Dear SE, please unlock Balmung

[kyuven]

People paying to play with their friends on their home server, they can't because whatever reason.

Ask yourself: Why does home server ALWAYS mean "Balmung" in these complaints?
You never hear people on almost any other server except MAYBE gilgamesh complaining about this. There's over 5 dozen servers (i counted). Why does it have to be balmung?
Also, comparing the system of this game to WoW is faulty: the way our characters work and how much data they take up compared to a WoW character is astronomical. Just taking into account what our characters can do without getting into the nitty gritty of our appearance data means that each and every character is the equivalent of more than TEN WoW characters.
This means that a single character in FFXIV takes up more space on the servers than ten WoW characters, which means if 2000 people made 8 characters each, they'd be taxing the server's capacity in the same way as 160,000 WoW characters. Which means, conservatively, if we have 500,000 subscribers with 8 characters each (some have more, many have less) we're occupying as much space as 40 million WoW characters.
And that's *lowballing* it.

[ExKage]

Also, comparing the system of this game to WoW is faulty: the way our characters work and how much data they take up compared to a WoW character is astronomical. Just taking into account what our characters can do without getting into the nitty gritty of our appearance data means that each and every character is the equivalent of more than TEN WoW characters.
This means that a single character in FFXIV takes up more space on the servers than ten WoW characters, which means if 2000 people made 8 characters each, they'd be taxing the server's capacity in the same way as 160,000 WoW characters. Which means, conservatively, if we have 500,000 subscribers with 8 characters each (some have more, many have less) we're occupying as much space as 40 million WoW characters.
And that's *lowballing* it.

How do you get these numbers? Based on the graphical character data?

[kyuven]

How do you get these numbers? Based on the graphical character data?

Again, this is ASIDE from graphical data, which is also pretty high but I'm not as certain about.
In WoW (and many, many other games) You can only be one class, have two professions (though you can change these through special means, it's a reset option) and have only one level assigned to your character.
That means that, just taking THAT simple factor, each WoW/EQ/Whatever character has one value and stat allotment for one class per character.
In FFXIV, one single character can be ALL the classes. Which means this value, and thus stat alottment, gear allowances, etc. is potentially much higher since even if you don't unlock the classes, the values are still assigned to your character.
Let's be generous here and take 1 character in an MMO where you pick a class, 2 gathering classes, and 2 crafting classes. This means an FFXIV character has one more value for gathering, 4x as many values for crafting, and 10x as many values for the base class. That's ONE character in FFXIV.
If you'll remember, FFXI had a similar system and they were just as if not more so draconian about alt creation and server assignments (things change but, so did software/hardware) going so far as to charge you more monthly for each character you had access to, because each one in THAT game was 11x the size of of an average character in its contemporary games, increasing to over 20x as time has passed. They were also (at first, again this was back in 2003) more in the habit of wiping characters in FFXI if they went without being subscribed.
And again, this is BEFORE we get into graphical data, which for XIV is very high compared to most games of its type. I don't think I need to explain that an FFXIV character's graphical data would eat up more space than a WoW characters...cuz that's PAINFULLY obvious. We have more options for our EYES than most MMOs give for entire bodies.