Merge the darn servers already!

[Stompa]

My server has like maybe 800 at peak. Usually closer to 350. A few years ago there used to be 2500 at any given time. I highly doubt that server overload is a thing.

Yes. But back in the 2500 players per server days, those 2500 players did not have trusts or ilvl gear. The old 75-era content was manpower-intensive, you needed a lot of people for most events and also xp/merit parties. Even in the early Aby years you needed alliance for serious farming.

Today a player with 119 gear set, and five trusts in their solo party, can solo most things in the game. Even areas where trust is not allowed, a 119 player can solo and clear whole zones of mobs without problems.

I define congestion overload not in population numbers, but in player-power vs. events. Currently I never need to form parties for Meebles, I just go and solo it, and the same with other events. Most people seem to do the same. This is different to when Meebles required 6/6 people just to win. That means that you got 6 players through the instanced zone at the same time. Now it is six times longer, because there are six solo players. The same at Jobpoints camps etc. If you see a few Soulpyres on the way to the camp, that means somebody else is soloing there and will want to keep soloing with their five glowy trusts, so you have to find another camp. In the past, 6 players could use the same xp camp, now each of those players is heading to six different camps with their trusts.

And the situation today works. But if you look at this last RoV chapter updates, with the new battlefields which are extremely popular, and project forward, let's say that the final content this year is some major popular event with a lot of pulling power, it is possible that the many ex-players who were undecided about returning, will return at the end of this year. And if we have merged servers before then, and people soloing with 5 trusts each, plus returning players, would mean that a lot of camps and instanced battles became heavily congested. So I think SE are waiting to see what the server populations are like, after they release the grand-finale content. If this final firework show does not draw crowds, I imagine server merges would follow. I know about fifty serious ffxi players who are undecided on returning to the game, some real dynamite content would bring most of those players back, and then multiply this across all servers.

[bazookatooth]

Yes. But back in the 2500 players per server days, those 2500 players did not have trusts or ilvl gear. The old 75-era content was manpower-intensive, you needed a lot of people for most events and also xp/merit parties. Even in the early Aby years you needed alliance for serious farming.

Today a player with 119 gear set, and five trusts in their solo party, can solo most things in the game. Even areas where trust is not allowed, a 119 player can solo and clear whole zones of mobs without problems.

I define congestion overload not in population numbers, but in player-power vs. events. Currently I never need to form parties for Meebles, I just go and solo it, and the same with other events. Most people seem to do the same. This is different to when Meebles required 6/6 people just to win. That means that you got 6 players through the instanced zone at the same time. Now it is six times longer, because there are six solo players. The same at Jobpoints camps etc. If you see a few Soulpyres on the way to the camp, that means somebody else is soloing there and will want to keep soloing with their five glowy trusts, so you have to find another camp. In the past, 6 players could use the same xp camp, now each of those players is heading to six different camps with their trusts.

And the situation today works. But if you look at this last RoV chapter updates, with the new battlefields which are extremely popular, and project forward, let's say that the final content this year is some major popular event with a lot of pulling power, it is possible that the many ex-players who were undecided about returning, will return at the end of this year. And if we have merged servers before then, and people soloing with 5 trusts each, plus returning players, would mean that a lot of camps and instanced battles became heavily congested. So I think SE are waiting to see what the server populations are like, after they release the grand-finale content. If this final firework show does not draw crowds, I imagine server merges would follow. I know about fifty serious ffxi players who are undecided on returning to the game, some real dynamite content would bring most of those players back, and then multiply this across all servers.

crowding in events and camps is a matter of poor planning on SE's part. They could make more instances of new events. They could make more viable exp camps. 90% of adoulin areas go completely unused because the mobs there suck / are too low level to be worth while. The same goes for Escha. Most of it is just space that people run through once and never visit again unless the ??? at another spot is being used. All this stuff could be fixed by adjusting some mob levels and / or how many pops there are. Personally, I much preferred having a ??? claim war in abyssea to standing around shouting for people for UC, Vagary, Etc. because nobody cares. People solo Exp because of SEs decision to force people to be on the job that they are earning the JP for. A party of 6 paladins sucks, so people are forced to solo. Again. bad planning on SE's part that could easily be fixed by making JP like merits without leaving all the servers dead.


Let's be honest. We're at 2/3 of the last major updates and have seen no major uptick in server populations. Many servers have less people. That giant rush at the end isn't going to happen and everyone knows it. And whatever servers get shutdown in a merge can be repurposed for instances, so that solves that anyways.

[bazookatooth]

Yes we are at 2/3 and only a few people have re-subbed for this, so far. We might see more people re-subbing in the next few weeks, because of the very popular Sinister Reign which has been described as "best new content in many years" by numerous veterans. When that kind of feedback reaches the ears of people who are considering re-subbing, we might see people coming back very soon.

On the 3/3 RoV, it is the grand finale, and so has the potential to blow all earlier updates out of the water. SE promised to make the last content "worthy of FFXI history" and they wanted to make it the best content ever. Also they will probably be wanting to add some serious challenging and rewarding long-term content, to keep people busy after the updates stop. If this content is awesome, we may well see a major avalanche of account re-subbing this Winter.

We both agree that the instanced/overcrowding is a longterm issue and could have been changed earlier. I call it the "Oversized Sock Factor." I went 0/100 on oversized sock sub-boss pop, on Thief. This is unusual, but it shows that random fails in sub-pops can result in a single player clearing the whole area of mobs over and over, just for a sub-boss trigger. If another player wants to farm it, they are out of luck.

The system was designed for parties in level 80~ gear killing those mobs slowly, automatically allowing mob repop and farming opportunities for other parties. But now with 119 set, one player can kill all the mobs, combined with the random Sock Factor, may be killing those mobs for a long time. This system is unsustainable unless there is only one person wanting the Sock, or the drop rate goes to 1/1, or the random 0/100 Sock Factor is cancelled entirely.

And that applies to other similar zones which were built for the 75-99 level parties, and are now being scorched by 119 solo players. It would take a huge amount of effort to rebalance everything. And if you server merge, you will get double the amount of people wanting to farm areas XYZ.

I have never really said I am against server merges, infact I agree with you that server merges are inevitable, and that a distant future FFXI would have to be mono-server.

I just said that merging the post-ilvl worlds would require tweaking of some areas and content. And that SE are probably waiting until the grand-finale content has been released and reviewed by FFXI fans, both current players and potentially returning players.

Sinister Reign is great, but just it's not going to bring substantial numbers of players back (if any). It's only one BCNM and I bet you that it will die off almost completely before the next update comes out. The truth of the matter is that they are probably putting this off because they are working on the final updates and could care less about server populations. I'd bet that they feel the same way as me about the chances of a mass return player population. They just can't be arsed to spend time on a merge until they are finished making content. Which sucks because we need one.

As for your sock thing. SE could (and probably did) predict that. They don't care. There's very little of any consequence in the game like that for a reason. SE stopped making people compete over pops and spawns for the most part to solve that. There are still some areas that could use a little work, but it doesn't significantly impact game play these days. The only glaring problem ATM is Exp/CP/Silt camp crowding and / or the lack of viable camps. Which like I said, could easily be resolved by changing the level/repop time/number of mobs in various already existing and otherwise uncrowded zones and should have been done before the CP system was ever introduced. 3 or 4 bsts or blus or blms or w/e AOE job can basically dominate all the CP camps in zitah and then they come out with Ru'Aun which isn't much better. If there's 20 people in either of the escha zones (which are huge), they are overcrowded ATM due to poor mob placement. That's bad planning and should be fixed immediately seeing as it is the bulk of relevant content at this point regardless of whether they merge servers.

They could also remove the job specification from JP so that people could farm JP on any job and spend them on another. I know and understand why some people like that feature, but it also forces people to solo most of the time because you can't form a functioning party if all the bards, cors, whms etc. have already capped JP. It was completely predictable and should have never happened.

There could be 10 people on any server and that would still be too many people doing silt farming at once. They could also remedy this by lowering the silt requirements for pops to like 100 and remove those ridiculous 50K vorseals so that people don't feel obligated to do all their CP farming in escha zones. Or just allow people to gain silt outside of escha in other CP camp areas like woh and doh.


TLDR; there's a million easy ways to compensate for whatever overcrowding that might (but isn't actually) going to happen.