When will there be a "SERVER MERGE?"

Rift never had the population problem SWTOR has. I could do open world pvp easily, at all times. Warfronts were no problem.
Rift now lets players from one faction join a warfront with the other. Kind of interesting.

RIFT was run by a passonate dev team who care more about player's happiness than profits. EA doesn't let Bioware out of the silence cage unless the numbers are met.

Yeah, they did.

If you open with as many servers as they had at launch and you have what they have now, that shows there was a population problem.

Also offering every player free UNLIMITED transfers once a week for ALL of their toons says they were battling a population problem.

The fact that they offer the Mercenary thing for PvP (switching sides) shows they had that problem and figured that's the best way to handle it after a year.

Thats better than no transfer at all, and losing people who still want to play by denying the problem all together.

Again, Rift did not offer that at their launch which is what you don't seem to understand. There was NO transfer early in Rift that came LATER.

There is none in TOR now, that will come.. later. You just want it now, like everyone in Rift who was screaming back then.. I was there. If you want I can link the countless threads bemoaning this daily in Rift on their official forums.

Selective memory is selective.

Free transfer once per week is the most terrible thing ever, What we need is a server merge, merging multiple servers with low population until they reach a heavy load. People playing on desert server mean hi fidelity customers, who really love this game (I'm one of 'em).
I think we should have no more than 20 european servers and 30 in U.S.
BW can open new servers anytime they need, if population starts growing again.

Okay, let's discuss this "Rift cares more than Bioware/EA" thing.

Free Character Transfers will be released in RIFT Update 1.3.(05-23-2011)

1.3 dropped June 23. So they didn't have 'free' or any other type of transfers until several months later. Some of you people are either misremembering or just didn't play the game at all.

Considering Rift was a much smaller game to TOR in just about every way at their stages of release, I think the time frames are pretty similar.

Give Bioware time for the merges to happen as it's sure they will.

P.S. first thing you saw after all those merges were "Trion killed our guild with free xfers!" posts lol

I played Rift from beta and it never had the population issues most SWTOR servers have. I never heard an issue while I leveled multiple characters to lvl 50. I NEVER was the ONLY person in an entire area. And they never had over 200 servers.
What possessed BW to make so many servers?

I think they originally thought 1.2 along with offering an obnoxious amount of free weekends (invite 25 friends, and $20.00 off through origin ad) would fix the issue and increase population. Now I believe they have a clearer vision that 1.2 simply won't help this issue long term and they are infact stalling as you mentioned while they try to work something out.

No new players are rolling on low pop servers and the people stuck on them are left wanting to play an MMO with people. Then people become discontent on their current server and play less/quit or re-roll and over populate the few servers that already have a decent population while others are sitting practically dead.

They broke it, they should fix it.

Bioware had control over every guild and where it was placed before launch.
Bioware had very few servers available during early access.
Bioware then opened up way too many servers.

Now on a good day there's still over 40+ light servers at prime time. It's not the players fault.

They thought this game was a WOW killer, but were sadly mistaken when people realized it had a engine inferior to even games released 10 years ago and lacked half the essential features that made mmos fun.