They do have to weight that against the very real possibility of many, if not most, of the players from server you merge with end up quitting as a result. Not only does that mean potentially losing a number of lesser spenders, but it also means that you are back where you started, in a dead-ish server. There are a number of already merged server requesting merge again due to the server dying again for whatever reason, and high ptw could very well be such a reason.

It's hardly any particular parties' fault, but that is the nature of such ptw games. I wonder if things would be better if the huge spenders promises to not plunder as well as make certain compromises in GNW. While not exactly fair for the spender, it would certainly minimize the impact and thus allow the merged server to sustain longer.

I was responding to the "observation" of ptw server not being merged, not necessarily age of server thou significant ptw tend to be on somewhat aged servers.

As far as age goes, I agree that it should not be only new servers. Thou I imagine older servers might be more problematic due to likely bigger disparity between servers and it's possible the people in charge just don't want to handle the harder problems.

It's not the same.

For one, older server, on average, are more active than newer servers. This means if there is a specific level of inactivity needed to qualify for merge, a larger % of newer server would qualify. This would mean that there for say 6 consecutive servers of a region, there are like 4-5 that qualifies and therefore have a reasonable merge between those where the age difference between the youngest and oldest server is small. On the other hand, for older servers, it might require a span of say 10 or more consecutive server to find 4-5 qualifying servers, creating a bigger age disparity.

For another, apparently they care about top player power. Fact of the matter is, player progress at different rate, including top player of one server versus another. And if we consider power growth like any other static problem, that is to say there is a mean growth and a standard deviation to the growth, you will easily see that it makes sense that as the mean increases over time, so does the standard deviation. Therefore, between a cluster of consecutive server, the older the age of the server, the bigger the difference between the lowest highest power of a server and the highest highest power of a server. This could further dilute suitable candidates for merger.

As a result, a "fair" merger based on power could result in servers whose age are vastly different, being cherry picked out of a fairly large span of servers with various servers among them being not suitable, requiring the span. And you know the youngest server will complain about being merged to a server a month or two older.

On the other hand, if you ignore the above, then you will receive complaints from players of server that never asked for a merger but is forced into it or complaints from the "weak" servers about being merged with a much stronger server.

So unlike the merger of newer server, older server merger would be problematic and prune to complaint no matter how they do it, because of the inherent bigger disparity between consecutive servers and therefore being less suitable of being blindly merged together. So no, it's not the same, it's not just picking consecutive servers out of a cluster.

Chances are, they have to bite the bullet eventually and live with one complaint or another. But the question still remains, just which bullet do they bite?