Recruit a Friend . . . so he can play on another server!

So I talk a friend into playing with me and he gets pumped and buys the game. He had a very difficult time buying it from SE store for reasons I will not go into except to say that they were even asking him for a scan of picture ID to confirm the purchase. After several days of back and forth with the SE store, he ended up canceling the purchase and buying through steam with minimal effort.

Ok great! Now its time to get started and play together . . . except he has not been able to create a character in Balmung for the past 5 days or so.

Now I am not selling my house or giving up my FC to go and play with him for now since I dont know if he will continue to play longterm. I am looking at the website for character creation and half the US worlds cannot create characters anyway.

So did I just make him waste 60 dollars? My friend is getting to the point were he will quit before starting out of frustration with the system.

Create character at like 4 am Pacific.

Or create character and world transfer.

You're on one of the most congested servers around. You honestly should have been aware of this and warned your friends on the character creation restrictions.

They even post said restrictions and updates to them here, on the Lodestone. A little bit of research could have alleviated the grief you are feeling.

I'm sure you knew beforehand how hard it is to make a character on Balmung. You should probably make an alt on another server to play with him. Or have warned him before he bought it that your server is usually locked. It's not like this is a surprise to you?

World Transfer service is associated with an 18$ charge and also has the condition:

"Your free trial for the service account to be used has yet to expire, and you have yet to be charged a service fee. "

So they could world transfer after playing alone for a month and paying an extra 20$ . . . I dont think he will do that.

I will ask him to try the 4am thing but really this seems absurd. I mean if you are having a campaign to recruit people they should be able to play once you recruit them. I understand Balmung is a heavily populated server but obviously more recruitments are going to come from servers where there are more people to recruit friends.

As far as i know there a two things your friend can do:
1. Try to create an character when activities at your world are down (so when most Players are slepping or working, look up from which Countrys the mayority Players on Balmung are)

2 Create a character on a different Server and transver. costs Money but as far as i know it always works.

Balmung is one of the most crowded servers. He's gonna have to make a toon in the middle of the night or you can give him some money to drop on a world transfer which for some reason ignores to the character creation restriction.

This is also less than a week after the release of a major expansion. All of the servers are going to be more congested than normal for a while until the hype dies down.

Even when the expansion hasn't just come out, Balmung is closed for character creation 90 something percent of the time. You've got 50s in most classes, which means you've been playing long enough that this should come as no shock to you.

Edit: Oh derp....stupid work computer opens up my forums straight to page 5 and I didn't notice. Sorry for the necro.

I really wish SE would recreate the worldpass system they used to have in ffxi. Leave the worlds locked for new players that don't really care where they end up, but allow players who are already on the world to be able to create a one time use code that lets someone make a char on their server. I've had a couple friends end up returning the game when they couldn't get on the server I was on.

Had this same issue at launch with all of my old guild from another game. Needless and sorry to say that not a single one of them stuck around after that.

I'm going to echo the whole "you knew you were on a crowded server" sentiment. I'm on a legacy server too. If I invite a friend to start playing, there is no reason for me to not be aware that there will be character creation issues, and to be prepared to create an alt character on a less congested server to level with them until they can get onto Excalibur. Or Balmung or whatever the case may be.

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Originally Posted by Rampage

Balmung

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Found your problem OP.

Yes OP should totally abandon all of his progress and start over on another server with no resources, none of the previously earned event rewards, and without all the people they've been playing with this whole time just so that the friend they wanted to welcome into the game won't quit. Yup. Silly OP.
/s

I'm in the same problem as you OP. I like playing this game, and I am loyal to my server, and I want to welcome my friends into that community instead of having them being shoved into a random-ass community that I know nothing about. Refer a friend should lift server restrictions to the server of the recruiter for the recruitee. I can't imagine who thought gating people off from their friends would be a good idea.

I play on Excalibur.

I had to create character at 4 am Pacific when it opened to play with rl friends. That's just how it goes here.


And it's only $18? My other two games that I used transfers on, it was 25 or 50.

We need a forum for all the people on overpopulated servers to complain about being unable to make new characters on or get new people onto the server.

Didnt even need to click the thread to know op was on balmung. If all the people with this problem went to a lower population server a lot of population issues would be solved

To all of you that are telling me: "You should have known . . .", you realize that you are basically saying that we should be content not being able to invite any new friends to the server right, and you think this is ok?

I would be happy to move to a less populated server with my small FC, assuming they would agree, if:

I could transfer for free
I could take my house

However if we get 5-10 people to transfer thats 90 to 180$ that we are spending. Losing the house would also not be fun due to the time /effort to get it in the first place, the unlikelihood of getting a new house since there is no ETA on more land becoming available, and the non-recoverable money dumped in it in fixtures ext.

My original point in starting this thread was to see what options are out there. However I feel that it is obvious that the most densely populated servers will have higher growth rates, would it not be possible to allocate more servers or other resources to increase their capacity?

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Originally Posted by Rampage

My original point in starting this thread was to see what options are out there. However I feel that it is obvious that the most densely populated servers will have higher growth rates, would it not be possible to allocate more servers or other resources to increase their capacity?

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Best option for players is to have patience in making the character. After they succeed they get to enjoy the very small server queues because the server lock keeps the less dedicated away. I bolded the important parts. Even if they increase the capacity, the server maintains it's high growth rate and will soon meet the new limit. It would only be a temporary fix. Best option for SE would be to offer free transfers with an in-game reward (pet, mount, title, glamour) as an incentive to leave overpopulated servers. The incentive needs to be good enough that people would leave their fc for it.

Server Labeling would help with this. Label two servers per data center as RP, two as PvP, and the rest PvE. Help guide people to other servers instead of leaving it all to be community driven. Once SE does do this, we need free, Unrestricted Character transfers (by unrestricted I mean do not restrict the Gil transfer, other things like leave a FC, take stuff off the market, etc is fine cause that makes sense.)

And for the love of the Twelve, give us more Housing Plots!!!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

Yes OP should totally abandon all of his progress and start over on another server with no resources, none of the previously earned event rewards, and without all the people they've been playing with this whole time just so that the friend they wanted to welcome into the game won't quit. Yup. Silly OP.
/s

I'm in the same problem as you OP. I like playing this game, and I am loyal to my server, and I want to welcome my friends into that community instead of having them being shoved into a random-ass community that I know nothing about. Refer a friend should lift server restrictions to the server of the recruiter for the recruitee. I can't imagine who thought gating people off from their friends would be a good idea.

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And then people will sell access to populated servers and get all the rewards that go with it too. And the server will become even more overpopulated.

Every time someone posts a thread like this, they're from Balmung server. I check server next to their forum avatar every time I see a thread like this.

You would think these people are new to MMOs. In most MMOs you cannot make a new character on overcrowded popular servers, even if it's in the dead hours around 4 am. If you want to play with your friend, have him make a character on a medium populated server and transfer your character to that server. The server I'm on, Leviathan, is somewhere between high and medium as we use to be the 5th most populated server. Any server medium population, give or take a little, is good. However, if you refuse to transfer for whatever reason, maybe due to friends and/or FC you already have on Balmung, then you might have to face the fact that you won't be able to play on the same servers. Another option is to make an alt and play on his server. Maybe he'll get lucky and by some miracle be able to create a character on Balmung.

Server limits exist for a reason. A server cannot have an infinite amount of players for technical reasons.

What if I told you, not everyone on Balmung came here when it was crowded? I know I came here as a server merger from Fabul to Balmung and I've been here ever since. I'm not about to pack up shop and move when I would take a huge hit in Gil, lose the community we built, etc. You want to know why Balmung is full? Google "FFXIV RP server." If SE had officially labeled a few servers per database as "RP" then this could have been avoided.

But nevermind that, its easier to blame the victim in this, the players. "If you are on Balmung, you are askin for it!"

Just from the title, I knew it was a Balmung thread

EDIT: Hey OP, I think your FC name describes the state of Balmung server very well.

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Originally Posted by Rampage

I mean if you are having a campaign to recruit people they should be able to play once you recruit them. I understand Balmung is a heavily populated server but obviously more recruitments are going to come from servers where there are more people to recruit friends.

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Oh, so just because SE is having a recruit a friend campaign, that equates to said person automatically being entitled to start on any server they choose, even when said server is constantly at capacity?

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Originally Posted by PArcher

We need a forum for all the people on overpopulated servers to complain about being unable to make new characters on or get new people onto the server.

Didnt even need to click the thread to know op was on balmung. If all the people with this problem went to a lower population server a lot of population issues would be solved

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imo if you have characters on the server you should be able to make new ones whenever. It's not adding to the load when you can only log in one character per account at a time.

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To all of you that are telling me: "You should have known . . .", you realize that you are basically saying that we should be content not being able to invite any new friends to the server right, and you think this is ok?

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Yes. You can invite people. *I* invited people. I also told them that they need to be online at 1pm their time to make characters because the server is full otherwise. I myself was up at 4 to do it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chihaya

EDIT: Hey OP, I think your FC name describes the state of Balmung server very well.

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Hahahah this made me laugh, thumbs up!

My friend was up at 2:50am last night after maintenance and still no luck. So I guess Im coughing up 18$ to get him over here, hope that works. But Im not happy about it!

@ NorthernLadMSP: Yes if SE is having a campaign to recruit friends I think that entitles you to play with the friend you recruit lol. I dont know why this is such a CRAZY concept. I understand there are technical limitations to the servers, and as Reinha pointed out adding more capacity would just make the server full again (although it would make allot of people happy). So I think the solution here would be to have an incentive for world transfer out of overpopulated servers, not a monetary barrier like what we have now in addition to what you lose in game when you transfer.