Everyone wants to be where all the happenings are, which in this case was Balmung.
The only solution which would be ideal for player particupation with each other is megaservers, but with economies/housing, that's a cluster of a mess.
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Everyone wants to be where all the happenings are, which in this case was Balmung.
The only solution which would be ideal for player particupation with each other is megaservers, but with economies/housing, that's a cluster of a mess.
Let's not be rude guys!
I understand wanting to put your input, but your first comment. And this comment actually... Don't contribute any ideas or suggestions to the original post. They're not very helpful. They just sound kind of short and rude imo.
Do you have any solution as to what people should do?
For me personally I don't think closing Balmung has helped. It keeps several of my friends from playing with me. If I wanted to help craft them cute/cool/helpful armor and we started on a new server? I'd have to level all my crafts and gathering on one of my alts to 50 all over again. Y i k e s. It kind of really sucks.
Unfortunately the population hasn't stabilized since they shut down Balmung. It probably won't because people don't want to leave an established server we clung to for Roleplay in the beginning. There's not enough incentive to leave compared to the incentive to stay. I lose my house I worked hard to get. I lose contact with buds on Balmung, and the ability to scuttle all over the furniture in their home.
That's not very fun! It's not a very great solution. In fact it's been more hurtful than anything to my enjoyment of the game on the server that they gave me the option to pick.
It's not a technical problem. It's a hardware, possibly networking limitation. And yes, while the devs did help create this situation by not having a more robust back-end (or by not limiting server pop before it became problematic), they did include server recommendations based on server population. So if players ignored that and continued to create characters on a full pop server, that is indeed a problem that the players created themselves.
Honestly, the best solution at this point might be a server split with no incoming transfers/new accounts for a time. and then set the server pop locks well under the actual limit across all servers to prevent this from happening again.
An official roleplay server wouldn't prevent congestion. In fact, it would be the start all over again. I can count more people on Balmung who were there for the community aspect than those roleplaying. The largest appeal to Balmung wasn't actually roleplay but the big city appeal it fostered. You had roleplayers keeping the city-states and small pockets areas active, raiders of all variants, crafters, and etc. Balmung basically did everything. Why Cactuar and Levi have exploded in popularity isn't due to roleplay, which neither server promotes, but they have a similar big city aspect going. Mateus adds roleplay to the mix, hence it's insane growth. Now I wholeheartedly agree incentives need to be significantly better since you only get anything at all for going to preferred worlds, and even that isn't great. Alas, they aren't going to open either server nor is your initial statement correct. Square only cares about the mass server population, which locking down both Balmung and Gilgamesh has worked to quell their numbers.
Define "working". The lock is actually working "as intended", that is, the servers slowly bleed players. And if people actually pay for a transfer elsewhere, all the more money for them - we call that "side benefits".
I dunno. If you leave the perspective of the players on the servers and instead take the perspective of the company, the lock is a raging success. Well, until a significant amount of people unsubs over it. But really, who does?
It absolutely is working, though. Balmung is still one of the largest servers and now, finally, Mateus and Omega are shining as alternative options for those seeking role-play. Making a specific server into an official role-play server is not going to change anything. Far too many people will just flock there and then when it inevitably gets bloated it will be locked and it will result in the exact same predicament.
I'm inclined to say that's already happening - According to the last unofficial census, Leviathan has already beat Gilgamesh in active players with Cactuar not far behind. I think people who used the free transfer should soon be able to switch again as well, so I expect regret-transfers off the unpopulated servers as well.
I have a penchant for burning things, so I am looking forward to observe the development further.