Insane Queue's for Sortie

[Alhanelem]

No one plays on asura by choice. They play there because there is no choice.

Overcrowded or zero players. That's not a choice. (And pay $30 to look, that's insulting)

Hundreds of players is not zero players. I do sortie every day that I log in, and I have no problem finding people to do it with (if I want to form a party). I do not have a static. I'm in a linkshell that's mostly full whenever I'm on it. It's easy. And Zero waiting to get into sortie.

I feel like because of the number of bots on Asura that they think, "oht, there's 400 players online on this server, they must all be bots." No. Asura has disproportionately more bots for the number of actual players. Every server has bots, yes. But Asura has more as a percentage, I guarantee you.

I've been on Shiva since I started playing (within a month or so of the US launch). I've never felt the need to transfer to a more heavily populated server, either because I can't do content or being unable to find items I need on the AH. Lately we're sitting on 6-800 concurrent users (and that's still thousands of users over 24 hours). I can ask my linkshell or yell and find people to do whatever is popular no problem. You don't need 3000 players online to accomplish anything.

Now imagine if the top three servers (all well over 1000 spread their population amongst the rest, probably every current server would be sitting around 1000 or so, which is right on par with the way things were more than a decade ago.


Ultimately, there is a choice. Ausurans are just blind to that fact (if every one of them is using your logic, which I think sells the average player short.)

Balancing the servers would cause a loss of players.

No, it wouldn't. It would result in a better experience for everyone, and would far more likely gain players for the game.

Players that hop on Asura right now will likely find frustration waiting for content and competing with bots for EXP camps. That would be a thing of the past after balancing populations.

Players on most of the other servers currently would see an increase in population and an increase in items available on the AH, while still not having lengthy waits for content, because no server would be exceeding what the game was designed to handle.

From where I stand, everyone, and I mean everyone, gets a better experience if no server has too many or too few players. I promise you, your experience will be better. My experience will also be better (as long as we're not in the same party, probably). Seriously, everybody wins.

And sure, some people do want to be amongst big crowds all the time, that still doesn't mean it's healthy for the overall game as a whole. My suggestion to such people would be to play a game that's better built and designed to handle the size of crowds they find ideal. FFXI isn't good at handling crowds because of netcode and graphics engine limitations. FFXI's maximum display limit is what... 25 PCs/mobs/NPCs I think? Most modern games you can play today allow for a lot more.

The point is, FFXI wasn't really designed for the population that Asura has, And back when FFXI was at its most popular, no server had the population Asura currently has, I'm quite sure of it. And I promise if you took those people you say want to go where the crowds are and plugged them in to any random server after evening out the populations they wouldn't know the difference without using /sea all.

For sortie they disabled the automatic transport feature when your instance is ready (such that people who aren't alert and paying attention don't take up instance space I guess). But this applied to everyone on all servers, even though it was only really relevant for Asura. The rest of us got punished for a problem Asurans manufactured.