Locking Balmung/Gilgamesh is not working

[D-chan]

Thing is tho, thats an extra cost to add new servers, and why would anyone do that when they perfectly good empty servers already? Adding "RP" servers would require new hardware for each server, and if no one moves off the old servers to go there, then they just wasted a ton of money on hardware because of a few people on the forums.

Merge two of the lowest pop "empty" servers, then, and use the freed resources for a new server. Yes, it takes money, but at some point that's got to stop being an excuse. SE's job is to invest money into the game to make a profit. The situation on Balmung right now is not okay, people are losing faith in SE, people are getting so fed up they are quitting or considering it because they can't stand being on Balmung anymore but don't want to be parted from their friends and the largest RP community. We've put up with the long queues and the server crashes, the ridiculous lack of housing and contradicting info about what can or can't be done in regards to people "flipping" houses, the lack of fresh faces in the community and the inability to play on the same server as friends who are just picking up the game, and now the economy is absolutely tanking.

People are either saving ridiculous amounts of gil to buy houses at multiple times their actual cost from other players, or they already have their house or have foregone that madness and have instead already bought all the things they want and need. There are no new players and no new characters being made. There's jump potions available atm so even classes and characters people haven't gotten around to leveling yet don't need low-level gear and food etc. when they can just get boosted to a high level instead of grinding out levels. No one is buying anything. Prices are super low and they drop drastically every day, sometimes every hour, sometimes in minutes. Undercutting is out of hand. Things just aren't selling. Making gil is nearly impossible, yet if you want a house, you need to save up a few dozen mil for a small plot and risk getting in trouble for buying it from another player. If you need to clear out your inventory, you'll have better luck trashing what you have or vendoring it, because otherwise your retainers will be sitting full of things listed on the marketboard for weeks. It's getting out of hand and it's long past time SE does something about it when no other fix has been more than a band-aid at best.

We have seen how Mateus's population blew up so quickly when it was named the unofficial, secondary RP server. There's not a chance that at least the same level of interest wouldn't be generated by an official RP server.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

server merges are NEVER the way to go, unless a game is dying out completely.

Adding more people to Balmung won't make the prices increase, they will go down further, supply/demand

[D-chan]

server merges are NEVER the way to go, unless a game is dying out completely.

Server merges are what happens when a company has made a mistake. Sometimes that mistake is vastly overestimating how many servers they will need, or making poor choices that turn people away from the game and make the number of active players drop. Sometimes that mistake is letting one server get grossly overpopulated and doing nothing about it until it was too late and locking it indefinitely.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Server merges are what happens when a company has made a mistake. Sometimes that mistake is vastly overestimating how many servers they will need, or making poor choices that turn people away from the game and make the number of active players drop. Sometimes that mistake is letting one server get grossly overpopulated and do nothing about it until it was too late and locking it indefinitely.

So you are telling me, if they merged 2 small servers to make way for an "RP" server, the people on the smaller servers would get upset over losing their houses, possibly names, and FC's, and that would be less of an issue than the current problem on Balmung? They did do something about the overpopulation. Free, unrestricted server transfers, but people didn't want to leave their 8 linkshells and 200+ friends, so by their own choice, they stay on a server with population issues.


The game has also had the most active players since the release of 3.0.

For the record, my character was created on Besaid in 2010. That got merged into Balmung. When they offered up the free transfers, my group took advantage of it. We made our choice, you made yours. You can't blame SE for your decision.

[reiichi]

Based on unofficial census by locking the servers they have already fixed that though, Gilgamesh has become lower then a bunch of primal servers based on active players

People keep bringing up an unofficial census based on special rules that designate an "active" player. That doesn't speak about people who only come back for an expansion or just for a patch for new savage raid content. From my understanding, Gilgamesh is one of those servers. Sure, it's population looks smaller right now, but it's still active enough to be closed. And its active population will likely spike when 4.2 drops and there's new gear and new Omega to run. Right now, 4.1 hasn't really changed anything gear-wise for PvE players. They're likely saving on their subscription costs.

But let's assume that per datacenter, the number of players all evened out so each server has the same amount of people. Come patch/expansion time, we'd still run into login queues, duty finder issues, and private instance issues because those are datacenter-wide issues. Sure, some of the server-wide issues might be temporarily alleviated, but the current transfer incentives aren't quite enough in my opinion. They were for people looking for an out. Not for the people who want in.

[D-chan]

So you are telling me, if they merged 2 small servers to make way for an "RP" server, the people on the smaller servers would get upset over losing their houses, possibly names, and FC's? They did do something about the overpopulation. Free, unrestricted server transfers, but people didn't want to leave their 8 linkshells and 200+ friends, so by their own choice, they stay on a server with population issues.

When exactly did I tell you that? Please show me? You aren't going to get anywhere in trying to make a point by putting words in my mouth. Yes, they would be upset. The same as people on Balmung are upset now. The same as many people on Mateus and elsewhere are upset they can't be on Balmung/with the larger portion of the RP community. The same as many people who had been on Mateus prior to the free transfers were upset when their server was flooded with RPers, their population blew up, and the houses were bought out. Shit happens, there isn't much you can do to help a large number of people without upsetting a smaller number of people. Yes, some names might be lost, I don't see how FC's would be lost since I've never seen guilds get disbanded in a server merge in any other MMO (but maybe I'm missing some detail here?), and as for housing, I think before anything else, SE needs to rework the housing system. After all, making an official RP server and then not letting people transfer their house there or even guaranteeing they could purchase a new one there would be no fix at all for the issues at hand.

If the "something" SE did was so ineffective and unappealing to players that it hardly made a dent in the overpopulation problem, then it wasn't a helpful "something." And I'm not denying that attempts were made, rather that they were, in my own words and not the ones you made up for me, done "too late." I can't blame SE for my decisions. I can, however, blame them for their own mistakes.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Then whats the point of merging servers, if the people who would be upset is equal to those currently upset? That would just transfer the anger from one population to another, and solve nothing. Really what needs to happen is the RP community needs to not be stuck on 1 server, and they need to split themselves up. Because no matter what happens, you won't ever be able to fit all past, present, and future RPers on one server, and for the most part, my understanding is that they only want to be on the biggest RP server. They only moved/chose Mateus when they had no other choice.

[reiichi]

[snip] Really what needs to happen is the RP community needs to not be stuck on 1 server, and they need to split themselves up. Because no matter what happens, you won't ever be able to fit all past, present, and future RPers on one server, and for the most part, my understanding is that they only want to be on the biggest RP server. They only moved/chose Mateus when they had no other choice.

They tried before on Gilgamesh and it worked decently in 2.X. It didn't stay alive that well after.


Smaller groups of RPers have also congregated on other servers like Siren and Jenova, but there was never a really organized effort until Balmung was locked to transfers. At that time, Mateus was very vocal. And EU players also decided that it would perhaps be wise to have an unofficial server that wasn't a sea and a continent away from them. This isn't some easily fixed problem. It's on the players and on SE for any solution to -really- work. Otherwise, coordinated player efforts will either be missed or ignored, or will fill up and lock another server. Efforts by just SE will anger the players somewhere.

It's also tough to group all RPers together because there really isn't -that- strong of a community bond. Rather, it's more like a bunch of individual groups with some decent overlap that may or may not coordinate on hub sites like the RPC or tag appropriately on select-what-you-see social media like tumblr.

[D-chan]

Then whats the point of merging servers, if the people who would be upset is equal to those currently upset? That would just transfer the anger from one population to another, and solve nothing. Really what needs to happen is the RP community needs to not be stuck on 1 server, and they need to split themselves up. Because no matter what happens, you won't ever be able to fit all past, present, and future RPers on one server, and for the most part, my understanding is that they only want to be on the biggest RP server. They only moved/chose Mateus when they had no other choice.

You've asserted that there are numerous "empty" servers out there, that doesn't sound "equal" to the number of people currently miffed about the server locks? A lot of us enjoy RPing in MMO's because it feels like a complete world that's "alive" around you when you're in a big RP community where you can usually always find other people IC or RP events going on. Smaller communities don't always have that feel, and large vs small communities have other pros and cons. But naturally, a lot of role-players are going to gravitate toward... well, a lot of role-players.

We have split ourselves up, numerous times. We knew Balmung would be too crowded at 2.0's launch, so Gilgamesh was designated an alternative RP server. That fizzled out eventually as the game started calm, and most of them transferred to Balmung. Balmung began to get very crowded, people who wanted something smaller or who just missed the memo that there was an unofficial RP server began to make small RP communities across various servers. Then with the server lock and the queue time hell, there was a bigger push to make a secondary RP server hub and Mateus was chosen. True, some people who were just joining the game didn't have a choice and had to default to Mateus. But plenty of people on Balmung willingly chose to transfer or make characters on Mateus. They absolutely had a choice.

RP communities are not incapable of dividing when it's in our best interests. However, most of us are fine with a crowded server. Again, no one here has any illusions about an RP server ever not being crowded. In any MMO, no matter how many RP servers they are and whether they are official or unofficial, there's typically one that's "the" RP server that attracts the majority of the RP community. We're not asking for it to not be crowded. We're asking to no longer have our server be one that's been sequestered and slowly suffocated. There's nothing stopping there from being multiple RP servers even in terms of official RP servers, it's not unheard for MMO's to make a new RP server when the previous RP server is too crowded, so "there are too many RPers for one official RP server" isn't much of an argument because... there doesn't have to be just one?

[Enla]

The only reason SE hasn't server merged up until this point is because doing so if often seen as an indication of decay within an MMO's structure. Yet there are plenty of servers even on the Aether network that could probably benefit from it. The server closures of Balmung and Gilgamesh can only 'fix' the issue so much without ruining those two servers and we're fastly getting to the point where inflation is at an all time high. The continued lock is only going to cause more issues going forward without SE taking a long hard look at their server infrastructure and making a few potentially tough calls about what they want going forward. They need to upgrade their capacity on all ends no matter what side of the equation you're on however. The introduction of 4.1 was a clown show for most people because of the limitations of their current technology and as the game continues to grow and expand there's going to come time when their present best simply won't be enough.