The sad thing is, I knew the complaint was going to be about Balmung before I even opened the thread.
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The sad thing is, I knew the complaint was going to be about Balmung before I even opened the thread.
NO.
SE need to get a backbone and just lock the server to all new characters. If they don't get a handle of this there will be overloaded servers struggling with the load and servers with very few people on it. Increasing capacity doesn't solve problems with people clustering to specific server, usually legacy. You are part of the reason why it's locked; you introduce new people to an already overfilled server. If you want to play with friends you either make a fresh character on another server or transfer off. SE should however offer free transfers off of high pop servers.
They have dozens of servers for a reason, someone has to populate the less popular worlds and make new communities. Having a friend invite system isn't much different from opening the gates, if someone has a server preference they will probably have a friend there that will invite them.
The above poster is right they actually should take a harder stance at least for new players, the lower pop servers are really suffering because of the insistence people put on being on one of a handful of worlds.
If you want a better solution to having friends cross-server, instead of insisting everyone is on one world and killing worlds how about just increasing the amount of things people can do cross-server? What about a cross-server PF or chat?
Population-wise, Balmung is actually not as large as some of the other servers out there. I have characters on both Gilgamesh and Balmung and I can say that the population on Gil is most definitely larger than the one on Balmung.
The problem on Balmung (that no one seems to want to talk about or address) is the fact that many, many people will go AFK for hours on end and remain logged in, thus taking up a login space on the server. I'm quite sure that Balmung would become much more accessible if they just reimplemented the AFK auto-kick feature.
Login is handled by a different server... AFK players don't impact logins anymore. We used to log directly in to the worlds originally, but they changed that up a long time ago with the addition of the intermediary servers (Aether, Primal, etc). The queuing and "full server" statuses are now triggered and managed at those lobby servers and not by the worlds themselves like they were at launch.
Why don't you just move to a different server instead of trying to make them join your over populated world?