Congested Server Status

This needs to go. Locking down a server for weeks, or even months at a time makes it impossible to play with your friends. "Your friends can roll on a different server and transfer over to play," is nice but has completely gutted Free Companies. And those with active Free Companies cannot recruit new players because they're on Congested servers, and those without active Free Companies cannot find them, because they're on low pop servers. You cannot fix this by telling players, "no, do not play with your friend, play on one of these smaller servers instead." No one is going to do that. Even with free transfers, Balmung, Mateus, Faerie, remain locked near year around. All it does is make the game unnecessarily frustrating.

Few years back, you could reliably make a new character or transfer over to a big pop server, so long as you did it outside peak hours. Now your only chance to roll on a server where your friends play, as a new or returning player, or simply someone who has made friends with a group on another server, is to wait for weeks, or even months, for the transfer window to reopen. It stinks. And now with servers getting shut for even visiting, you've turned what was a functional if unnecessarily complicated system into something that causes nothing but frustration.

You have had years to fix this. WoW doesn't have these issues. ESO doesn't have these issues. These are entirely self-made issues on your end. Fix your game. We've been patient. My patience, as an 11 year veteran of FFXIV, has nearly worn out.

Thank you.

Balmung used to be permanently locked and set as congested back in HW and it lasted up to ShB when they split the datacenters and started adding world visit. The difference is that paying for transfer was still allowed to move over to a congested server back then. I didn't even know they disallowed this since.

Stop making silly myths about servers and spread out.... more benefits as well if want eg. a house and other things...

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Originally Posted by HokujinDoujin

This needs to go. Locking down a server for weeks, or even months at a time makes it impossible to play with your friends. "Your friends can roll on a different server and transfer over to play," is nice but has completely gutted Free Companies. And those with active Free Companies cannot recruit new players because they're on Congested servers, and those without active Free Companies cannot find them, because they're on low pop servers. You cannot fix this by telling players, "no, do not play with your friend, play on one of these smaller servers instead." No one is going to do that. Even with free transfers, Balmung, Mateus, Faerie, remain locked near year around. All it does is make the game unnecessarily frustrating.

Few years back, you could reliably make a new character or transfer over to a big pop server, so long as you did it outside peak hours. Now your only chance to roll on a server where your friends play, as a new or returning player, or simply someone who has made friends with a group on another server, is to wait for weeks, or even months, for the transfer window to reopen. It stinks. And now with servers getting shut for even visiting, you've turned what was a functional if unnecessarily complicated system into something that causes nothing but frustration.

You have had years to fix this. WoW doesn't have these issues. ESO doesn't have these issues. These are entirely self-made issues on your end. Fix your game. We've been patient. My patience, as an 11 year veteran of FFXIV, has nearly worn out.

Thank you.

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This is all done to force people to transfer and for them to get money, that's why the entirety of Aether is closed yet again, funnily enough, right before they shut it all off, Aether was open for transfers, same for Balmung.

This is honestly just about the money, its to force people to transfer and make money off of them, this congestion stuff is also just to pretend that the game is booming with players while it has been going down extremely fast since DT with a massive drop from 1.4m to under 1m players (and probably more, that was for the previous Q, so this one will probably be worse), them removing it would be them admitting that the game's playerbase is dwindling so I doubt they will turn it off anytime soon, they would rather keep this image that the game is full to the brim (which is false, it's basically deceiving players).

Both Dynamis and Materia are also failures, in the case of Dynamis, they've tried everything to try and get people to transfer there, as an old Dynamis resident (this is an alt) I was stuck there for an entire month, people were forced to make characters there at DT launch, the second they opened the gates to transfer to other DC's, a mass exodus happened because no one wanted to be on a dead DC, they really thought that forcing everyone there and making them stuck there unable to DC travel was going to make people want to stay on Dynamis, all it did was convince people like me to get the hell out of there as soon as possible in case they decide to do another "lockdown" and keep us stuck there away from everyone. The idea they had to keep players on Dynamis actually worked agaisnt them and a massive amount of people left the second transfers opened.

Dawntrail started with early EW numbers, and quickly dropped to mid SHB numbers. It's hard to believe so many worlds are still congested and require travel lockouts. SE not being open about this situation doesn't help much, just like with many other issues the game has.

To understand why this is necessary, you need to understand the history.

Before Shadowbringers, Balmung had been congested for years. It was so congested that creating a new character on it was technically possible, but only for about 1 hour a week at the lowest activity moment of that week and you had to plan it in advance. People got around this by doing paid transfers, and I made a linkshell there which filled to 128 new transferees in just 2 days. At that moment I knew the bubble was going to burst eventually and something had to give.

So SE invented "Congested" status to make paid transfers impossible as well. Combined with splitting Balmung from Aether onto its own data center (Crystal) with lots of low-pop worlds and adding World Visit, they effectively pushed people off Balmung. They either transferred to Aether to raid or they moved to other Crystal worlds, so that Balmung's reputation for RP could spread evenly across the other worlds on Crystal.

I know that you want to believe that servers can grow endlessly but that only happens because of cloud servers where you are all technically connecting to different servers that appear to link up. That's how Discord works for example and it's why bots go down on some shards but not others.

As for the matter of population, I can say that Aether and Crystal's active population often reaches 200,000, which is way higher than after the DC split and Crystal's creation. Crystal's population often surpasses Aether's quite regularly now. According to the last update by Lucky Bancho, the population of Crystal was as low as 138k, Aether at 130k, Primal at 120k and Dynamis at 50k.

Obviously this likely jumped due to the patch, so Aether and Crystal would be higher since then, and it therefore makes sense why they would want to push people elsewhere. And obviously they want to push people to Dynamis generally.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Obviously this likely jumped due to the patch, so Aether and Crystal would be higher since then, and it therefore makes sense why they would want to push people elsewhere. And obviously they want to push people to Dynamis generally.

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Which is failing miserably, and instead people are leaving Dynamis.

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Originally Posted by SophiaDL

Which is failing miserably, and instead people are leaving Dynamis.

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When they split Aether into Aether and Crystal. It worked because they didn't just make a new datacenter and tell people to go there. They took servers from Aether and moved them to Crystal.

When they made Dynamis they, for whatever reason, didn't repeat this. So now you've got an overcrowded DC that nobody can make a character on or transfer to, another overcrowded datacenter that you can still make characters on and transfer to, then Primal, and finally Dynamis.

Dynamis didn't have the benefit of a large popular server being shuffled to it like Balmung or Gilgamesh or whatever, so why would people ever want to go there. It might get better if queues and PF went cross datacenter without you manually having to visit one, but who knows.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

To understand why this is necessary, you need to understand the history.

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I know the history. I've been playing on Balmung since January 2014. It doesn't alter the fact that no other game of this size and success has these issues.

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Originally Posted by HokujinDoujin

My patience, as an 11 year veteran of FFXIV, has nearly worn out.

Thank you.

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I’m sure that because of your threat and the ~$1200 you made this billion dollar company your issue has been directly forwarded to the CEO.

Thoughts and impressions:

1. I think with all the griping about DT, people forget something: there was a whole lot of griping from a lot of people about EW, too. Yes, its introduction numbers were massive... but they did drop, and the griping began pretty quickly, as a chunk of people continuously compared it negatively to SHB. Part of why so many were excited about EW (and poured back in) was they'd loved SHB... and then they backed off when they found "it's not the same," for whatever reason. And the complainers just got fresh meat with DT, in some ways at least. (Covid may have also played a part in people *initially* swarming into EW.)

2. I think Yoshi, especially, just flat freaked out over the long log-in waits for EW. Granted they *were* long, but I suspect they've over-compensated for that with the "congested" system: that the numbers they set to "decide" a world is "getting too much traffic" for visits at the very least, are set way too low. I can't say how this affects the *transfer and new character creation* aspects, but for DC travel, it causes them, IMO, to pre-emptively block out travel, like they've been doing on Aether---and notice that they block Aether for DC travel every time they release a patch now? And then take a while to start easing up on it?

3. From what I've heard from several people (on here and elsewhere), the biggest "causes" of congestion on Aether seem to be three sources: streamers who joined there and then their friends and fans went to be with them and joined (or moved) there; a lot of the folks who regularly run duty fights (all types) grouped up there, and apparently some big RPG groups. I agree with others who've said that in regards to the middle group (the fighters), if they'd just open up fight queues to pull cross-DC, it would help a LOT. It's ridiculous that on one DC someone may wait just a few minutes for something to queue... and on less populated DCs it may take HOURS. (They could also do this for PvP, and maybe things that stay mostly dead like Rival Wings, wouldn't stay mostly dead.)

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Last part:

4. On Dynamis: They did all kinds of stuff to encourage people to move TO Dynamis... for many it was the chance to finally get a house, but there were other incentives, too. But for those who *moved* their character there, often it meant leaving behind a lot of friends, FC or other. And honestly, it's a discouragement to people to go visit a friend on another world or DC, much less go do fights, MSQ, etc. there, because you can't access things like retainers and mail and your grand company... so there's a lot of stuff that, should you need to tend to things involving those, you have to travel back to your homeworld, and then turn around and come back to your friend's. Plus those who've never done DC travel sometimes have a time figuring out how to do it. Anyway, I think these things contributed to why so many on Dynamis have had a rough time getting friends from their original homeworld to do much visiting. Add in horrendous queues for fights, and yeah, makes it even worse.

5. On top of the above re: Dynamis, NOW we have the CE (Cosmic Exploration) garbage of Build Fates not being adjusted to actual numbers of players in-zone, and them *punishing* those who fail the Fate by locking out Red Alerts and Mech Ops for 8 hours... that's hit Dynamis particularly hard. Others got hit with it too, but Dynamis has it worst. Especially when these things also pop during "wee hours" on a weekday times.

I do love Dynamis (I have a few alts there), but they've not done things to support it growing and thriving, and it shows. Especially now with the CE issues.

Ye, waiting 5 hours in order to create a character, because friend who invited u to the game is playing on a busy server.