Would this game best be served with a single sever?

Yeah, the login is the same, login-servers are surely seperate from world servers.

One single server would require a series of machines, connected, with instancing for each and every zone. Certainly doable.

If *I* were developing a new MMO, I would always go for that model, because almost all MMOs have the exact same problem : a peak number of people at tha start (due to all the marketing), then the numbers go down, then stabilising (if they're lucky)... and then you got empty servers...

True, you need a good system for instancing, but that is certainly not impossible. and to people that say they prefer to play with few people, well, just go to your own instance of an area, problem solved : a decent instance system can handle both types of people.

Just because both of YOUR servers suck, or you are anti-social doesn't mean that my server is the same way. I know a ton of random folks on my server. When I go to warzones, I recognize most of the names every day. When I go to fleet, same thing. When I talk in channels, we know one another.

Learn to be social and maybe you'd know what community actually means. Community isn't something the game can do FOR you.

I honestly don't think that their infrastructure would be able to handle such a load. While they would be able to drop some servers currently in use, the technical requirements needed to achieve it is just a bit out of range yet.

If I may intercede here?

People don't give a crap about community when they can't even assemble a group to tackle the game's content. Systems can be implemented to make other players appear consistently; substitutes for players cannot.

That's a problem that does need to be fixed, yes. But not by one giant super server. In fact, by doing that and not settling other glaring problems like not having a LFG system, you won't see any differences. If you've never played STO(who HAS a giant single-server sharding), then let me tell you something: Each instance of a zone holds all of like 15 people. So you'll see almost nobody and still end up feeling like you are on a dead server.

Of course, that's also ignoring the glaring fact that this game has much larger subscription numbers than other flourishing multi-server games, yet feels much more dead because they simply have too many servers. LotRO doesn't have this problem. EQ2 doesn't have this problem. AION, RIft, AoC, etc don't have this problem despite all having significantly smaller subscription numbers.

So this idea that they need to make it all one giant sharded system is downright silly. If you think the game feels like a single player game NOW, you haven't a clue what you'd be in for with one giant server. Good luck ever meeting anyone more than once in your travels.

Single shard MMO's have been around for awhile, it's not suitable for all MMO's though.

Depends what you call community.
You can call a small clique community, and they will be feeling special on the force forsaken server.

My first server Hydian Way is a dying village at it's peak.

Nothing massive tbh and this does not help this %^%$!+ unfinished game.

Merges will never happen. No matter how vital they would prove to be.

Its how it should be but such huge populations (overall, not the current low per server numbers) would make it very difficult. A variation which I think could happen, perhaps not with SWTOR as BW seem to think technical innovation would be steam powered technology, would be dynamic server allocation.

Rather than log onto your 'home' server you would just log in, you would be automatically logged into the the most populated non full server, you would weight the choice towards guild and friends if you so wished. The result would be that no matter when you logged in there would always be a maximum of players to play with. As the game world is not persistent and there is nothing that ties you to a server this could work very well.

I suggested that idea as well. I'm baffled that this isn't the next big technological 'thing' with MMOs, quite frankly.

The number of people per zone is an arbitrary limitation. TOR already has sharding technology, and each shard can hold ~120 people. Even then, the communication channels are wide open, and shards can be moved between.
While an LFG system would be necessary to sort the chaos, a server-locked LFG system still does no good if there are no people to use the system.

Those games don't have a thinly spread population but they're still using an outdated model. They're doing well with their systems, yes, but MMOs as a whole would be moving in the right direction to throw

They don't need to do anything. They would be much better off, but they don't need to do a thing- they can piddle along with a small pool of subscribers as long as they want. I'm just someone commenting on the internet, too- Hopefully they have someone on the inside who has a better mental map of where MMOs as a whole are going to move in the future.

Also, I wouldn't have much trouble finding the same people constantly. Oceanic primetime is good like that. Having people occur more frequently in your travels is a matter of weighting, and it wouldn't be hard to develop a system to encourage repeat appearances on the part of other players.