Hi, it's been only some time since the players voted against the idea of cross server sage, but as the game dies down and merged servers shrink (back to inactivity levels) - I hope that the possibility of cross server sage can be revisited in the future.
I think the main reason why people were opposed to it was because of the disappointment in the cross server matching in matsuri and arena - I hope this could be looked at, and I imagine how difficult it must be for new servers to struggle with this: while i understand that the source code is taken directly out of CN's version of the game, I think for matsuri and arena, it is possible to adjust which groups are co-located together yeah? The trick would be finding the sweet spot whereby waiting times are balanced with the comparative strength of the players against the server's average strength.
To be really honest, although I have been consistently getting 10-15 adv refines everytime I take part in a sage, the same players are usually getting the top spots - fighting the same people tends to get a bit boring: there are very few fights where you can consider "equal" - i.e the fight could go either way since you've most likely fought the player many times in the past before and quite to be honest, sage feels like a routine for me (not sure about others) as time progresses. There used to be two sage battlefields when the servers merged, but as players quit the game, it went back to one battlefield - the lower sage battlefield was great: it allowed strong low level players that were behind the curve to compete: in fact, two or three of the players who enjoyed the other battlefield were able to compete now when it was impossible due to difference in initiative and they weren't able to get any advanced runes.
However, multiple sage battlefields within the server isn't healthy: for the power gap between the strongest and weakest in the lower sages is so huge there, it encourages lots of people to want to stay behind.
I imagine that in a perfect cross-server sage, the division of lower levelled players will be quite equal (i.e 90 vs 90s, 89s vs 89s, 88 vs 88s), and within each level bracket it will be further divided on the basis of power. With the number of players in pooled competitions, it is totally possible to make a more equitable system.
These are just my views, and I recognize that there will be many players that will be against this, however I thought I would come up to write this, since OASIS would never know what the players think if no one expressed their views. I did vote against the cross server mechanism mainly because I was disappointed at the matsuri and arena matchups initially, not to mention that I was getting the benefit of the advanced refines after all. However, the current system makes it very, very difficult for people trying to catch up on initiative through advanced runes, and we are at the stage of the game where many people have all lvl 7s on their main and while they have been saving diligently to get their advanced runes from coupons, the fact is that the free advanced runes for the same players creates a gap thats not even possible to surmount. However, I don't think that's the issue, as game imbalances for people who are ahead is pretty much present in most games - the bigger issue is that for many servers, sage world battlefields is beginning to die down, get boring and quite to be honest, more people have been quitting the game due to not finding it fun anymore. I would also imagine this must be worse for inactive and dead servers - we still have an average of 2400 activity points from the top 4 groups weekly despite dropping significantly since server merged, and some of us are beginning to find this boring.