable design. If they'd cut it down to a single realm pairing at launch, and added additional realm pairings as subscription money came in, Warhammer Online could have a long life of steady growth like EVE or Runequest. Now it's more like on the lifecycle of Neocron: cut developers, figure out what of the game can be left behind or ignored or cut based on the remaining developers, watch customers leave, cut more developers; the classic MMO death spiral.

This would have even been the pairing to start with, arguably. The Empire/Chaos pairing was, hands down, the busiest pairing because it has the best-designed open RvR zones (although after tier 1, not the best scenarios). I could make an argument that if they shut down the other two pairings *and* Land of the Dead altogether, promising to bring them back if or when subscription numbers warrant it, and concentrated all of their development manpower on making that one pairing the best it could possibly be, and on fixing all of the remaining combat-related bugs and class-related balance issues, they might have a stable, and dare I say fun and entertaining and unique, place to grow from. On some level, this may be as close as they can realistically come to a plan to actually save the game. And that'd be a good thing; there are things about this game worth saving.

I just don't see it as all that likely to work.