Insane Queue's for Sortie

[Alhanelem]

Keep telling yourself that

Copium

I will tell myself that, because it's true

[Alhanelem]

Would people be happy if Square forced a cap on Ul'dah of 50 people or wherever is popular these days to balance them out and people were forced to "hang out" in other cities too, or would that cause mass outrage and lead to people quitting?

Look ive said this way too many times already: I'm not suggesting they force people to do anything. All they need to do is copy FFXIV's system of marking worlds as "Congested" and "Preferred." Offer bonuses for creating characters on preferred worlds, and offer free transfers from worlds marked as congested, with relaxed limits on gil transferrable, etc. It won't solve overnight, but it will make plain to people who can't see it that the world(s) are officially overcrowded. Give bonuses to EXP and whatnot for a period of time after transferring off, free passes for content with costs associated with it, etc. I can guarantee you at least some percentage of people would transfer for p erks like that (and being able to take more gil with them will boost the economies of the servers they transfer to). They should end the occasional sales on server transfers and instead have high-to-low-pop transfers always free and other transfers always full price.

FFXIV already does all this and it works- it proves especially effective at populating new servers as well (though that's not something FFXI has to deal with sadly)


This one would be more controversial but maybe a free wardrobe for a period of time could be another perk, which might even have the perk to SE of increasing sales for it later.

You don't force people to move, you give them incentives. I'm not proposing world mergers or splits.

[Immortal]

Sorry 600 or less people online... depressing. I think server mergers would be healthy. We dont need this many servers if they arent going to invest more resources into the game.

[Sp1cyryan]

Sorry 600 or less people online... depressing. I think server mergers would be healthy. We dont need this many servers if they arent going to invest more resources into the game.

People have been saying this for the last 7 years or something. It's time to stop and if they do it then they will just do it.

[Pixela]

Sorry 600 or less people online... depressing. I think server mergers would be healthy. We dont need this many servers if they arent going to invest more resources into the game.

To you, to the people on the smaller servers they like it the way it is.

[Alhanelem]

Sorry 600 or less people online... depressing.

It's not depressing to me. It's still plenty enough. I see people in all the towns and I have a 100% full linkshell to talk to and get help from. Why should I be depressed?

And you seemingly glossed over the fact that I posed the question to my linkshell if anyone here thought they couldn't accomplish what they wanted to accomplish here. No one said they couldn't.

And 600 concurrent users is still thousands over the course of a day. It's also an increase over a few years ago, and I've seen it over 1000 during free campaigns.

We don't need server mergers or splits. We need population balancing.

To you, to the people on the smaller servers they like it the way it is.

I wouldn't mind more players. But it's also not the problem "Must have huge server" people think it is. I'm 100% okay where I am. There's minimal bots by comparison, and I can still get things done. No troubles finding EXP camps (quality of parties may vary), etc. But we can certainly have more and it won't be detrimnetal. Optimal current pop to me is probably around 1000 +-100.

A few hundred off the three biggest servers would significantly cut down on those 1-2 hours Sortie queues, while we can definitely accept more players before there's any wait at all.

People have been saying this for the last 7 years or something. It's time to stop and if they do it then they will just do it.

This whole debate can be settled without server mergers/splits or forcing anyone to do anything. We don't need to split asura, which would piss a lot of people there off, nor do we need mergers, which would also piss some people off. All we need are incentives. Then people who are like "these 2 hour sortie queues suck" will notice "hey, SE is offering free transfers out of here, maybe I'll see if things are better somewhere else. What have I got to lose?"

(As an aside, server mergers would be really bad publicity spawning all sorts of "game is dying" news and discussion even though my observation is the overall population has been stable for quite some time.)

[Pixela]

Something people really do need to keep in mind is that FFXI is not a pure PVE game, it's what you can call a competitive PVE game.

What I mean by that is that unlike most modern PVE games everything on FFXI is limited, and you have to compete to access them. It has always been this way, and for players that don't want to bother with that a smaller server is always going to be better to them.

If you want to mine or kill a random NM, other people want it too and if they get it you're not. If you want to gain merits or job points at your fav spot, someone else might be there. If you want to make an EMP, you're going to have to fight for it on Asura because others want it. If you want to enter any content, it's limited.

It's really no different today than it was 10 years ago when we were fighting over king drops.

Asura is dog eat dog, other servers are far less stressful.

There has been a lot of arguments lately on New World, where all servers hard cap at 2k players. People have been asking them to lower this cap because more players means more competition for resources.

People always tend to only fixate on the positives of their arguments and not the negatives.

[Alhanelem]

People always tend to only fixate on the positives of their arguments and not the negatives.

I'm not doing that. I know that no solution to any problem is perfect. But we can try to min-max the downsides and upsides.. Which is why I said that merges or splits are not a great solution. Both will cause a group of people to be very upst. But when you provide a solution that's totally voluntary, You aren't likely to upset anyone, and conditions will at least modestly improve on both the highest and lowest pop servers.

The goal here is to reach an equalibrium, an optimal state. Optimal != perfect, but rather just "best possible." There is no perfect solution. But the only downside from offering free transfers off certain servers is a little less money for SE (But they're still getting money from people who transfer TO those servers).

[Sp1cyryan]

People always tend to only fixate on the positives of their arguments and not the negatives.

Yes, and irony too. They never notice it.

[zataz]

Except they really don't, because they're complaining about long waits for content, insane amounts of bots, etc.. Problems explicitly caused by overcrowding.

That's not something you say when you like the way things are. If people move, there will be more people wherever they go. No one likes waiting hours for sortie, no one likes not being able to find an ML grinding camp, no one likes a million RMT bots. They *sign up* to asura because either they know someone there or becuase Reddit recommended they go there, and no other reason. Asurans created the problems they're having by piling on that server. The game was not designed for the player load Asura has. Even at FFXI's peak, no server had as many players as Asura has now.

Ultimately, you have no right to complain about the problems Asura has if you "like it that way." These are problems that purely exist because of the overpopulation. Meanwhile, on other servers, we get punished with the loss of features that worked just fine just because Asura can't handle it. And you all want special fixes that only your server needs that will affect everyone.

It is not a healthy situation, period. Balanced. Populations. Serve. Everyone. Better.

You know I'll say it. I don't care for asura. too many bots (pink bird camp) after this coming week I'll be going back to ragnarok while I have a few friends. I do worry about finding a decent ls. Also I find it hard to find a good quality ls... (ones that don't poke at me over my afterglowed ochain ) I'm tired of the lower end player base that is asura. While my xp isn't everyone's I do feel people are over looked by most cause of rampant rmt issues. Why level with me when I can work sleep and get NY masterlevels.