A humble request to Square Enix: please unlock Gilgamesh.

[ScootPatoot]

I'll keep this brief.

Our economy has crashed.
FCs are dying left and right, and there are no new people to strengthen them.
We have many latent players, but the active ones are leaving, making the environment bleak for those who play socially.
Open Gilgamesh, please.

~ Scoot Patoot

[Lazaruz]

I'll keep this brief.

Our economy has crashed.
FCs are dying left and right, and there are no new people to strengthen them.
We have many latent players, but the active ones are leaving, making the environment bleak for those who play socially.
Open Gilgamesh, please.

~ Scoot Patoot

Once your population isnt in immediate risk of exceeding server capacity, they will.
It's as simple as that, especially since it took SE FAR too long to stop the ability to transfer in, one could make the argument Balmung even went beyond what would be considered stable numbers

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Once your population isnt in immediate risk of exceeding server capacity, they will.
It's as simple as that, especially since it took SE FAR too long to stop the ability to transfer in, one could make the argument Balmung even went beyond what would be considered stable numbers

This stance can lead to irreparable damage to their respective communities. Say both Balmung and Gilgamesh remain locked for another six months, bleeding enough players to finally unlock. By this point, many will have moved on and neither server recovers. Now Mateus, Cactuar and Leviathan are the top servers. Should everywhere who went there cross their fingers and desperately try to re-direct people to other servers for fear they'll get moved into congestion and suffer the same decline? Now you could possibly argue Balmung needs to stay locked a bit longer, but I'd prefer the devs stop taking the easy approach and offer better incentives for other servers.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

This stance can lead to irreparable damage to their respective communities. Say both Balmung and Gilgamesh remain locked for another six months, bleeding enough players to finally unlock. By this point, many will have moved on and neither server recovers. Now Mateus, Cactuar and Leviathan are the top servers. Should everywhere who went there cross their fingers and desperately try to re-direct people to other servers for fear they'll get moved into congestion and suffer the same decline? Now you could possibly argue Balmung needs to stay locked a bit longer, but I'd prefer the devs stop taking the easy approach and offer better incentives for other servers.

You realize this'll be a continuous cycle that must be repeated? When that happens, the same applies to those servers because you cannot predict which players go where and for how long. There is no single solution other than to address the situations when they arise.

If Balmung ever got to the point where it actually stagnates, they'd just open the server and offer the incentive to transfer over. But let's be real, Balmung is far and away from that happening within the next 1-2 years.

[Oscura]

You realize this'll be a continuous cycle that must be repeated?

I can see how that will be healthy for the game as time goes on.

[LaylaTsarra]

Was it healthy for the game for servers like Balmung, Gilgamesh, Tonberry and others to bleed other servers in their data centers of their vitality when their party finders dried up and people moved away to the promised lands as a result? The fact of the matter is the bleeding needed to stop for the health of the game overall. Cross finder party finder has has a lot to do with stopping the exodus from smaller servers and the incentives to repopulate the smaller ones appears to be working very well.

I can feel for those who aren't happy with people leaving but it's no more of an issue then having had the smaller servers suffer for a long time because of their people leaving. Rebalancing is necessary and hopefully locks will be a thing of the past soon enough.

Relative to the OP I can identify with Gilgamesh seeming less populated at the moment because I have a fully leveled toon there and run content. Yes it does seem less populated but I will say that when xpac released having queues of over 3500 was ridiculous. Perhaps it's time for SE to give the population of Gilgamesh a hard look and perhaps open it again because the incentive to move there now with cross finder pf isn't what is once was.

[Vrankyl]

If Balmung ever got to the point where it actually stagnates, they'd just open the server and offer the incentive to transfer over. But let's be real, Balmung is far and away from that happening within the next 1-2 years.

While the population itself may take that long to stagnate the real issue with such a lock is the economy on the server. So many things that non crafters sell are finite things to be sold, things that once people have they don't need again. Even crafters will eventually have an issue as leveling gear becomes less and less needed and thus ends up not selling. Now if SE were to implement a Data Center wide MB this would no longer be concerned and the lock could easily stay indefinitely until the population drops to acceptable levels. Without something like that it can very well ruin the economy on the server completely.

[Krotoan]

This stance can lead to irreparable damage to their respective communities. Say both Balmung and Gilgamesh remain locked for another six months, bleeding enough players to finally unlock. By this point, many will have moved on and neither server recovers.

Recovers... back to too many people?
Or you think the server will finally go under safe limits of concurrent users and then it'll open and people will just gush out like a severed artery and it'll die? .. .. I'm not seeing any reason to unlock the server that makes sense yet.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Recovers... back to too many people?
Or you think the server will finally go under safe limits of concurrent users and then it'll open and people will just gush out like a severed artery and it'll die? .. .. I'm not seeing any reason to unlock the server that makes sense yet.

Recovers in the sense of rebuilding their community. If enough people transfer, many won't go back and even more will inevitably leave or quit the game entirely because Gilgamesh isn't what it once was. You have to strike a balance between stable populations and letting a community thrive. I recently moved to Cactuar and don't want to see the markets implode and people start leaving because the devs refuse to offer better incentivizes.

[Lazaruz]

This stance can lead to irreparable damage to their respective communities. Say both Balmung and Gilgamesh remain locked for another six months, bleeding enough players to finally unlock. By this point, many will have moved on and neither server recovers. Now Mateus, Cactuar and Leviathan are the top servers. Should everywhere who went there cross their fingers and desperately try to re-direct people to other servers for fear they'll get moved into congestion and suffer the same decline? Now you could possibly argue Balmung needs to stay locked a bit longer, but I'd prefer the devs stop taking the easy approach and offer better incentives for other servers.

I can see where you're going with this, but I have to agree with Kokonoe that this is unfortunately a continuous cycle particularly because it's impossible to predict where players migrate towards (I mean just look at the incentives from leaving a congested world. Some likely took SE up on that offer, while others didnt, and the only way to know is case by case), with one possible exception, and it's a exception I feel like you're overlooking and, coincidentaly why I firmly believe Balmung got so drasticly overinflated in the first place, that being its status as the "official" RP server.

I know a good number of people who with as much as a passing interest in roleplaying where either looking to transfer into Balmung, or lamenting that only Balmung has a "proper" roleplay community, as (atleast in my experience and heresay) the roleplaying scene is nowhere even close as established as it is on Balmung anywhere else (I even knew about Balmung's role as a "RP server" before I even started playing FF14!).

Unless another server completely usurps the position as the "official" RP server from Balmung, I find it hard to believe the community would have to be locked as long as Balmung have and likely will be, as you're not drawing in players in quite the same way, especially now with the constant improvements to cross-server capabilities