What If: Server Merge

Over on reddit the user Mewshimyo did a Lodestone Survey that pulled various data off the Lodestone of all the characters in the game. I find this kind of data interesting much like the official census we get every once in a while. Before I get into the server stuff I'll just post some other interesting information from it.

*All credit for this information goes to Mewshimyo on reddit*
- 7,948,025 total characters.
- 1,358,567 total Lv.50+s.
- 408,141 total Lv.60s.
- 407,466 Lv.60s in Grand Companies, which means.....
- 675 Lv.60s apparently don't have a Grand Company....

We could say that the Lv.60 total is the number of "end game" players in the game since you need to hit Lv.60 to do any of the end game stuff. Mewshimyo then has graphs that show the Lv.60 demographics specifically which is what we will be looking at. The one in particular I will address is the # of Lv.60s per server found here:

*All credit for this goes to Mewshimyo on reddit*
http://i.imgur.com/KP7tOEn.png

Here are some interesting things to note from that graph:
- Out of the 8 EU servers, none of them have below 5,000 Lv.60s.
- 6 out of the 8 EU servers are all within 10 rankings of each other for Lv.60s. So the EU servers seem to be relatively balanced, good for them.
- The PRIMAL data center has NO servers below 5,000 Lv.60s, good for them.
- 6 out of the 13 servers in the AETHER data center DO have BELOW 5,000 Lv.60s.
- Out of the 5 lowest servers, 3 of them are from AETHER.
- The TOP TWO Lv.60 servers are from AETHER, Balmung+Gilgamesh both have over 15,000 Lv.60s.

The takeaway from this is that the end game for the EU and PRIMAL data centers are pretty balanced across the board. The issue comes from the AETHER and JP servers. The data centers seem to balanced around the highest population + the lowest population, instead of being “equally” populated. Poor Mateus probably doesn't even have over 4,000 Lv.60s, meanwhile Gilgamesh has well over 15,000 Lv.60s. Imagine how much harder it would be to get groups to do content on Mateus compared to Gilgamesh. Balmung is the same way and actually the most popular and is nearing 20,000 Lv.60s.

So what if the servers were more properly balanced so that their end game populations were as equal as possible? I went through and merged the lowest servers into the lowest “mid tier” servers so that there were NO servers with less than 5,000 Lv.60s.

http://i.imgur.com/25H9Keq.png


- I kept all servers in the same Data Center that they were already in.
- This turned into 8 Primal NA servers, 7 Aether NA servers, 7 Chaos EU servers, 7 Mana JP servers, 6 Gaia JP servers, and 6 Elemental JP servers.
- This makes the servers go from having 5 servers with over 10,000 Lv.60s to 13 servers with over 10,000 60s.
- No server now has less than 5,000 Lv.60s.
- The lowest would now be Ultros with probably 6,000-6,500 Lv.60s (eye-balling it). Compare that to previous lowest being Mateus which probably had ~3,000-3,500 Lv.60s.
- No server is still anywhere near Balmung and just barely come close to catching Gilgamesh.
- This brings the total # of servers down from 64 to 41.
- 19 JP servers, 15 NA servers, and 7 EU servers.
- Zodiark and Lich were both very low compared to the other EU servers. While they weren't below 5,000 Lv.60s they weren't really comparable to the others which is why they were combined. Moogle is the 3rd lowest EU server and yet it was the 15th most populated with Lv.60s. So combining the two lowest seems reasonable, but maybe not necessary. This in turn would make it the most populated EU server, which would be quite the change for those players I imagine.



So that's what the end game population of the servers would look like if they ever decided to merge servers. I play on Adamantoise which is a “mid tier” server in terms of population in nearly every demographic (Overall, Lv.50s, Lv.60s) and it isn't too bad. I honestly can't imagine playing on one of the less populated ones considering how it is even on my server. Which is why so many people decide to transfer to Balmung/Gilgamesh which is presumably a problem.


I didn't re-adjust the graph since that would've been a lot more cutting and pasting, but maybe I'll do that later to clean it up a bit.

While not a bad idea the reason for doing server merges has never been to improve the communities of the servers affected. It's always been to cut costs, and is always between the lowest population servers regardless of what the population breakdowns are. If they were to do a server merge I wouldn't expect to see much of a community ratio improvement.

it'll probably happen sooner or later.
Either to save dying servers or to lighten the load on overcrowded ones.

A reminder that servers for XI were not merged until the average active population of them was around 1500-2000 or less, across all time zones.

As long as some servers on data centers are being straight up locked for character creation, SE will continue to use that tool to encourage new players to go to lower population servers. Mergers may be in this game's distant future, but not in the near future.

While I can certainly see where you're coming from on this, I have heard quite a bit from people who play on the low population servers do so specifically BECAUSE they're low population, and as such there are benefits such as more housing, less early swarmed hunts, better MB pricing, less RMT spam, ect. While I do get that there are players on those servers that complain about long que times or poor raiding, most of the players who consider that more of a downside than the benefits have already left for other servers, or created alts on more populous servers. I don't think it would make the people currently on those servers as happy as you seem to think if they merged.....