why cant players toons be transferred? ask all players to delete all but 1 toon on the worlds to be deleted. transfer every players remaining toon to the new world.
this way most would be happy.
As in a world that is completely new? No towns or forts built, no alliances, no town forums, no alliances, no alliance forums? You think everyone would be happy with that?
And what of the issue of people who have two toons, one for each world? You think they'll be happy?
Anyway, transferring players poses many problems, not the least of which is that it would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis and require players to cooperate before anything can be brought across to a "new world." The more glaring problems are that of Accounts working like this: Main Account - Character accounts for each world.
Characters are not independent of your main account, they are directly linked. Nor are they modular from the respective world. I.e., they can't just be "moved." They would instead require a developer to "copy" the data, and the corresponding fields, to a different world. If the respective fields are already occupied, the data from those fields would need to be erased before anything could be copied over, to avoid corruption of data. If they do not exist, they would need to be created before the data within those fields could be copied over. At least based on what I was able to tell when I used to work with the tools, which don't provide a clear picture of the database structure, but is sufficient to glean some things
(and no, I wasn't going to go snooping, that gets developers nervous).
Merging worlds as a whole is a difficult challenge, particularly since the initial design does not accommodate such a venture. You have the problems of duplicate town names, same x/y coords, dupe characters (one account), town spacing, fort ownership, dupe alliance names, etc and so on. The idea of merging worlds is a surmountable challenge, just not an easy one.
However, making everyone happy is not one of the programming challenges. That hardship falls on the lap of the CMs, who you like blaming for everything.