Why do you need it defined for you? It should be self evident. But fine, let me spoon feed you and maybe you can wrap your mind around it with a few more words: The ~700 maximum concurrent players that p99 servers saw before the merger was much fewer than what live servers in 1999 saw. And it's stable because it's stable. There hasn't been a significant exodus of players since the merger and the concurrent peak player counts have remained about the same since the merger.

Yeah what I've noticed is the anti-merge crowd seems to parrot this saying that we've been losing hundreds and hundred of players due to the merge, when the pop has been stable since it happened