It's great to hear about your practical experience. I knew some servers had experienced mergers, but I didn't know anyone who had gone through them. From what I've seen, your experience was good, right? Did it increase the competitiveness and activity of the servers?
At first we didn't like it. You see, the game back then (the first merge happened in 2014, and another in 2025) was very different. There was still quite a decent level of competitiveness on each server. We spoke our local languages, and every .si server was its own ecosystem, its own history with its own heroes and legends.
All of a sudden they decided, what turned out to be the first BF merge ever, to merge all .si servers together with completely unknown communities (nordic, baltic...). We were puzzled. For example, why wasn't .si merged with .ba (because of historical familiarity)? Or why weren't Norway and Denmark merged with Sweden, and so on? There was a lot of uncertainty, but in the end people just got used to it.
The second merge last year wasn't that strange, but it was very unbalanced. We used to play in a relatively balanced community... vamps and wolves, wars, etc. Sometimes the balance of power shifted a bit toward the wolves, sometimes toward the vampires. There was no clear winner.
But when I checked all the servers that were supposed to merge with us... the situation was terrible. Literally. Out of about eight servers, there wasn't even one, not a single one, where wolves dominated. Even worse, on the strongest servers it looked like all the top 30 players were vampires grouped together, opening gates every few weeks with zero competition.
So after the merge, there wasn't a single player capable of joining us in the dominating werewolf clan, while there is an entire army of vampires joined together. Because of that, we can basically forget about real competition in the foreseeable future.
Yes, we fight and we struggle, but it often feels more or less futile. Every time a wolf quits the game, it matters, because there are so few of us.
Even worse, if one or two of the wolves who are still holding things together quit the game, I'm pretty sure all the competitiveness will disappear again.
Vampires have always been a more popular character in mainstream culture, and that is reflected in the game as well. There are servers where a smaller group of wolves dominates, but in general too many players want to be vampires, which makes the communities very unbalanced.
The merging of servers can have a positive effect for some time, but don't expect miracles. If you're not big enough, the major clans won't accept you, because with all the multi-accounts (which are allowed on merged servers since players have accounts spread across multiple servers) they can never be sure you aren't just a spy. All the smaller clans died out long ago, so finding a new home is quite a challenge. Even as a top dog on one server, you might end up just average after the merge, and so on...