They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[Jybril]

Okay this might be a good reason for the Trust system to be implemented. Queue times gonna be horrible on Crystal.

...Yeah, Balmung is what keeping the center afloat with a sprinkle of Mateus.
I admit though, I'm not even a RPer I just enjoy the community but if I can't get into
Queue's and all, then I might be very well affected as I can't be asked to sit in Q for years.
I won't jump ship until I see it though.

Like I said, people just need to come together and see what they wanna do in order to keep
raids, and friendships or lose your house and whatever else is server bound.
You gotta find what's more important to you.

I will miss all the abundance of PF's and stuff if the split does make everything barren...

[Zumi]

Guess I am not going to be playing with a lot of people I met on Balmung anymore. This feels like its going to make PFs a have less people due to lower number of players.

[Tsukino]

They seem to have the misconception that splitting the servers like this will result in a neat little scenario where each data center contains 33% of the population.
When what they've actually done is broken up hundreds of statics (because the most populated server has been completely severed from the rest of the top-5) and pretty much hard-divided the servers into the "raiding + pvp" group (Aether) and the RP group (Crystal). So people who like to engage in both are in a very dire situation.
The bulk of players are going to migrate to those two data centers and Primal is just going to be a ghost town.

This isn't wrong and is likely to play out, but look at it from the other perspective.

A certain number of (mostly NA) players seem to have the misconception that they can all play on the same world or instance servers with no negative side effects. That somehow the devs can just wave a magic programming wand and have unlimited people all on one big server, but instead refuse to do that for some reason. That's obviously not the case - they've offered free transfers, extra incentives to move to specific places, and locked the most populated worlds, yet those people refuse to accept them in order to help fix the problem. So now they have to do something more serious (and expensive) to try and alleviate those issues.

It might not work as great as they plan, but the dev team isn't the only group making poorly informed decisions here.

[Zainy]

Server transfers are not an option, making them free doesn't fix the problem.

[HyoMinPark]

Seems like a player caused issue to me.

Yes. We clearly caused this issue after fostering communities for years on certain servers for certain activities (Balmung/Mateus for RP, Gilgamesh/Sargatanas/Leviathan for raiding) only to have them torn apart and unevenly distributed all because the developers can’t have the foresight to NOT place an MSQ instance 10 quests into the new expansion.

But, by all means, try to foster a new raiding community on Crystal when 90% of it is on Aether, and then come back and tell us all how easy it was for you. We’ll wait.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Having 4-5 popular servers on a data center is better than having only two. It still succeeds at doing it's job ultimately which was mostly to disburse Balmung since the preferred world transfer incentives were not working.

They however knew that some servers would be horribly damaged which is why they implemented visiting.

Except when all those popular servers are on Aether. Instead of Balmung having 20,000 people, Gilgamesh will. In fact, I foresight at least half of Crystal's servers being listed as preferred while Balmung drops down for the first time in four years. Meanwhile, Gilgamesh, Cactuar, Jevona and Sarg will all boaster massive upsurges. In the end, this accomplishes absolutely nothing. I suppose it will force them to prioritize the cross DC PF because they're going to need it.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yes. We clearly caused this issue after fostering communities for years on certain servers for certain activities (Balmung/Mateus for RP, Gilgamesh/Sargatanas/Leviathan for raiding) only to have them torn apart and unevenly distributed all because the developers can’t have the foresight to NOT place an MSQ instance 10 quests into the new expansion.

But, by all means, try to foster a new raiding community on Crystal when 90% of it is on Aether, and then come back and tell us all how easy it was for you. We’ll wait.

Balmung had a pretty big raiding population back during coil, before cross world party finder was a thing. In fact, it wasn't until Gordias that raiding on balmung got bad, and that was only because people jumped ship to greg thinking they could get carries on the "raiding" server.

Theres no reason why new statics cant form, people can raid anywhere.

I know you are a big shot ultimate raider, but its not hard to raid with people who aren't big shots. Just takes like minded people, who can be found anywhere, and some effort. Lots of outrage and "were gonna designate servers for this" fixes nothing.

[worldofneil]

Questions : Are the data center still all West coast or they plan to move one Central or east?

They didn't say anything at all about a new physical data centre or relocating the servers, so it sounds like they will all still be in the same places they are now.

[RokkuEkkusu]

At this point, I don't really care anymore. I've met quite a bit of people from honest folk to fair-weathered flip-floppers, that I'll just yolo whatever comes my way and team up with whoever is available.

[TsurugiKoutetsu]

I don't have anything against role players but I kind of don't want to deal with them either, I've played on balmung for a while because friends wanted me to come over but left after a few months and I rather not to have to see PF filled with people hiring for their in game strip clubs or looking for erp hookups