Creating a new character on a restricted server?

I just bought the game and am trying to join the Excalibur server to play with my fiance (this is his log-in). At the character creation portion when I try and select Excalibur it is grayed out because it is restricted.

I have been refreshing every 3 minutes and have noticed that a non-Legacy server has come available again (Moogle, was not available but is now) but no changes from Excalibur. Is this something that is not likely to open up again for days? Should I keep checking every 3 minutes while I do other things on my computer or is this a waste of my time?

My fiance joined Excalibur to play with all of his work friends who are all on that server. We saw that you can pay to switch servers but he doesn't want to, because we all want to play together. We are both very disappointed because we have spent a lot of time today downloading the game, creating accounts, etc and after all that we can't play together :(

Yup character creation restrictions are in place on congested worlds and will remain there for an unknown period of time, could be 1 day could be 1 year

And this is why I constantly tell people not to just flock to the most populated servers :/

Server restriction status changes at 3 am/7 am/12 pm/5 pm/10 pm (PST)--there's a note on the launcher about it. Your best bet would be to wait until mid-morning on a weekday. The restriction is based on how many people are logged in. I had a couple friends trying to get onto Hyperion. It took them a couple days, but they were finally able to get on at the right time.

For example, the maintenance is in 15 minutes so everyone is logging off. Every server is available for character creation.

Also, since Excalibur is a Legacy server, he would only be able to transfer to other Legacy servers. Most of the Legacy servers have creation restrictions, so you'd just be trading one problem for another.

I noticed that with Balmung (NA Legacy Server) that everyday til about 5pm MST they open character creation and then close it til the following morning, you could try checking at various times of day

The restrictions are only a temporary measure whenever a server's starting areas are incredibly congested to make sure that they keep running smoothly. They actually open and close based on player population in the starting areas. The Lodestone site updates the server availability list every 4 hours but some servers have periods of being open in between the 4 hour list updates. If you try to make a character during times when many people are likely to be on (say, evenings during the weekends) then you will very likely be locked out.

I would advise you to make your character in the early morning, it seems to be the best time for servers to not be congested. I have had over a dozen players join Hyperion, which is in the same situation as Excalibur, and no one has had any issues in the early morning. Late night would theoretically be OK too but more people play at night than in the morning.

My brother actually just started playing this evening and at around 9:00 PM the server was restricted. At 10:00 PM the status updated, it was open for new characters, and he was able to start playing just fine. Just try again later.