Being a Leo player that switch to Draco, I can easily see both sides of this.
No, I didn't like seeing ROSE's community split. And I do believe that we would have been better off as one community, especially since I've seen all this inner-community conflict over the two servers.
But now that's it's split...what can we do? Ask for a merge? The best thing I can think of as far as a merge would be for us to address the issues of a merge, such as increasing max character count per account to 10 (would have to be done), and also addressing the same-name issue across servers. The best thing I can think of is perhaps making the two servers' characters' names different colors, and then new characters made on the merged server would be normal -- white, because I absolutely loathe the idea of seeing a [D] or [L] beside my characters' names. Then, after the issues are discussed and settled, an admin on the site should make a poll for whether we should merge or not.
I'm sure many people would and wouldn't want to merge for different reasons. Some people have brought up the issue of the differences in economy. In my opinion, Leonis' lower prices would beat out Draco's economy just because of competition. It might take a month, max, to balance out. It might start out somewhere in the middle, but I really don't see this issue as HUGE as far as the decision for a merge goes.
Others of us left Leo for a change of pace, a new start, to get away from Leo's community. But, the way I see it, if a merge took place, all of our friends on Draco would now be on on the new server, too, and it would all balance out and be alright.
But I don't want to debate the pros and cons of a merge -- if we're ever going to stop fighting as a community, though, it should probably happen. I agree with most all of you that the community being split is having far too negative an impact on our community right now, and it really needs to be remedied asap, in some way, even if it's not a merge of the two servers.
Edit:
@bendersmom
I am 100% sure GMs had good intentions and good ideas when they made Draconis, but the thing is that if you make it an exact copy of Leonis, sooner or later the same scenarios we've seen in Leonis had to happen in the new server, and since Draconis' economy is even more inflated now, because of too few people farming\crafting\vending, Draconis became even worse than Leonis.
That's why I see players moving to Leonis or quitting because they got bored of it and\or don't want to start all over again after they possibly spent a considerable amount of money in the Item Mall.
Merging the two servers and creating a 2nd channel would be a good solution now, and then they should work on preventing people from duping.
Agreed. Completely.
Edit2: Just thought of another issue with a merge. Clans. Same-name clans would have issues as well. Don't really know how that could be dealt with without ruining clean-looking clan names.
Edited by Kittiz, 07 July 2011 - 07:55 AM.