Balmung, Solutions to fix your.. population balancing.

[worldofneil]

Give us a reason to leave or we wont, some may still not move but its the fact that we are so poorly incentivised i think that no one is willing to xfer off.

Do you have any realistic suggestions to offer? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm sure SE would like to hear what might interest players.

[AriaXIV]

Saying you cant leave is bullshit - you can leave at anytime, even free of charge. You just dont want to - thats okay if thats your choice, obviously.
But keep in mind that an overpopulated Balmung is more harmful because of server-stability for the wholer data-center than a locked one.

#1 Did not say you could not leave the server, i said getting back on is near impossible and people are worried about it. So lets correct that.

#2 Lets also correct the issue of server stability, I am trying to suggest things that could help relieve that.

[Soupa]

My solution is just to force them to transfer when 5.0 drops and they get stuck in a 5 hour login queue and can’t even play because the servers overcrowded again. #onlySBlaunchkidswillremember it’s cool though I’m on one of the smaller servers and got a buncha cool new friends outta it. :-)

[Zsolen]

Coeurl wouldn't be a bad place for RPers to start setting up shop. Only the shady ones are not liked. The native/ long term pop likes to joke with everyone though, but not in an immature way. You would have to roll with the punches. It's laid back for the most part.

[AkashiXI]

I think the eventual server merges will be the only solution to a problem like this, with Square giving large incentives to move in or out of said merged server. They’d have to fix the house issue (only solution would be to double the housing instance so all players can keep their respective houses), and also find a way to make sure there are no duplicate names, duplicate Free Companies, etc etc. It’s a lot of work, but we have too many servers given the population. For players that like small servers — there are currently more small than large, and no inbetween.

Adamantoise has always been a smaller server, and while I don’t mind it at all, I feel having fewer, but more populated servers would benefit the lifespan of 14.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I think the eventual server merges will be the only solution to a problem like this, with Square giving large incentives to move in or out of said merged server. They’d have to fix the house issue (only solution would be to double the housing instance so all players can keep their respective houses), and also find a way to make sure there are no duplicate names, duplicate Free Companies, etc etc. It’s a lot of work, but we have too many servers given the population. For players that like small servers — there are currently more small than large, and no inbetween.

Adamantoise has always been a smaller server, and while I don’t mind it at all, I feel having fewer, but more populated servers would benefit the lifespan of 14.

Server merges have never been a good thing in any stage of an mmo, and usually put people off. Oh, that game had server merges, its dying.

[AkashiXI]

Server merges have never been a good thing in any stage of an mmo, and usually put people off. Oh, that game had server merges, its dying.

Yet it’s a necessity for most and a pink elephant in the room. It’s how you spin/advertise the merge, rather than saying, “The game is dying, we need to do this.” Square just needs to find the right incentives to pull it off, and make it feel like a new beginning, rather than a beginning to an end.

[Vanitas]

The only solution that will work for everyone is to delete Balmung.

[Ageofwar]

The only solution that will work for everyone is to delete Balmung.

Wow I though I was being radical, I think this idea would piss off more people than a server split

I don't think Aether need to be merged, I think the population need to be spead more accross the servers, which is where desinating a RP server is not going to work. (well unless you desginate Aether for RP)

on a techincal level borrowing resorces from other Aether servers to keep Balmung up is not posible solution and it makes the server layout non-universal which in turn makes patching a lot harder.

[Vhailor]

These are just three of my personal thoughts on the matter, keeping it locked is unhealthy for both balmung and the surrounding servers because they all have people who want to move to join their friends but just cant. So you will lose subs if this isnt fixed and people feel like they cant enjoy themselves.

Speaking as someone on Mateus, please, no, let's not add additional incentives to exit Balmung. I didn't like the first flood of people; I wouldn't relish a second one.

They've got enough incentives in place. I could get behind an improved cross-world system, because that's general functionality that benefits everyone, and I could do with a change to the character creation lockout system that restricts creation for new accounts but not new characters (it's fucking ridiculous that existing accounts - accounts that can only have one character logged in at a time - cannot create new alts on a locked server).

Beyond that, though? No. Let things stay as they are. If you don't like the overcrowding and its consequences, leave. If you don't want to leave, stop complaining about the consequences. I'm all up for a bit of bashing on SE for even letting this situation arise in the first place, but now that it's here, there's not a lot they can do without severely disrupting other players for the sake of those who want to have their cake (their die-hard community) while eating it too (removal of overpopulation restrictions).

By the way, even if people somehow left in large numbers, the restrictions would largely remain in place. There's almost surely a huge backlog of people waiting to make characters on Balmung. What do you think would happen if the server's population were to return to acceptable levels? SE would surely remove the transfer incentives. Followed by... what, exactly? Any lifting of the restrictions for even a few hours would probably kill the population again, and then we'd be right back where we are. It's not a solvable problem at this point. It's simply something people on Balmung have to live with. It's like living in a gated community that nobody wants to leave - you can't exactly invite your friends to move in next door. Trade-offs.