SOE has announced that they will be merging Planetside's two North American servers and are encouraging current and former players to return and preserve their character names.

With the goal of maintaining a high level of battle between the three Empires of PlanetSide, the two North American servers, Markov and Emerald, will be merged into one server, Gemini, on May 20, 2008.

Starting today, as a part of a select group of past PlanetSide players, you will be able to log in for free until May 21, 2008.

Preserve your Legacy! After the merge, many character names will be duplicated and priority will be given to players who have logged in most recently and to those who created their names first. (See below for name change details.)

As an added bonus, special merits will be given to native Markov and Emerald players to represent your loyalty to your past server. Characters will receive their merits upon logging into Gemini for the first time after the server merger is complete.

Read more here.

One step closer to death, but I'm redownloading it now to play for a little while.

still the one mmo i can come back to, jump in, and have fun instantly without any fussing around or waiting on other people to be not stupid.  while i didnt care for the overall direction the game took in the long run, and all its missed opportunities, there really isnt anything out there that can come close.  when its gone im going to miss it.  what other games do i miss...? eq naaah wow nope ao not really tabula rasa ick guild wars boring swg pre cu maybe

Ironicly I have ben talking about merging their servers since a few months after the game came out......

Can we just merge all the hundreds of crappy games into one giant craptacular experience ?

1 game, 1 class, 1 mob

Actually...PlanetSide has already undergone one server merge, about a year and a half into the game...Johari was merged with Markov and Konried was merged with Emerald...

The old game needs the scale of many players at once to work...and lately it's been difficult to have that...I see a merge as a positive thing at this point.

I've never played any game in over 20 years of online gaming, since the original Air Warrior in 1987 on GEnie, that has made so many mistakes and been so determined to change the gameplay....But, having said that, there's still nothing else out there that is remotely like PlanetSide...To this day, over 5 years after I started playing the game....I still grin till my face hurts every time I log in.