Petition to Lift Balmung Server Lock / Impact of Server Lock on FFXIV RP Community

[MistakeNot]

I mean no offense, but you likely have no foundation, experience, or understanding of the RP community. RP does not "flourish" on other servers when its participants are limited to a handful of sparsely populated link shells that throw a RP event once in a blue moon. If you've never been a part of a centralized RP community, it might be difficult to understand the importance of having a centralized hub. The reason that RP tends to gravitate to a centralized location is that RP requires such a thing to exist in the first place. Without having access to a community, participation in community activities is substantially more difficult.

Y'know, I transferred my main RP character away from Balmung to Omega when it opened. I am getting more RP there than I did on Balmung - while there are fewer RP events on Omega they are all during times suitable for my timezone, unlike Balmung where 95% of the events happened in the middle of the night for me.

RP does not require A central hub. It does require a certain critical mass of people to really be viable and sustainable, but the RP community in FFXIV is large enough to sustain more than one RP server.

[MichiKyou]

I'm kind of on the 'wanting it unlocked' side. Mostly, because I took a long absence. Half my friends left, but the other half still live on balmung and a lot of my friends want to reunite. RP servers do need some sort of central area. EU and US servers are fine to be seperate. But.. yeah, it'd be nice. A shame it'll never happen.

[NanaWiloh]

I'm kind of on the 'wanting it unlocked' side. Mostly, because I took a long absence. Half my friends left, but the other half still live on balmung and a lot of my friends want to reunite. RP servers do need some sort of central area. EU and US servers are fine to be seperate. But.. yeah, it'd be nice. A shame it'll never happen.

Aww Michikyou, Don't take the mind set of it will never happen. Balmung will be open again at some point its just going to take time.

[MichiKyou]

Aww Michikyou, Don't take the mind set of it will never happen. Balmung will be open again at some point its just going to take time.

Probably when i'm dead. ;-; I think my issue is, its very hard to recruit or meet new people when there are no new people on the server. It also does stagnate roleplay.

[Reinha]

(1) Unlocking Balmung is the single greatest act SE could do to support the RP community. <snip> Roleplayers rely on centralized locations and hubs to find roleplay.

(2) Prohibiting transfers to Balmung divides the gaming community and discourages potential subscribers from purchasing the game to play with their friends.

(3) There has been no evidence that Balmung’s population has caused server instability, or that the extraordinary act of barring all character creation and transfer to the server is necessary to abate any harms. <snip> "the server is locked because SE says its locked and SE is right because it says its right".

(4) The transfer prohibition threatens to further stagnate the Balmung RP community and divide roleplayers among dwindling populations on small servers. <snip> If SE believes Balmung’s population is excessive and requires a long-term lock, it should strongly consider designating an official RP server, and providing free transfer sot that server.

(5) If SE will not terminate this policy, it should at least disclose a firm date when the prohibitions will be lifted, so players can plan and play accordingly.

(1) The RP community on other servers has benefited greatly from the increased rp activity and on those servers they are able to make alts without paying a transfer fee. Centralizing RP on one server has proven to cause congestion (ongoing character creation restrictions, login queues) on that server. Also, many other games do just fine with multiple roleplaying servers. If you asked for a centralized place for roleplayers to connect and organize, like a roleplay area on this forum, I would support it. That place doesn't have to be, and cannot be, a game world with a population limit.

(2) There is some truth to this argument. One can also argue that a situation (which Balmung previously had) where one is required to pay a transfer fee to play with their friends, would also discourage potential new players from starting the game. The only situation where new players are not discouraged is the one where character creation is not restricted, and that is the situation the current policy is moving us towards.

(3) You are making a mistake here. There is no published evidence. Lack of public evidence does not mean there is a lack of evidence. SE does not have to show us their stats in order to be correct in the statements about congestion. What you call the fallacious argument 1 is actually "the server is locked because SE says so and SE is right because SE has access to all the data necessary to make an informed decision whereas the players don't". This translates as giving SE the benefit of the doubt. SE has also shown several times (Odin, Gilgamesh, Cerberus) that they will change the server status from congested to standard according to their internal data.

(4) Correct on the first point. That is one of the motivators to get people off the server so its population can stabilize at a lower level. However, smaller servers are not at risk to get smaller as you claim. Mateus went from being a preferred world to a standard world. Omega, a new world, became a standard world also. This suggests that other rp communities are in fact growing and not dwindling. It is now possible to join rp communities which are not locked from character creation of transfer. Official roleplaying servers are not required because roleplayers have the ability to decide this for themselves. As they did with Omega and Mateus. And transfers were free to those servers for a while.

(5) Disclosing dates would defeat the purpose of the lock, which is for old and new players to consider playing on other worlds. It's very unlikely they would ever release specific dates.

[Alien_Gamer]

Is this a real 9-page argument?

Or is this like...roleplay?

I thought it was entertainment, like one of those movies on Mystery Science Theater 3000?

[magnanimousCynic]

Didn't Balmung crash themselves during a Seasonal Event due to the extreme amount of people that tried to accept the quest?

[Lazaruz]

Argument in Support 1: Prohibiting transfers to Balmung divides the gaming community and discourages potential subscribers from purchasing the game to play with their friends.

If their inability to play with a friend makes or breaks the decision to subscribe to the game, FF14 is not for them to begin with, and it's only a matter of time before they permanently quit regardless. I've seen it happen first hand with people I've been in FC's with where they almost immediately left the game entirely upon someone else leaving

Argument in Support 2: There Is No Evidence That Balmung’s Current Server Population is Excessive or Detrimental.

Neither is there any proof that it isnt above or close to what the server hardware can reliably handle. And the absence of proof, is not the proof of absence.

But I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit anyway given the queues on Balmung during primetime and major content releases

Argument in Support 3: Prohibiting transfers to Balmung is devastating to the long-term viability and health of FFXIV’s large roleplay community.

So is hoarding it all on one single server, knowing full well that it cannot support every single person with a interest in participating. A healthy community would've spread itself out so you could possibly attract even more into the crowd, as I have no doubt there are those out there that could very well get into RP if they only got a good taste of it for FF14. (Only reason I'd even want to transfer to Balmung is in my experience no other server has that level of community due to hoarding the Roleplaying community). This is a player made problem to the outmost degree, and hypocritical in the extreme to blame SE for

But I guess it's more important to have a cool kids server then actually get a healthy community going. That way you have something to use as a shield when your toy gets taken away

Fallacious Argument 1: “Balmung is over populated, and SE will lift the server lock when it decides to.”

This argument is rooted in speculation, circular logic, and is not an argument in the first place. The argument amounts to little more than the following tautological nonsense: "the server is locked because SE says its locked and SE is right because it says its right." This is not valid reasoning or the basis of any respectable opinion. The entire point of this thread (and others like it) is to apprise the development team of the need to unlock the server.

No, it's not.

As we've seen many many times by now, SE both can and will unlock servers once population drops beyond what they consider a acceptable margin to the ideal max capacity, or how did you think Gilgamesh earned itself a unlock? It most deffinetely wasnt because of their players complaining on the forums days on end.

Balmung in all likelyhood needs a much more significant drop then many other servers, as while character creation remained lock, transfers didnt, and many people ACTIVELY advocated for using that loophole for getting on the server, which I can only assume contributed to further bloating of the population. It was only a matter of time untill SE had to put their foot down once the community refused to play ball with those whos job it is to make sure the game is both stable and playable for everyone.

Fallacious Argument 2: “The RP community doesn’t need one server, and can exist on multiple servers.”

I reffer you to my comment about Balmung's lock being "detrimental" to the RP community. Something I, just for the record find even more hillarious when you yourself pick appart that statement with

Servers serve no purpose to the RP community, and their only function is to divide an already small community across a pointless technical barrier.

If they dont serve any purpose because it "divides" the community, why are you enforcing said divide by trying to hoard it all on one single server?

Again, here's an idea, if you're afraid of how small your community is, maybe you should, oh i dont know, expose new people to it instead of hiding away in a corner? Your community wont grow if you dont allow it to grow in the first place


Conclusion: It's fine to be angry when your toy gets taken away from you. But atleast have the maturity to admit it instead of hiding behind easily deconstructed arguments

[Clover_Blake]

I am getting more RP there than I did on Balmung - while there are fewer RP events on Omega they are all during times suitable for my timezone, unlike Balmung where 95% of the events happened in the middle of the night for me.

RP does not require A central hub. It does require a certain critical mass of people to really be viable and sustainable, but the RP community in FFXIV is large enough to sustain more than one RP server.

You are getting more RP in an EU server because you are from EU (like myself), which doesn't mean that RP doesn't need a central hub. In fact, Omega has been chosen as the EU central hub, and I suspect that's why you might find enough RP there.

In any case, to everyone else, why is it that people who want Balmung open are causing you such distress? There's a lot of "oh gods not again" drama, simply because this is a matter that doesn't affect you at all, and thus you don't want to hear about it? But the people who are affected have all the right to tend to their own needs and to ask for things that will suit them, whether or not these things are convenient for you (or even your business to start with).

For the record, I'm from Balmung, but with me being from the EU and Balmung's constant restrictions, I don't RP with the community and I eventually lost every will to find a suitable FC or even socialize in general. This means that right now I don't really care if Balmung is open or closed, as it doesn't affect me anymore. I'm not defending OP because it suits me, but because OP has this problem which is ruining their gaming experience, and they have all the right to complain about it for as long as this problem continues. If it doesn't even affect you, then you have no business telling OP to not talk about their problem. Sorry about my bad English; just my two cents.

[Keridwyn]

In any case, to everyone else, why is it that people who want Balmung open are causing you such distress?

Because my server and several others share the Aether data center with the behemoth that is Balmung and there is at least one prior reported instance of Balmung crashing so hard it took the entire data center with it. If it was just you guys all alone out there on your own data center I wouldn't care but when there's a very real chance that your giant metropolis will explode and take my tiny suburb with it that's not right either is it? That's why so many of us say no every time this is brought up.

Also OP, how might we go about getting numbers you wouldn't consider 'tainted' by SE? You're predisposed to dismiss out of hand any argument using numbers generated by them but as they run the server equipment they're the only people in any position able to provide us with actual data. Do you have a suggestion on how to obtain data via another source and if so why are you not confronting them with the actual numbers? Otherwise all you have is hearsay and conjecture based on your limited observations. Or did you manage to line everyone on your server up in a conga line and count them? If so, color me impressed.