from those 3.000 if gm remove orc bots / ertheia bots im sure numbers will decrease to 2.000k at least. Then remove afk shops that make lags at cities and afk toons and we will get like 1.000-1200 ppl max so we can merge naia and chronos to get a decent server with 3k ppl without afk bots.
max server can handle without becoming unstable is 5.8k concurrent players even though at 1 point we had 6.3k
now the 1 thing ppl seems to overlook here is that current max online numbers are not the same as max amount of active players on the server.. it's possible for Chronos to have an actual player base of say 20+k with play times spread all over the day / week so NC has to take that in consideration as well when looking at mergers - only NC knows the real amount of unique distinct active players.
regardless there are moments like on Siege days where both Naia and Chronos hit 4+k players so yeah a merger between those 2 is not going to happen.
But that's a problem that concerns all PC-based games, especially in Asia where companies like NCsoft used to make a real lot of money from the PC-cafe culture. With the advent of social networks and the smartphone that culture came to an end - you simply don't find groups of 7 or 9 players (Talking Island is a Classic server) who would be willing to sit on their chair for several hours, doing nothing but hunting, without checking whether they got any new messages on WhatsApp.