Any recent updates for server "balancing"?

[Tsumdere]

It's a bad situation all around imo.

I will preface what I'm about to say with this :

Balmung should not open at this very moment. I am not saying it should. I believe SE should heavily reconsider server balancing though. Something needs to be done.
That being said...

1. Its feels really dead. Like really really dead. No one comes to hunts, no one comes to super FATEs, low level areas are completely devoid of life because there is no leveling, and there is no fresh blood replacing the people who just... leave (this point really feeds into the no one showing up to content). The only place you see people is Kugane and the Quicksand. I understand it is the mid-patch lull, but it really does feel terrible to be punished for two weeks of heavy activity that happens every two years. I haven't had a single queue to log in since the first two weeks of Stormblood.

2. SE no doubt has lost customers because of it. I cannot for the life of me get people to keep playing the game. They say they like the game, but feel lonely even if I do dungeons with them. I understand this feeling, because it is exactly what I felt like when I started on a different server than my friends. For a new player who wants to play an MMO like... an MMO, not being on a server with their group of friends is practically a death sentence to that player's sub. I have lost all of my five new friends to this. They quit and never come back.

Personally, I am between a rock and a hard place where my FC and friends of literal 6+ years have dug in their heels and said we're not leaving Balmung, but irl friends and new friends saying they will quit if they don't get on Balmung (and they do). But why should we leave? We have our dream houses, large contact lists, stable FC, and (for me) a great hunting community. It's not exactly fair to tell me to choose between two groups of friends. In any case, I made my choice and the only real losers are new customers and SE.

[Rokke]

Do you actually hunt? Like, actually hunt-hunt? Unless you’re hoping to leech of a party in pf or are playing between 2-5am ptd, hunts drop faster than slow comps can reach the mark because linkshells are so quick.

The open world is dead because there’s nothing to do in it. Potd/hoh killed fate trains, which were the only reason to really stray out of the cities. Opening the server would not really change that. Level a character on one of the preferred worlds. Outside the city states the world is a ghost town regardless of server pop.