If we say that the fusion will happen, who should OGame Italy merge with ?

There is also this problem with little activity in DK, SE and NO, but if they get merged with ORG or something else then they will lose their native language and will be forced to speak English if they play there

It can increase activity but their own native Community will be lost, I think Gameforge would have done it if they wanted players to only play in a English Community or some other language, I doubt that this kind of merge will happen. But maybe in the future when Gameforge docent want their own native Community's, who knows xD

Yes... some games from gameforge already have international boards where a lot of languages are allowed (even ogame origin community got it from beggining).

Here some examples:

board.dropzone.gameforge.com/index.php/BoardList/
board.skill.gameforge.com/index.php/BoardList/
board.omd.gameforge.com/


So it is not imposible, but it is a BIG step, so game should be very very small , I think there is a lot of options to make normal merges (like it was until now) than international merges...

Personally I don't think that language is a problem (of course, with the good intentions of the community), everyone can write their own language when they talk to their friends, and in case of contact with another user, a translation wouldn't hurt (otherwise it won't probably be understood).

Now I know of some people that don't like OGame interface in another language, so that might be indeed a barrier, but may be a script to translate or (even better) a configuration choice to change the interface language, and that would be solved too.

In any case, here's another idea related to this.

Since a merge is too drastic, it could be possible to try, at least temporarily at first to see how it goes to duplicate accounts and put the duplicates in an universe such as this (international, merged, etc.) so we could get two things: people would keep their accounts at their universes but they could sign up to this international universe and start with their own account.

That way, if it doesn't work, there's no worries, everyone has their old account (or may be at the end of the test universe give the choice to see what account to keep, and bring the chosen back to the original universe). And also people could easily choose, apart from (may be) spend a bit more on the game

I think it would be a problem too, but a language changer should be possible to make if they want to do it

I think the other one with a international universe sounds like a good idea, and we could open it here on Origin since this is the place for testing

When I started playing OGame more than 10 years ago, I registered in a young universe containing about 10.000 players. That number dropped over the years of course, but it remained huge compared to current populations. I recently started playing again after years of absence, but the current situation isn't particularly inviting to stay for long. The amount of active players in some universes is so low they could as well all be in the same alliance.

I was just messing with some numbers I pulled from Ogniter which I'd like to share. I'll call everyone who is listed as a 'Normal player' active, and all others inactive.

• Of the 28 different domains, 12 have less than 1.000 active players. The situation is worst in Norway, which has 31 players, while Finland has 63. Only 8 domains have more than 5.000 active players, which I'd call decent for a single universe.
  
• Of the 428.312 accounts, only 116.706 (27%) are active. This leads to an average of 404 active accounts in each of the 289 different universes.
  
• The are a couple of universes on .de and .fr that superficially seem healthy with many thousands of players, but those are actually more inactive than average. For example, the French universe Fornax has nearly 8.000 players, but 96% of these are inactive.
  

While turtles or miners may be less affected, such empty universes mean the death of the fleeter playstyle. I cannot imagine you'll find many interesting targets in universes with less than 100 active accounts. And while merges won't solve OGame's fundamental problem of universes becoming unactractive to new players as they age more and more, they can at least bring back some action for the diehards who're still playing there.

I therefore agree that international fusions need to happen. I'd even say a single domain with no more than 20-30 universes should be enough for all players worldwide. Less servers to maintain also means less operating costs for GF. Language differences don't seem like such a big issue to me. Translations for all interfaces already exist, so why couldn't you just change your preferred language in settings? I fear OGame won't exist for another 15 years without some drastic measures.

I would love one international community and international merges. But the past shows us that merges weren't the solution. They might even add to the decreasing number of active players.
Servers with several thousand players have an insane number of players who quit the game per month.

OGame needs to fix several things to ensure players stay for a longer time period. The most pressing and logical thing would be a proper game introduction.

if you keep same supported languages, players will be happier with bigger servers, even if theres a language barrier.

You could also keep the language separations and reduce number of universes per language by completing merges and not opening unis as fast.

Right now I'm hoping for a merge because we need one again

Yes... All communities need it since a lot of time.

"You could also keep the language separations and reduce number of universes per language by completing merges and not opening unis as fast"

This looks a bit too discriminating...
How about add anche optional in the ticket creation and select the support-language that you need? I belive that after the merging there will be lots of gos happy to support with you favourite language

I think that this is a good idea, honestly I'd want to see international competition, (something as old retro server). If we could get one without Dark Matter that would be awesome, showing the skills, but I believe that this would be too much to ask for