Are we getting a server merge soon?

[BBWallace]

People won't be happy till this game is dead.

[Amalon]

I'm seeing alot of arguments just skimming over all the posts here, and valid points brought up on all sides concerning the drop in population of alot of the servers. Simple fact of the matter here now is that something does need to get done whether its a server merge, or either giving everyone a one time free transfer to move to another server or just removing the world transfer fee.

I only play now during the free log in campaigns simply because my server Quetzalcoatl is literally dead, there was only about 265 people on that server when I checked during this last free log in campaign. When I stopped playing there was less than 1000 people left on the server and no one did shouts for anything anymore its literally been dead for about a year and a half to 2 years now. I can remember way back when there was over 3000, 4000, and 5000 players on the server yea sometimes things got a bit laggy in busier areas but it was always very active. From what I've been seeing there is alot of servers now that have basicly died out and lots of people like me that have or are looking at stopping playing because of it and feeling tht we shouldn't have to pay to transfer from a dead server.

Personally i think if something isn't going to get done about a server merge or removing the fee to do world transfers then Square Enix should just be shutting the entire game down. It was a great game but its become a shadow of its former glory!!

[Diavolo]

I wonder how much more willing the dev team would be to undergo another round of server merges if they were able to delete characters that failed to meet certain criteria beforehand, such as having accumulated X amount of playtime and having been active at least once in the last year. I imagine the headache caused by the large scale character renaming process associated with a merge would be much easier to bear if that were to happen.

[lllen]

Having survived one server merge, Hades to Cerberus it was't so bad, it was nice to see couple thousand + people playing, big headache was the dynamis schedule...remember those. I immigrated to Asura end of March, Cerberus would have 250-300 people listed, you would go to Jueno and see 2 people moving...use to be lag city. I made mules and played on several servers before going to Asura. $1 for a test run was easy way to see what is going on. I play solo now, had my fill of 7 days a week every evening end game runs (but I'll never forget the fun and drudgery of getting Dio), most of my friends were young and now have families (I'm old) so they are no longer playing. But their is a warm fuzzy feeling see people running around everywhere, even in Bastok.

The dynamics of the game has changed, mainly because the players as a whole have grown up playing this game, rl has a way of interfering few have the time to be in game for hours. I agree a merge would be a good thing, but even better would be for SE to have a free transfer period and let people readjust the servers, self leveling you might say. Only one problem, what if only 50 people left on server...do you force them to move or automatically move them. I can see other problems with free transfers so not sure what the best answer is at the moment. But I do think something needs to be done.

Just thought of another old time thing, remember when you couldn't find a camp in the dunes.

[Amalon]

One thing i have thought about with doing free world transfers is that I think the world transfer system is set up for both FF11 and FF14 because both games are run through the square enix account management.

One idea that had gotten formed on another thread I had started was to do some type of expansion/add-on/quest idea where you could go back and forth between FF11 and FF14 and either your character from the one game gets converted to the equivalent it would be on the other game or you have a character made for both games and can switch to that character while in a lobby that is set up in between the 2 games. That could improve the server populations for FF11 by people wanting to return to FF11 to play a little there as well as players that are currently on FF14 that have never played FF11 to explore and play FF11.

[Limecat]

One idea that had gotten formed on another thread I had started was to do some type of expansion/add-on/quest idea where you could go back and forth between FF11 and FF14

That was actually one of the early ideas SE was kicking around during the 1.x days, a way to link your new XIV character/account to your XI one so that you could basically walk through a shining door in either game to transition to the other one. In the end they gave up on it as being far too complex to mess with, to say nothing of oddities arising from trying to launch two different engines from inside one unified UI. Would have been pretty cool if it could have been pulled off. Maybe we'll get lucky and someday they'll have an opt-in rebuild of the game that uses XIV's engine/UI at least.

[Amalon]

That was actually one of the early ideas SE was kicking around during the 1.x days, a way to link your new XIV character/account to your XI one so that you could basically walk through a shining door in either game to transition to the other one. In the end they gave up on it as being far too complex to mess with, to say nothing of oddities arising from trying to launch two different engines from inside one unified UI. Would have been pretty cool if it could have been pulled off. Maybe we'll get lucky and someday they'll have an opt-in rebuild of the game that uses XIV's engine/UI at least.

Thinking about it now I think I recall something about that from back then, but if they set up a lobby for the transition where you basicly log out from the one then log into the other game, it would be similar to doing stuff through the mog station and selecting something like add crysta and it switches you over to the Square Enix account management page to do it.

[OmnysValefor]

That was actually one of the early ideas SE was kicking around during the 1.x days, a way to link your new XIV character/account to your XI one so that you could basically walk through a shining door in either game to transition to the other one.

I've never heard anything like this. Any source?

As a one-way passage, it could easily work. As a two-way door, problems would be had. For instance, XIV wouldn't have to use XI character models, they could just use XIV character-creator presets that closely matched XI models.

It can't be any more than cosmetic similarity of characters, as the gear and mechanics in XIV have always worked very different from XI (fulltiming a set, vs macroing in pieces)