1. What is considered a "community"? I'm guessing this is the location ID for each server group.
Context: "All 1x servers within each community will be merged into a single 1x server. All 4x, 5x, 8x, and 10x servers within each community will be merged into a single 5x server."
The term "community" here refers to the individual languages. This game is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian and many more.
Accordingly, there are two English (UK and US), Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian communities and many more.
2. Is there any consideration or timeline for all "communities" to be merged into one international community?
I feel like the community is owed this answer even if there is no plans currently, since the communication and transparency has been so poor for over a decade that players need to understand what the actual results of these new mergers will bring. In my opinion this is a major determining factor in what type of server is worth my time to continue to play after these merges. While the community mergers are overdue by about 8-10 years this is an opportunity for GF to make right and create these international servers sooner than later.
In some other Gameforge games, communities are merged together, e.g. two UK and one US server become one EN server.
Or all languages (EN, US, ES, PT, ...) are combined on one server. This is then called an "international server".
If something like this will happen in BattleKnight in the futher, we will let you know.
3. Will there be any option for 1x Server characters to move to 5x or plans to eventually merge those servers together?
Similar to question two, this is also important for the community to understand. I worry that the standard servers are going to remain died even after this change as the current incentives bring no new players to these servers as new players will still be pushed to younger servers. I believe the rational behind 5X or higher servers should be allowing players to catch up to then eventually be combine to a main server? I personally think that 1x servers are outdated and were fine 10+ years ago but frankly the 4-5x servers should just be the normal speed and everyone should be combined together. For those that will complain that the 1x servers have existed longer see my sentence above this is offset by the server speed. Regardless, the more segregation (communities, speed of server, etc.) active players are forced into the more the community suffers in my opinion.
If this will be implimented into the game we will also inform you about this.
4. Will there be any modification to the current Castle system?
Even after these mergers I would be shocked if any server will maintain 50 active players on the server let alone within an alliance. Can these limits be removed or modified? In conjunction with the reply's above above inactive knights will have to be kept or multi-accounts will need to be allowed within the same alliance in order for us to actually field enough to continue raids. I saw a suggestion about the old raid system coming back which might be welcomed with combination of our current one. Either way something about this system needs to change unless there is a way to get hundreds of active users back into the same server. I'm by no means an expert on this so I'm sure someone has a better solution.
Regardless I am happy to play again even if it will be for 90 days before it turns back into the same old story. For the first time in 8 years I have loaded up on some Rubies and I feel that GF and the community should be given some credit here for doing something meaningful to the game we all enjoy. Hopefully, we can actually get some well deserved dialog since it seems like GF has not completely forgotten this game exists.
We currently have no information about this. Perhaps the merging should first take place without any problems.