Time will tell, just because people havnt been on in a week, doesnt mean they wont come back in a month. The simple fact that in 4 days couger has a lv 21 of 60 levels leads me to belive that people are going to hit the "end" of the game too fast and lose intrest(not everyone will do several charaters). People complain about slow leveling, but rapid leveling like many of the new MMORPGs are doing is a quick way to lose you base too fast. CoH had the same thing, faster levels, and when after the first couple months people played through all the content, they got bored. It pulled signifigant numbers of people at luanch also. Some in my guild who have tried other games, are comming back after acouple weeks because they got bored with it.
The drop of many players at high end right now has less to do with other games, and more to do with the fact that a great deal of the players leaving have played through almost all the content in the game. The set up of omens didnt help any, only 1 locked zone got people into and through all the high end oow content too fast. As annoying as flags are and have been, they did slow down progression. Locked zones also had the effect of a status effect that is lost in oow, and the fact that a bazaar geared person is in the same places as a time geared for xp/aaxp is offensive to some.
EQ however is not dead. And any talk of server merging is just that, talk. They wont even think about it till a number of things happen, holidays end(they DO have an effect on server population afterall), subscrptions expire(just because someone hasnt been on in a week or two weeks, their accounts have not expired yet, and im sure in many cases are not cancelled yet either), and sever population stays low for several months continuously, and the accounts dwindle.
Before people declare EQ dead, make sure the "eq killers" have more staying power than a month or two.
