The MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea from Flying Lab Software announced today it is shutting down 7 of 11 initial servers after it's first quarter of a year. The reason behind this is to consolidate the player base. Their official announcement on the homepage spins it like this:

"When Pirates of the Burning Sea launched on January 22nd, we introduced our customers to 11 new game servers. Through feedback from our players and evaluation of our server populations, it has become clear that key game features require populations of higher density in order to function at optimum levels. When you take into account both the disparity in player time zones and the delayed launch of our title in some countries, we were spreading our overall population too thin. Also, in more recent builds, we were able to improve our server technology to allow for an even larger population than we were originally equipped to handle."

The bottom line is that they didn't reach the population levels they expected. This may be the beginning of the end, which is really sad because this game had features I really liked. Even liking the game a lot though wasn't enough to get me seriously playing it. Basically I have one piece of advice if you are thinking of creating an MMO in the face of WoW; don't. The problem is simply pulling players away from their massive time investment and their friends. If you have a guild full of friends you are not likely to leave them. There is a massive amount of inertia that must be overcome to make something like that happen. The entire guild has to decide to jump to a new game at the same time. Hopefully this will happen with Age of Conan, I am dying for an MMO that does not miss the entire point of being an MMO like WoW.