I hope that Balmung remains locked for quite some time. It's much too bloated at the moment. Preventing new characters from being created easily on the server was a good way to mitigate the problem for a while but a lot of people got around that simply through transferring. This is a process that stands to make the development team quite a bit of money, so it's very telling that they're preventing people from transferring to Balmung altogether.

Balmung is a behemoth - one that needs to be beaten down a few times until it becomes more manageable in size. Offering incentives to players to move away from it is a pretty great move, especially if the development team continue to make it more appealing to play on a server that isn't so overpopulated. The cross server friend's list and messaging system will go a long way towards accomplishing that, I believe.