I agree that having the community split in two is making it less of a tight nit community and is spreading an already thin population even more thin.
But you got to keep something in mind; people who play pve don't want to play the game; they just want a safe server to build vanity projects on where they can afk outside their tribe boarders without worrying about dying. In fact, they dislike being killed so much they complain about animals attacking them being a bad thing they want "dealt with"
How can you unite these people with a pvp minded server?
I'm sorry but at this point its too late, they are too spoiled and too used to getting what they want, they would never agree to giving up what they have in pve in order to rejoin a united pvp server.
I DO agree tho that having to make the Choice between servers is not a good thing... a solution could be possibly be making it so that your pve and pvp character are the same and stat gained on one transfers over to the other? This would mean you would have the same playable character regardless of the server your on, only items and tribe would be different...... I say this but I can see it being heavily abused by pvp people farming their stats on pve server.... so I'm not sure how there is a expolit free way to solve this.
I again DO agree with you that having no population on a game where "players are supposed to make the experience cuz theres no NPC's" ruins the experience, theres no quests, theres no players to interact with instead of NPC's, it ruins the entire concept of having players replace NPC's when there are no players.
My solution to this?
Bring f2p back but ONLY for pvp. I say only pvp cuz pve could not handle this, while pvp would appreciate the extra life injected into the server. f2p or paid doesn't matter to players when they have someone to play with, to trade and interact with.. someone who makes it seem like the server isn't dead and your not the only person playing the entire server.... I would heavily welcome f2p players on pvp since it would add much needed life to the server, since its unfun to play a game when your the only person playing it as you have pointed out.
The server merge will never happen cuz pve guys don't want pvp features.... and pvp people don't see the point in grinding stats on a pve server they can't actually use those stats verse anything in pvp, theres no need to grind 300+ hps if you never need those hps in pvp combat.
So while I agree with you that the server split was a huge mistake, it "is" what a small handful of pve people wanted and taking it away from them now would not work. At this point I think its a good thing to have a server that people can go play on if they don't want to play the whole game and instead just wana focus on vanity building, its better for them to only play half the game than quit all together.. where as if those vanity pve players who dont wana play anything but building where forced to merge with pvp, you would most likely see people freaking out to guides if anything happens to them and since thats a problem to jordi it wouldn't work since they are unable to tell players "thats how the game was designed" and isntead trys to "make the player happy" by using guide powers to solve their problems or interfere with player interactions... to say this another way, jordi doesn't have enough staff/guides to deal with all the complains from pve players if they merged servers.
However again I agree with you the pvp server is dead aside of maybe 4 active players that don't play at the same time often, so it seems even more dead... But forcing pve players to play with them is not a solution at this point.. However you are right, we do need more population in order to have a server with life, a server thats fun, a server worth playing... without that population, the pvp is boarderline not worth playing... thats why I've been suggseting to add f2p to pvp, this would add extra combat minded players and inject extra life, extra drama to the server that pvp really needs but pve would not want at all cuz it would cause "problems and more work for guides as they are forced to interfere between player interactions since thats what is expected on the peace/pve server" where on pvp guides could just ignore player interactions and let them sort things out themselves instead of getting inbetween every player interaction like on pve, they could just let things take its course on pvp, this means it wouldnt be causing problems they would need more staff/guides to deal with and it could honestly work to give more population to the server that needs it (pvp not pve) without flooding pve with players they dont want like f2p/pvp players.