Dear SE, please unlock Balmung

[Caraway]

Read through most of this and just wanted to touch on the character data portion (coming from someone who works in the field).

The character data itself is probably not that much. It's something, for sure, but a lot less then the numbers being tossed about in this thread. Even counting for expansions growing purely vertical, each item of data will only be a few bytes in size (purely numeric, easy to store). Even taking into account the fact that you can have multiple classes, your inventory, your retainer, etc. it's still not a whole lot of data in the grand scheme of things.

People often think databases are monsterous and huge but really they're generally not. I'd wager it's measured in the single or double digit gigabytes for the entirety of FFXIV's playerbase (not counting backups).

So it's far more likely that the creation locks are due to concurrent players and it's just an easy way to try and get folks to make new characters on other servers. As it is you can pay to transfer to the server regardless of the lock situation so it's definitely not a case of data limit but concurrent connection limit (people logged and connected to the server).