How in the world would they know when the population numbers will stabilize?
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I mean, you're right, but what I'm saying is that "population" is not particularly precise.
Is SE measuring only the amount of characters on Balmung? The amount of active connections? The number of active characters based on the data that gets refreshed from the Lodestone? If people just stopped playing the game, would that tell Square that people are moving away from Balmung when they're really not just logging in any more?
I have no plans to transfer servers, but I approve of designating an official RP server and making transfers free. I see a couple of logistical issues though:
1. Extreme variation in server's economies and accumulated wealth. Paying 5-10 million gil for Item X on Server A might be common, whereas the going price on Server B might be 500,000-1 million or less. Allowing character transfers from a variety of servers along with all of their liquid assets will create a very unstable economy and cause folks from a low-cost server to no longer be able to purchase items due to extreme inflation.
2. What to do about housing? If two or three players who own a house in the same ward and same plot transfer over with all of their real estate, who's going to end up getting the plot? Are the other players going to automatically get the same size plot in the same ward or the same plot in a different ward? What if there's nothing available when they transfer? They've just lost their house and any investments they've made into it.
Otherwise, I hope SE does create or designate an official RP server for y'all.
I can only see point 1 happening if everyone from Server A moved to Server B, instead of spreading out into Server C, D, E, etc.. If all the people that decided to move did spread out into all the servers, their impact on each of ther other server's market will be minimal, and they'll most like adjust to it then the market adjusting to them.
For point 2, and this is only a prediction, but I suspect that SE will consider creating new Wards for all the worlds, and if a person that owns a house In Ward 5, plot 5 transfers servers, but there is already a house in that same plot, they would most likely be set up in the new ward instead. At least, that's how I would do it if I had the resources to do so.
Both of you are misunderstanding why those attempts have failed. The $18 transfer fee per person is the primary reason that the large seed groups that are needed to create a stable RP groups are unwilling/unable to transfer away from Balmung. It costs $18 for 1 characters, $900 for 50 characters, $4,500 for 250 characters, and $18,000 for 1000 characters. As the total rises players are less able to justify the fee.
Well it's not just the fees. If you don't have a large enough populated amount of groups in the community, eventually a group of 200 players will end up stagnating. Like, 7 FCs of 30 people with a total of 4 linkshells isn't able to sustain a large variety of people without starting to see a type of cannibalizing effect because of stagnation.
Quite exaggerating on XIV can only have 40 characters max per account anyways. Sorry they have all 40 characters slot filled (8 per server) but it only $18 per transfer and can do all the characters that are on the same server and transfer them to the same new server for the one price.