Age of Conan Server Merge Detailed

With Age of Conan active user numbers dropping, the inevitable and ominous server merges begin. Massively gathers details from AoC director Craig Morrison's comments.
Here are the highlights:

* All servers will not be merged at once. Instead, they'll be staged with "Hyberborea" and "Bloodspire" seeing a merger during this week's patching.
* During downtimes when servers are merged, all servers from that region will be unavailable. So this week, all US servers will be down while the two above are fused. Funcom is going to provide compensatory playtime to users affected by these outages.
* After the servers are merged, all players on the resulting server will be given a free one-time-use character transfer if they want to move their primary character to another server. They're doing this to ensure players like where they end up.