Petition to Terminate Restrictions on Transfer to “High Population” Servers

[Oaken]

If you joined after the launch of 3.0, you have no idea. Aether was down for days due to the lobby server crashing due to population limits reached because of balmung and gilgamesh both residing on it.

Again, I don't think people who support the transfer prohibition have given much consideration to alternative actions SE could implement to /actually/ stabilize high population servers (see OP above). These actions could accomplish the same balancing effect without the obvious detriments identified in the OP.

[technole]

OP doesn't get out much. What "dead" servers? The first column is based on active lodestone changes. 3.3 completed quest data is column 2.

A12S Creator Savage clears/% is the last column. (It's based on Armateus Mount).

Login queues are unfounded (and have rarely ever exceeded 5 or 10 minutes, tops).

"Unfounded"

Keep it up.

[DaikiKiyoshi]

The solution should not be to boost the populations of dead servers (which will remain sparse and dead -- see post above for detrimental effects), but to merge small population servers and devote resources to sustain high population servers. SE has the assets to do this, and if they do not, should simply raise subscription prices.

I must disagree. I believe that the best solution would be for the population to be somewhat evenly spread over all of the servers. I'm very happy that high pop servers will be locked for the time being. The best way to sustain ALL servers (IMHO) would be to ease stress on high pop servers by offering free transfers off to lower pop servers.

[Driavna]

If this is a real threat, SE should address it by allocating resources to sustain high population servers during stress. Quite frankly, I'd rather sit in long queues than face the risk of FFXIV being fragments across 15 servers, having no sense of community whatsoever, and then dying a slow, sad death over the next two years.

No, they don't because is a waste of resources due beeing a temporal situation, the way SE fix this problem is with temporal "bans" like this one, back when ARR was released they stopped selling the game because server where full and was a temporal thing (I know because I had to wait). Also, your solution is pointless, right now SE is already working in something similar to Blizzard with WoW (keeping realms but interconnecting them).

And I will say more, you can't predict the future, for all you know after SB release people get tired of ques/unplayable areas or a new server become more popular and Balmung end like a ghost town.

[JunseiKei]

You can petition all you want, but on games like this, it's not a democracy.

This will be wasted breath, but:

No matter the game, every server has limits. Once those servers start hitting limits, companies start accommodating with extra servers or forcing players to start spreading out if it's namely in a couple of spots (this would be Aether's Gilgamesh and Balmung).

I challenge anyone who actually wants this policy to remain in place to cite, with specific examples, how the high population of a server has adversely impacted your gameplay.

Challenge accepted.

Start of Heavensward and the segmenting (instances for each map of HW due to the high amount of people in each area) of areas leading to the splitting of hunts and not being able to get to them.

You simply asked how high population server adversely impacted gameplay (even Cactuar had this issue and is top 7 or 8 in population) and you did not ask how relevant it was to everyone. Seeing how hunts were the only/quickest way to gear up at the start, that's a pretty huge impact. Every instance of the zone had it's own hunt timer and it was RNG if you'd get into the zone you needed to engage the hunt. If you've only played for two years, you might have joined right after that annoyance was no longer needed and the maps were returned to a single instance.

[Istaru]

If this is a real threat, SE should address it by allocating resources to sustain high population servers during stress. Quite frankly, I'd rather sit in long queues than face the risk of FFXIV being fragments across 15 servers, having no sense of community whatsoever, and then dying a slow, sad death over the next two years.

Are you serious???

The game will die unless everyone continues to make the pilgrimage to Balmung and Gilgamesh?

Are you on drugs?

Can I get some? They have to be pretty good.

Let's be serious and cut the crap.

Your rant is Balmung and Balmung alone. You don't give one crap, much less two of them about anything else.

I'm sorry you feel threatened by this, but for the time being, I think that slowing the exponential growth of them is better for the game.

Since your diatribe is all about your view on things and not cold hard fact, holding us to a standard that you do not hold yourself to shows just how little you want adult time discussion.

Instead this is little more than a temper tantrum.

Now go to bed without your dessert.

[Oaken]

OP doesn't get out much. What "dead" servers? The first column is based on active lodestone changes. 3.3 completed quest data is column 2.

A12S Creator Savage clears/% is the last column. (It's based on Armateus Mount).






"Unfounded"

Keep it up.

Nice graph and allegations about login queues. It's a shame I can't really reduce to graph format what running through various zones on a high population server like Balmung or Gilgamesh (or other high population servers -- i.e. - large, healthy, active open world communities) looks like compared to most other servers (i.e. - ghost towns, terrible economy, minimal interaction between players, etc.). The bell curve on that graph would be a marvel to behold.

[Keydah]

This thread is both depressing and infuriating.

You are on an OVERPOPULATED server. There are no dead servers, but there are low pop ones partially because people are sheep and keep flocking to your overpopulated, literally locked every second outside of for-5-minutes-after-maintenance server. SE is FINALLY attempting to do something to fix that. If you want to play with your friends, then take advantage of the free transfer, so you don't have to tell them to stay up until 4am or blow money to get into your server? The transfers are FREE, take your whole FC with you or something. Those that don't want to come, then oh well? You're not going to be BFFs forever or anything.

RPers are currently looking into making a secondary RP server. Finally. Like they should have years ago. THAT is healthy to the RP community - not having to tell brand new players "lel sorry you have to pay $18 to transfer in if you wanna RP."

6. There are numerous alternatives to reduce server overpopulation that fall short of SE’s heavy-handed prohibition on transfers.

For example, SE could: (1) assess a higher server transfer fee for high-population servers; (2) provide additional in-game incentives to encourage players to transfer from high-population servers; (3) devote additional resources to banning bots and RMT schemes; (4) SE could raise monthly subscription rates to compensate for the cost of maintaining high population servers; (5) SE could designate official roleplay, hardcore raiding, and special interest servers to encourage certain player groups to transfer from over-populated worlds; (6) implement anti-idling features that disconnect players who idle for extended amounts of time.

1, 2, and 5 are great ideas. 6 would be nice too. SE may have been a bit heavy-handed in their restrictions, but it was necessary. There are servers that are black holes that suck people in because people are sad and think anything but the highest pop server is terrible. This way, people don't have a choice but to spread out, at least for a couple months. That benefits servers WAY more than just smashing multiple servers together in a merge.

Servers with "large, healthy, active open world communities" are great. Balmung and Gilgamesh are NOT that, they're so large it's a detriment to healthy servers. If they weren't so overpopulated, there would be MORE "large, healthy, active open world communities."

Also, many of your points kinda fall apart with the whole "we're working on cross-server party finder, whispers, friends lists, maybe marketboard, blah blah blah" thing. The only thing that your server is good for, even now, is RP and seeing people around. There's a large handful of servers where you already see tons of people around everywhere, and now that they've done this hopefully RP will sprout up elsewhere so that RPers actually have a choice whether or not they have to pay to play how they enjoy.

[Atreyu]

How long have you been on Balmung, exactly? Were you even here for the launch of Heavensward? It was awful. Queues were several hours long. This is both temporary and needed to happen.

And edit: likewise, I'm legacy and have been on Balmung since it was Besaid so don't be rude.

[Driavna]

Nice graph and allegations about login queues. It's a shame I can't really reduce to graph format what running through various zones on a high population server like Balmung or Gilgamesh (or other high population servers -- i.e. - large, healthy, active open world communities) looks like compared to most other servers (i.e. - ghost towns, terrible economy, minimal interaction between players, etc.). The bell curve on that graph would be a marvel to behold.

An overpopulated server is as bad as a ghost town, well even worst. If tomorrow SE connects all MB in one and allows people to invite players from another server to their own the worst place to play will be your server.