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[Marco]

This is interesting because it's the closest Blizzard has come to realm consolidation:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/23425638095-pvp-to-pve-realm-conversion-darrowmere.html

It seems like a really short-sighted decision to me.  I'm sure all the numbers line up behind the reasoning, but the message it sends is: if you set up shop on an underpopulated realm, it could be destroyed or turned into a different kind of server, so you'd better transfer to (or roll on) Tichondrius or Mal'ganis instead and let Blizzard deal with the load issues.

[Winston]

I'm going to take the "selfish" approach:

Given a choice between changing the "flavor" of a low-population server, or splitting up a high-population server (like Earthen Ring), I'll take the former. At least with the former I'm still hanging around people I know, and no one doesn't make a transfer who doesn't want to. If ER were to split up, and the DC community were to split with it... I'm not sure what I would do.

Of course, splitting up a server means Blizzard has to buy new machines, which makes it a less likely scenario.

[thanaomira]

if you set up shop on an underpopulated realm, it could be destroyed or turned into a different kind of server,

Okay, I get that.

so you'd better transfer to (or roll on) Tichondrius or Mal'ganis instead and let Blizzard deal with the load issues.

But I don't see how you arrived at that conclusion.  I think maybe I'm starting with different assumptions: people rolling on low-pop servers are doing so for reasons that would never make them want to roll on high-pop servers in the first place.

[Marco]

I'm assuming that only people want the community they become involved with to persevere.  The community on Darrowmere is being split up: everyone who cares about it being a PvP server will transfer to one of the 4-5 free transfer targets, and some people who don't care will stay.

Arguably realm consolidation would be better, but it probably requires downtime unless they can consolidate two realms in the same battlegroup.  Plus name issues.