Please do the server merge right. Don't rush it just to get it over with. Phinny players have over 5 years invested into their toons. Selo players have 2 years at this point. I'm sure we would all rather "rot" on our respective home TLP's for months (what's a few more anyways?) rather than lose progress we've earned just so things could be done hastily. Thanks.
My advice is to do transfers individually on your characters using the in game server transfer option and not wait when it will be done with the official merger. To mention both sides: Server merges are rare events, and they don't have the resources to keep a couple of servers just to test a server merger. Hopefully, they will learn from their mistakes last time, and it will go as smoothly as possible. They should take care they recognize players should be cognizant of potential issues with dragon cache, houses, and shared bank space. They don't want it to go bad as much as you do, as correcting problems at the individual player level is much more work than doing it right the first time. The development team rarely if ever implement a change without at least one set of revisions or bug fixes. They also are not good at communicating important information. Not everyone remembers or understands name conflicting policy when servers merge or if this will be different the prior server mergers. Expect that you may have items missing from any combination of the following: dragon cache (whatever it is called), house inventory, or shared bank. My money is on the fact that the dragon cache will cause issues. They purely have job security because it is uses archaic code and the large amount of time required of new developers to learn the system. A tangential note, it is surprising that developers have essentially shown they know how to remove truebox from an established server. Dreamweaver had mentioned at least once they may not know how to make changes like that once a server is established, removing vote requirement is another example.
Well, let's not count the chickens before they hatch, but assuming this is correct and they have found the "off" switch for Truebox, I hope they can restart the discussion around removing it from mature TLPs before they hit live.
Assume that anything related to your guilds housing will be wrecked when the merge occurs, so you may want to have members get the high value stuff out beforehand.
The "off switch" could be the fact that the whole server will be live status. It may not be an individual switch they found to remove truebox but keep everything else intact. I've always believed they could but I've also been dissapointed in them many times.
They have announced though that if you transfer, you lose all your Overseer stuff as the transfer system won't handle it. But allegedly it won't be lost if you wait for the merge. So that's a lot of $$ some people have invested that will be wasted and lost if they opt for the transfer option.
It might be possible to, instead of transitioning from a TLP/Truebox status, to live status, transition from a TLP/Truebox status to a TLP/non-Truebox status. If they are able to switch rulesets at all, which apparently they are, there may be no difference in difficulty between Phinigel changing to live ruleset and Phinigel changing to, say, Rizlona ruleset. If that's the case, then there should be nothing technological preventing them from changing, say, Mangler to Rizlona's ruleset once it hits SoD or wherever they want to set the line.
But if you're going this route and you're in a raiding guild wait until the last second. Selos is gaining loot over 6x faster than live currently. (1/2 raid lockout, 2x loot drops, 5x coin drops) If you hold off as long as possible you should be able to gear your main all the way up and get your alts partially geared before moving them.
Truebox on/off is not a software-"switch" - it requires a server downtime/patch to make the changes required. Free to play on/off is a software-"switch" and can be operated by the event system. Devs have said they do not want to change server rules after they are set pre-launch, I have argued they should be more flexible - it remains to be seen if my arguments, or those of other players have changed anything on that score.
