Server Availability

So I've been trying to join the server Excalibur to play with a friend for over 24 hours now. I sit on the character creation completion screen spamming refresh when available to join the server.

I just had to voice, as a potential new player, how annoying it is to try and join a friend who is already established on a server and be locked out with no realistic expectation of when, if ever, I'll be able to join him. There's no queue system there to even give me a number to speculate.

Pretty poor design in my opinion and a sure fire way to deter new players from joining the game.

It is simply overpopulated. There is a limit to the concurrent connections that can be handled effectively at specific points in the network, as well as across the peered networks that carry our data back and forth. If they don't restrict new account creation the traffic flow can become too unevenly distributed and cause issues for other worlds, potentially even other services in the grander scheme of things. It would take major infrastructure changes to get around the problem--along the lines of something like the new EU datacenter they have been working on.

Until they can balance things out better in general, the lockouts will likely continue. At least the restrictions do get eased periodically--they make announcements about it regularly in the Lodestone under the News and Special Notices sections (top of the lists, titled "Regarding Character Creation Restrictions", and they get updated 4 or 5 times a day, if not more often).

There is potentially an alternative approach to continually trying to get on the server as a new player too. You can also try applying for a transfer from another server if/when the lockouts become less of a problem.