If there’s no one, or very few people, playing on these servers, what benefit do you get by shutting them down or consolidating them?
They can’t merge them into Anniversary, but Anniversary might see an option to clone them into Era once TBC comes out.
Shutting down era would be a disaster. It’s all I play, so I’m biased, but I would quit the game if it weren’t for Era. I also personally enjoy playing on a low pop realm (Grobbulus) where our small town farm server has managed to grow from just a few people to a full raid who takes down KT, on our way to form our 5th Atiesh, and still raids all content in the game. Sure you might pop on and see no one online, but if you know where to look and join our guild it’s an amazing place to be.
We also have Free Character Moves available to take us to Whitemane which is more populated, but none of us want to join that realm and prefer our small town life here on Grobb. Merging us? You’d get maybe 70 unhappy players. It’s not going to move the needle for your cause of “player consolidation” and it’s just going to cause us on Grobb to be angry that we’re forced to move. No benefit for anyone.
I’d also say, Era has constantly ebbed and flowed with Population when other game types come out. Of course it’s low tide right now with Anniversary. In a year, it will be the only place to play vanilla again, and we’ll see the tides rise. We’ve been doing it this going on 4 years now on Grobbulus with Legacy.
It would have been an absolute shame if Blizzard shut down or merged the realms every time the tides were low. We’ve seen this with TBC, SoM, HC, Wrath, SoD, and now Anniversary. It’s no different, the players will return.