A humble request to Square Enix: please unlock Gilgamesh.

I'm wondering if it would be possible for SE to cull inactives from servers.

Say they take accounts that have not played in a year. They don't have any items on the market board. They don't have houses. SE should find a way to move inactives to a limbo area and if/when the account owner returns to the game, they are prompted with a "which server do you want to join" message that gives them the pick of open servers at the time.

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Originally Posted by Zygous

I'm wondering if it would be possible for SE to cull inactives from servers.

Say they take accounts that have not played in a year. They don't have any items on the market board. They don't have houses. SE should find a way to move inactives to a limbo area and if/when the account owner returns to the game, they are prompted with a "which server do you want to join" message that gives them the pick of open servers at the time.

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Of course they could do that, but what would be the point?
Inactive players do not count when deciding if a server is congested or preferred, or if character creation is turned off. All such is based on number of active players.
Moving long-time inactive accounts would not change anything for the active players - except maybe free up some names.

I also vote for Gilgamesh to be unlocked. The lock out at this point is feeling like prison honestly. I actually transferred to Gilgamesh before the lock out happened, and when i was new here it was a large thriving community. Now it's just a ghost town in comparison, with no new players or friends to join us, along with the Server slowly bleeding active players over time. :(

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Of course they could do that, but what would be the point?
Inactive players do not count when deciding if a server is congested or preferred, or if character creation is turned off. All such is based on number of active players.
Moving long-time inactive accounts would not change anything for the active players - except maybe free up some names.

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I'd not heard this before and was under the impression that inactive accounts still take up space on the server that could be used for new players. However, I don't want to beleive something just because you said so. Could I trouble you to cite the source of this info from the devs?

My two cents as a resident of Gilgamesh since aroudn 2.2/2.3. I agree with some points and disagree with some points, and i may be a little redundant, I apologize. Gilgamesh is definitely stagnating for a couple of reasons. Unlike Balmung which attracted players who are more likely to play the game at a more consistent pace, Gilgamesh attracted raiders, who are more likely to play the game in spikes around major content releases and settle into raid-logging. This was frequently tempered in the past by a combo of the ultra involved players, crafters, gatherers, achievement hunters (I see you!) along with new players keeping things fresh and modestly active at various levels. Without those new people giving fresh blood and dynamism in the server world, all we see is the raid loggers and we only see the population dwindle further in a feedback loop that sees the people who want to feel more community to transfer off. A quiet Gridania or Kugane or Ishgard to me doesn't really indicate the health of a server. Its just an arbitrary feeling of where players like to cluster. It doesn't do anything for me to see 100 people idling around a crystal or a market board or summoning bell. If it does for you, then I'm not sure what to say....but I don't think that's a server population problem, i think its "this is largely a theme park MMO" fact, not problem. It just is what it is. Gilgamesh still sees treasure hunt activity and significant hunt activity especially in SB zones so I'm not really buying the "totally dead" argument. mostly vacant overworld zones has been a thing in this game ever since the first run to 50 on ARR launch, Atma and Luminous Crystal grind excepted.

This also has caused (and will continue to worsen) markets to dry up as customers for lower level mats and gear are non-existent (even SB stuff is dirt cheap and has been for a while). Each person who gets a minion is one fewer customer for that minion with no one to replace them in the demand-curve. The supply continues to increase and potential customers for various markets will only continue to decline as fewer and fewer people need that Toadskin Jerkin, that Zu Mount, that Wind-up Shiva, that Ao Dai, etc. This gives the pro MB masters, the crafters, the gathers fewer incentives to engage in those activities, and contributes to the feeling of deadness and lack of things to do and crashing prices.

Now, this isn't as simple as just saying we're dead open the floodgates again. Because we have a raid-logging community, while the overworld may SEEM dead, there are actually still tons of characters on our server, and when the next major raid comes out, and especially when the next expansion comes out, all those characters will log back in, and if we've re-opened the flood gates of transfers and creation back in, we could see a server stability problem on our hands again. So I recognize the solution isn't simple.

I think the main point I want make is this: the current combination of locking and incentives has worked on most of the people it's going to work on, and its now starting to degrade the experience of the player base at large, so a new mix has to be figured out if SE believes we still need more characters off of Gilgamesh but make a better environment for the server. Right now having the server locked, for some people will actually make the incentive to stay on Gilgamesh STRONGER. (not everyone, some). If you aren't able to get back on the server one day, some are going to be more hesitant to make that permanent move. Further, the people that were convinced to transfer by and large had probably pretty loose ties to their in-game community. There are some that probably left things behind they didn't want to, but overall, there are people who play the game PRIMARILY to be with their in-game community whether that's RPing, raiding, or anything in between. Much of this activity is centered around the FC, and part of the benefit of being in the FC is the housing (I'll go off that deep end in a second). So if you're in an FC you like, you may not enjoy the environment of the server, but there's too much incentive to stay with your FC which is trapped on your server. Small FCs of 10people may be agile enough to coordinate a move, but you quickly reach a breaking point where you're not going to all agree as an FC, and either the FC gets stuck or some people get left behind. More likely the FC will stick (especially with housing being a now non-existent resource). Cross-server PF helps with this. Cross-server LS will help with this, but its still not perfect, because its still limited to Data Center, and it will never be able to include FCs with the way the game is currently structured on a fundamental level.

Anecdotally for me, I very much like being in my FC and have zero interest in leaving, however when my BF started playing recently, I couldn't bring him on to my server. We could still party together with the new PF systems and I could help him with dungeons, but our characters can't interact in regular stuff. I can't help him explore or go raise him when he dies to a boss FATE. I can't give himi a chunk of gil to help him get good gear. I can't craft him anything. But the in-game incentives to stay with my FC on my server are just way too strong for me to move my main character off. I can make an alt character, but that's not a very good solution and doesn't solve most of the issues I've mentioned. If he were on my server I'd be incentivized to get stuff of MB to help him with gear, give him some minions, etc. I'd help him with fates in lower level zones. I'd be taking him around giving the overworld a bit more activity. I could hunt with him and do treasure maps with him. It'd be new blood in the markets to shift the demand curve back to a better equilibrium. I am certain this is not the only story like this out there, and when you aggregate the loss of all the new player activity you end up with a very significant and growing problem of stagnation, to bring us full circle.

I don't have many solutions, but I would agree that the current set up has run its course of usefulness and I hope SE is able to find a way to still protect server population balance while also allowing life to flow a bit more freely on gilgamesh again. Else they'll need to come up with ways to incentivize and facilitate large FC's moving servers, which would also require them to figure out a way to guarantee housing for relocating large groups. That is a whole other can of worms given the recent fiasco of shirogane, so it may be as they come up with a solution for meeting housing demand they could figure out a way to make wards that are only available to transferring FCs or something. Otherwise they'll never be able to make an sort of significant dent in our server population (or other major populated servers)

I've been on Gilga since Gordias and never have I seen it so dead, it's actually quite sad looking at the sorry state that it's in now. Over the past few months I've lost count of how many friends I've lost due to them transfering, it seems every day there's at least 1 or 2 new (unable to retrieve)'s showing on my friends list. Everywhere you go is empty, and the op is right that even during peak hours major cities are like ghost towns.

+1 to unlock Gilgamesh.

The economy here on gilg is abysmal in Stormblood. Prior to 4.1 the shard/crystal situation was getting incredibly bad (Wind Crystals would have 0 listings sometimes, and spiked up to 1000 per after the patch before some supply stabilized). FC and LS are stagnating, there's more (Unable to Retrieve) popping up every day because everyone is abandoning ship. Cross-server PF is only a band-aid for friends playing together, most would prefer to be on the same server and interact outside of instances but there's no way to do that on Gilg unless the entire circle made their characters here months and months ago.

The first 10 days of Stormblood we had a queue that resembled a high pop server. After that it dipped down to less than one queue cycle and we never had a wait again (excluding the forced kicks where everyone had to log back on). That was the peak of population, but since the lock has been in effect the numbers can and have only gone down. Don't leave gilg to die. We're like China with a Zero Child policy and the elders are inevitable kicking it over time.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Just a fun little factoid for you. According to that census above, Mateus has more than doubled its population since June. That can mostly be attributed to people leaving Balmung, which has seen the largest decline. :)

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It's all these nerds playing house I mean roleplaying, and let me tell you the #original Mateus player tears are delicious.

I play on Gilgamesh since the early days of A Realm Reborn. There is a big difference between Heavensward Gilgamesh and Stormblood Gilgamesh for sure. The server is not totally empty, and I know many many people are saying that out server is one of the highest populated servers, or that our server is the one with the highest activity, or whatsoever. The problem lies when and where that activity takes place. We have a spike of people on Thuesday... and that's it. For the remaining days of the week the activity gets lower and lower, because Gilgamesh is and always has been a server known for the phase "go there if you want to raid". A stigma that was created before crossworld party finder was a thing. The game before had a duality in which you could go to Gilgamesh and be a raider, keep up with endgame content at a decent pace and have your clears, or you could stay on your server, keep your friends and the social circle you were used to, but don't have a party finder as active as ours was. That was Gilgamesh's perk. But I don't think it is anymore. Stormblood brought a lot of new people to the game, none of em joined Gilgamesh. And the old people that abandoned the game on Heavensward and joined back for Stormblood are no longer playing it anyways. And I do feel like that is the problem on Gilgamesh right now. We do have a lot of people on the server, we do have a lot of players and we do have a decent player activity. However that activity only happens in big scale once every 4 or 5 months because of mainstory patch, and once a week on a small scale because of reset day. Now even this last patch was enough to give Gilgamesh a player queue outside of the housing wars, but to be honest I feel like every server had a queue for the housing rush the moment the servers went live. And with the fiasco of the housing what happened? Many many players that only stayed on Gilgamesh because of the possiblity of having a house here (and having it as an excuse to stay in the server for it's imaginary perks) are already leaving to other servers, because maybe on patch 4.2 they are going to have better chances. Not even our market board is as it used to be. We have less and less stuff there every day, and less people wanting to by the small amount of things we have anyways.

To me the problem is not the fact that Gilgamesh is locked, but the fact that other servers, now higher populated and active than Gilgamesh are still open. It creates the whole "Let's go to Leviathan, it's just like Gilgamesh but with new players" mentality, which many of my friends already decided to do. Since Stormblood launched my friend's list went from 185 to 40. But if I decide to only count the ones that actually log into the game, that number decrease to 15. I have yet to see an FC on my server that isn't VODKA, TSB and Lucid with more than 40 players logged in at once outside of reset days. And most of the time not even those big FCs have that amont of people online anyways.

One of the things that made me wanna join Gilgamesh was the fact that the server had a lot of different faces on a daily basis. You would meet new people all the time, you would have so many people being invited to your FCs, or wanting to know you and interact. You would have so many new players in need of assistance and there would always be someone doing something in one of the maps. Not even the Yokai events were able to spike the life on Gilgamesh a little bit because it's the exact same people from when the even was here last. Everybody always have everything they want. It's the same group of people, on the same place, doing the same thing. And even though we are still big, Gilgamesh got to the point in which everyone knows everyone.

I created some alts on different servers just because recently and I was amazed with how lively the starter cities are. The shout and yell chats, the amount of people crafting everywhere, the sprouts tags, the returning player tags. I really miss having that on Gilgamesh, and I do find it weird that the server is still locked. I understand Balmung because 1) it's really, really crowded, and 2) it's the major RP server. You can't simply create an entire RP community by yourself and even so, Mateus is slowly becoming an amazing second option.
As for Gilgamesh, every server is a raid server right now. You do have access to what everyone else on your data center have acces to in the blink of an eye. So the only strong point I can think Gilgamesh had over the other servers is now, thankfuly don't get me wrong, available to everyone across all the servers. I am considering a transfer too, and I have been for a long time, though it's a bittersweet feeling because I consider this server in which I started playing, my home.

Seeing what xivcensus says about Gildamesh, i dont see any problem.
16k+ activ players, that is 5k more than on Zodiark and we dont have any problems.

Its not SEs fault that Gildamesh seems to be 'raider-only' world, change the people, not the world.
If everyone would not only come out for raiding, your world wouldnt be so empty.
I´m sorry for saying this, but its truely not SEs fault.

No rush of new players would change that, they would stop playing fast and join a more activ server. There is enough to do besides raiding, make people remember that is my advice.

Still, good luck o/