Adamantoise low pop?

[Minalia]

Adamantoise server seems super low pop. It feels like it's dead and it's damn near impossible to find raiding parties. It would be nice to see a server merger to bring the population back. I haven't seen SE talk at all about low pop servers lately. Is it really not an issue or do they just don't care?

[DevilsDontFly]

They said at live letter they are planning on incorporating cross-server Party Finder. That might be the end of people on low pop servers being unable to find parties for end game content clear.

[_slowpoke_]

They said at live letter they are planning on incorporating cross-server Party Finder. That might be the end of people on low pop servers being unable to find parties for end game content clear.

While I'm eagerly awaiting cross-server PF, I don't think it's enough. It would be nice if there would be a system in place where you could "visit" other servers, with some restrictions in place (such as not being able to use the MB or trade/meld, basically anything that would allow you to move resources between servers). Give visiting players a special status icon to identify them, put their home server in place of their FC tag (or some other way to resolve name conflicts), and implement cross-server friend-lists and tells. I know the game already has barely any issue with two people with the same name in a party (except emotes being weird), there's been a few screenshots of that happening floating around here and on reddit. Hell, we could even have an in-story explanation for this feature, it's not like we haven't already crossed dimensional borders in the game multiple times.

[DevilsDontFly]

While I'm eagerly awaiting cross-server PF, I don't think it's enough. It would be nice if there would be a system in place where you could "visit" other servers, with some restrictions in place (such as not being able to use the MB or trade/meld, basically anything that would allow you to move resources between servers). Give visiting players a special status icon to identify them, put their home server in place of their FC tag (or some other way to resolve name conflicts), and implement cross-server friend-lists and tells. I know the game already has barely any issue with two people with the same name in a party (except emotes being weird), there's been a few screenshots of that happening floating around here and on reddit. Hell, we could even have an in-story explanation for this feature, it's not like we haven't already crossed dimensional borders in the game multiple times.

I agree with you. The sole reason for most people not chat or interact in DF is because that amazing person will most likely be from a different server and you'll never be able to play together again, so what's the point?
That being said I would love if the DEV team could do something about it. If it was possible to visit other servers even with restrictions on the MB and stuff, I'm pretty sure servers like Gilgamesh and Balmung wouldn't be so packed and the less pop servers would be healthier in population because there's a lot oe people trading the possibility to get a house, for the possibility of gettin' a clear or joining a static on higher populated servers. Not to mention that would help a lot the social aspect of the game and even draw attention of old and new players that might have stopped playing because of the lack of social immersion.

But that conflicts with the $18 bucks people always spend to change servers so I doubt SE will do anything about it.

[_slowpoke_]

But that conflicts with the $18 bucks people always spend to change servers so I doubt SE will do anything about it.

While I would obviously expect cross-server play to be free as a basic gameplay feature, if that would be the only thing keeping us from getting that feature, I would be fine with paying some money to activate it (even though I would be salty about it, basically the same as I am about paying for two extra retainers). Let's be realistic, those $18 from server transfers are probably a drop in the ocean in relation to the total player population, most of which will never transfer even once. It's mostly there to deter people constantly switching servers, which would be a moot point if cross-server play was a thing.

[Reaperking386]

Idk. I am in Adamantoise and I enjoy the quietness. I don't think it is a low pop. I just think peeps are more about raiding with their FC's and you do see sometimes groups looking.

[Rakiria]

Blah cross-server-playing

The name conflict can't be solved by something like that. When you /tell a person, you tell the one with that name. Same with blacklisting. And reporting, as was seen when RMT bots copied players.

[_slowpoke_]

The name conflict can't be solved by something like that. When you /tell a person, you tell the one with that name. Same with blacklisting. And reporting, as was seen when RMT bots copied players.

True, but since cross-server play would require an overhaul of quite a few things in the game anyway (friend and black lists included), the tell system would be no exception. It would probably also be possible to just leave the regular /tell alone (simply being used for communication with people from your server) and implementing something new that works for cross-server tells. Let's just call it "/cstell" for demonstration's sake. You could then use something like "/cstell Yayadon Yadon Cerberus" to reach me, no matter where I currently happen to be.

That's just one possibility. Another would be to do the same thing Blizzard did with its BattleNet, which (as far as I remember) uses unique account IDs, so you can chat with people no matter which character (or even which game, since it's not just WoW that's in the BattleNet) they play at the moment. Console players already have this in the form of PSN, and some players - me included - play FFXIV via Steam (either as a third-party game or directly as a Steam game), which basically gives you this exact functionality (though the Steam overlay is sort of... garbage in FFXIV). We basically just need a unified way that is available to all FFXIV players. We already have the Lodestone, why not extend it?

[Minalia]

I don't understand how you could do PF cross server. PF isn't just for dungeons... I want PFs to do things in world so there HAS to be some sort of cross server connection that way. I don't understand why they feel they need to have independent servers in this day and age. It would be a simple matter to have "servers" but zones be cross server instances. There's no need to segregate players as they do.