Servers are fracturing communities

[Ayer2015]

Mega servers are the clear answer. The question is, is SE willing to invest in the change.

[ErryK]

I'm not proposing any solutions, if you want them hire me lol. I'm simply trying to raise awareness of this.

Lol. This is pure bait.

[jameseoakes]

Mega servers are the clear answer. The question is, is SE willing to invest in the change.

Answer to what?

[KisaiTenshi]

I'm not really sure what you want SE to do about it. If you look at WoW, Blizzard has made a lot of changes that largely negate the ability of servers to potentially split up friends, but it also came at the expense of other organically forming communities, such as realm communities. Now everything is cross-realm, including current content, and overpopulation is handled by creating additional copies of the area. While it allows Blizzard to funnel tons of people into the same virtual realm, it's also rather disjointed and destructive in its own right. Having played WoW for over 10 years (albeit, somewhat off and on), CRZ was honestly one of the worst changes they ever made, from the perspective of being detrimental to my fun and gameplay experience.

I have not played WoW, but I have played Wizardy (which largely just had a "hub world"), PSO2 (which only had a hub world), and Vindictus (aka Mabinogi Heroes), and I'll tell you straight up that the "channel changing" mechanic used to split up a world into multiple worlds is extremely disruptive, and yes prevents organic community forming because you may never ever see someone again once you do an instance.

The more ideal system requires a dynamic open world to begin with (eg see minecraft) and when player capacity increases in an area, you cleave off that section of the game and run it on another machine. Players crossing that boundary don't even see it. This can be as small as "a house" or shop, or as large as a an entire city in the game world context. But you never just run empty instances for people to get lost in. The worst side effect of doing it this way is that you lose your draw distance, so a lot of content just "pops in" and you get a lot more lag on low quality connections.

That said, that is also the antithesis of a storyline driven game, you can't generate more story at random any better than you can generate landscapes and buildings. A lot of these kinds of things game logic uses the "series of prefabricated rooms glued together" mechanic like the Palace of the Dead does.

So FFXIV is not the right game to do this. We don't need the overworld to be little more than a hub world for dungeons and yet more glued-to-the-ground generic nameless NPC's. Is it that hard to give all the NPC's a name? Instead of "Independent Mender" and "Scrip Exchange" maybe "Bob the Fixer" and "Joe's Scrip Exchange", if you at least give them a name they feel like they weren't just dropped there for lack of any planning.

[Joe777]

Don't forget there are people that actually like playing on low population servers. I know I do Besides, got a feel for how a crowded server is when Make It Rain happened and like 1,000 players gathered early in Ul'dah. Yeah, I'm happy with a low pop server.

[LalaRu]

I've to understand why any new player complaining have always their friends into the most busy server of the planet. And why always they want join their friends the day after the server goes locked.

[Rinuko]

I dont really see the problems anymore. We have cross world setup now as long you play on same DC

[Reinha]

The locked servers don't need more people. Make friends with those already on the server instead of luring every new player there. There are over 20 000 people to build friendships with on Balmung. And if you want to play with an IRL friend then you can always make an alt on another server and play through the MSQ with them.

[347SPECTRE]

I've said this before on another thread and I'll say it again here. If you're really dead set on playing with friends, transfer off Balmung/Greg (Other high pop servers) to the server your friend is on. It'll also help with Balmung's population issue.

[Moonlite]

I've said this before on another thread and I'll say it again here. If you're really dead set on playing with friends, transfer off Balmung/Greg (Other high pop servers) to the server your friend is on. It'll also help with Balmung's population issue.

You are so right. The one thing I don't see people complain about, which I think they have a right. Is the lock and free transfer system don't coincide. A person shouldn't have to pay to leave a lock server. They waited this long and couldn't have both systems in place. Also the gil restrictions are dumb. We have seen screenshots of people on lots of servers with max gil. Top ilvl gear is npc not gil anyways. I get houses/apartments suck. Let people take their gil and start with their friends now.