Arcueid
I mean, why should I continue to pay now? Free shards will pop up in no time.
Because oroginal shards will be stable, maintained by primary devs, best solutions from alter-shards will be merged here, storyline and events will continue, and your friends are here.
One more reason:
FSF
If you want to run your own server for the game, you have the software to do that, but you won't really have any world data—information about geography, special places, characters, quests, items, and so on—to run it with. Winch Gate Properties, the company that currently holds the copyright for all game materials and runs the official server, has decided not to release that data, to avoid causing disruption for their current player community. People who want to run their own server will need to develop their own world to do so—only a small test world comes with the code.