Creating characters in congested servers during non peak hours?

Hi! I recently decided to join my friends in this game and was wondering if it is possible to join the heavily congested servers, like Tonberry, during non peak hours.

My friends are all in Tonberry and have told me to stay up late in order to be able to create my character in Tonberry. However, after reading the article about Tonberry and other heavily congested servers getting character creation restriction indefinitely, I am starting to wonder whether or not it is even possible to join my friends in that server.

Thanks!

It used to be possible to create your character on another world and buy a server transfer to get into high pop worlds even though they were locked. I don't know if this is still a thing, but if it is, it's gonna cost money.
Also, there's a reason those servers are locked, look at super high population servers, they have hour long queue times to even get into the game and suffer from severe lag at times. Not even starting on the housing situation on those worlds.

I see.. thank you :D

There are now two different levels of blocking access to creating new characters.

For the worlds that are listed under the "Congested Worlds" heading on the current status notice (which includes Tonberry), neither trying during off-peak hours nor doing a character transfer will work. Those servers are semi-permanently locked until SE decides their usual populations are down to a reasonable level.

For servers listed under "Standard Worlds" or I think even the "Preferred Worlds", they can temporarily get a character creation block when lots of people are online. (It shows up on that status notice just as an "×" beside the world's name.) This is the one that only lasts while lots of players are logged in, so will generally open up again during non-peak hours, and it doesn't block the paid transfer service for moving a character from another server.

Unfortunately, the server you're interested in falls in the former category, so you're not going to be able to get there any time soon by any means. Any chance you could talk your friends into moving to join you instead? Or at least make alts on your world? That's the only way you're going to be able to play together in open world content.

Even from different servers, though, you can make a cross-server Party Finder to group together for dungeon content, so long as your worlds are in the same data center. So any open world in the Elemental data center, where Tonberry is, might be a better choice than Masamune, which is in the Mana data center.

I see.. Interesting. Thank you very much :D