English In Bahamut

So...I am an English Speaker that got the game a few days ago. I was looking for Rp-ing worlds on the internet when I read somewhere that "Bahamut" or someother world had an active RP community. HOWEVER, I did not do enough research and I am now stuck in a Japanese server T-T. I don't have any problems with it, and I don't really want to spend $10 right now (give or take a few extra) for a character transfer, nor do I want to start over from scratch on a new character.

What I'm trying to say is I'm a noob to the game, lonely, and got no-one to party up with outside of duties, and I was wondering if any newcomers are in a similar situation? And if they would like to party up?

If your interested, I play weekdays around 4:00-8:00 Eastern Time, Friend "Kit Xiathane" and we'll party up sometime :cool:

I haven't touched Disciple of War so I can "down lvl" my character if ya want, my "magic" is Lvl 16, 16, 25, so mid-gameish if you want to hang out.

I have roughly 5-7 days of gaming in, so I can offer some "tips" for newcomers, I just want someone to hang out with, be it lvl 1 or someone closer to my lvl 25, I don't care, (unless they are over-leveled, I don't want to "use some major higher lvl player to "power through" the game, and if if anyone who is low lvl-ed wants to hang out, I can just easily become one of the War classes and go back down to lvl 1

Sorry that you ended up on the wrong server. I hope you get a response, but from my understanding most of the English community on the JP data centers is on Tonberry. Just fyi, the unofficial English role play server is Balmung which is on the NA Aether datacenter. If you want to be on Balmung you will probably end up paying for a transfer anyways as Balmung is one of the two the most populated servers in the game and almost impossible to create new characters on (the other alternative is to try very early in the morning to make a character). If you have access to the Party Finder perhaps you could try putting up a party search to see if there is an English speaking community/ls/FC on Bahamut? You can also edit posts to get past the character limit for future posts. Good luck!

I would have suggested trying on the English Bahamut forum, except that it barely has any traffic so I'm not sure if a post there would even be seen. I guess you could still try and see whether the few FCs and linkshells recruiting there from a year or two ago are still active.

But I think overall you're going to be happier in the end if you move to a North American server, whether that's by transferring or creating a new alt.

(Any of the servers in the Aether or Primal data centers are North American. English is the most widespread language on any of them, though there's some French mixed in as well. The Chaos data center is European, with some servers being primarily English speaking, others German or French. The Elemental, Gaia, and Mana data centers are Japanese.)

I could recommend my own server, Coeurl, as friendly and relatively well populated without being overcrowded, but it isn't really known for RP. (I'm pretty sure there's some RP-focused FCs and linkshells around, though.)

Most of the English speaking community on the JP datacenter is based around Australia or scattered throughout Asia, so I think the main issue you may run into is few people playing when you are. Assuming you mean 4 PM - 8 PM EST and not 4 AM - 8 AM EST.

Some searching on the Lodestone suggests there are 13000 English speaking characters total on Balmung and a fair number of those are RMT. How many real people that represents is anyone's guess.

Thanks for the tip and everything guys,

Hey, you're on my Datacenter (though a completely different server)! Hi!

It's a very, very Japanese server group since we don't have either of the big Oceanic English-speaking servers in our Duty Finder, so unless you can find an English-speaking community to join up with I'm afraid I would recommend following Niwashi's advice. To be honest, I often go weeks without seeing a single other English-speaker in a group. It's fine when you're soloing through the main quest but I think you will find it frustrating later on if you don't speak the language, especially when fights get more technical later on, and your groups will find it frustrating too. Furthermore, the time zone thing Sagittarian mentioned is definitely going to be an issue. Queueing for non-Japanese-speakers out of peak hours is hard work (and defining peak hours for non-Japanese players is a real mess on Japanese servers - all activity is concentrated during Japanese evening and the servers are pretty much dead outside of that time). Japanese players don't like it when non-Japanese-speakers select 'Japanese' as their language as it makes coordination impossible, but at the same time it will be exceptionally hard to do any group content if you don't. Perhaps it's a good excuse to learn some simple Japanese? :D

If you don't want to pay for a transfer, you might be surprised by how swiftly you can catch back up with your first character if you skip through the scenes you've done before - it takes far longer the first time around! And you can try starting in a different city to see some different cutscenes!

If you decide to stay on Bahamut, please try using the new cross-world party finder and mention you don't speak Japanese in the description when you're looking for a group. It will be appreciated if you're honest about it, and some players will respect that and want to help you out. If I see you in there perhaps I'll swing by and help :)