IMO merge will NEVER happen, sure i saw it somewhere on these forums that BB wont move people from one server to another as there is too much data to pick from any given server database to move so guessing same would apply to merge data. and as some have mentioned above, some players play multiple servers, so a complete servers merge (with inactive purges) would cause many problems, and there are already enough bug/glitches in code now, without adding to them