With subscriber levels currently hovering at around 300,000, Warhammer Online developer Mythic is bringing down 63 servers in order to make sure everyone has other people to play with.
It's a common practice in the massively multiplayer online role-playing industry these days; popular games launch, opening server after server to deal with the flood of new players, and then a sizeable chunk of those players say no thank you, causing the servers to become barren, which leads to the inevitable sever merge. It happened with Age of Conan, and now Warhammer Online is preparing to close 43 North American and Oceania, with another 20 being closed in Europe. Forced player transfers were completed yesterday, leaving the remaining servers bursting with delicious player flavor.
Massive server merges aren't as much of a bad sign as they used to be. If anything, players who found the population too sparse previous might want to actually give Warhammer Online another try, now that everyone has been squished together.
Mythic To Close 63 Warhammer Online Servers [Gamasutra]