They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[hours]

In addition to free server transfers, they should give every active account a story and level skip thinger so that people can have the option of continuing to raid with their statics on alt characters. It's still an ugly solution, as maintaining more than one character is a pain, but it does not hurt to have more choices available.

[DracotheDragon]

So would I be correct in assuming the reason behind this is likely the World-Visit feature? I can see that adding extra stress to the servers that would require such a split... If so... Honestly I can live without that feature, when you spirit away half my friends like this it's already a fairly redundant feature anyway... Delay this whole mess until you can work on a cross-data-center feature that effectively removes the negatives of this change...

i don't think its just the world visiting feature, Harken back to the days of yore, known as... the storm blood launch, where balmung was so full of players the server broke, and took the data centre with it, then remember 4.3 where balmung broke, due to the server over stressing itself, the dc split seems like a way to lower overall stress between the data centres.

[Barraind]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Because surprise, nobody wants to move to crystal.

[HyoMinPark]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Please no. My static and friends are already being fragmented enough as it is.

[Nalien]

i don't think its just the world visiting feature, Harken back to the days of yore, known as... the storm blood launch, where balmung was so full of players the server broke, and took the data centre with it, then remember 4.3 where balmung broke, due to the server over stressing itself, the dc split seems like a way to lower overall stress between the data centres.

Well, I don't know about NA, but Chaos' playerbase is pretty sparse these days, it really feels completely unneeded... Major content launches are typically a problem no matter what you do though, the best way to mitigate it would be to have some form of branching story paths, that way you take the load off something like Raubahn since you don't bottle neck your excited playerbase on a linear path... That's why patches rarely have the same issues we saw at Stormbloods release, people spread out and do different pieces of content. You might do the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Crafting/etc., whereas with expansions they've always locked us to a single path. That's what causes that problem, at least.

Honestly though, if Balmung is the biggest problem, as the unofficial RP server... Why not see what impact an official RP server has before fracturing the community like this? Leave the servers as they are, take this new Crystal data center and slap "Official RP Data Center" on it, add incentive to move there, see how that plays out. It might not have the desired impact, but I'd say it's worth trying before, you know, screwing over a large portion of the playerbase as is the current plan... I don't think ping should be a major issue for RPers, so slap the data center anywhere and have NA/EU/JP servers in it perhaps...

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Because surprise, nobody wants to move to crystal.

Not only would that imbalance the servers 6/8/10, it would be an unmitigated disaster in terms of PR. If they started pulling crap like that, I guarantee people would outright quit instead.

[DracotheDragon]

Well, I don't know about NA, but Chaos' playerbase is pretty sparse these days, it really feels completely unneeded... Major content launches are typically a problem no matter what you do though, the best way to mitigate it would be to have some form of branching story paths, that way you take the load off something like Raubahn since you don't bottle neck your excited playerbase on a linear path... That's why patches rarely have the same issues we saw at Stormbloods release, people spread out and do different pieces of content. You might do the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Crafting/etc., whereas with expansions they've always locked us to a single path. That's what causes that problem, at least.

Honestly though, if Balmung is the biggest problem, as the unofficial RP server... Why not see what impact an official RP server has before fracturing the community like this? Leave the servers as they are, take this new Crystal data center and slap "Official RP Data Center" on it, add incentive to move there, see how that plays out. It might not have the desired impact, but I'd say it's worth trying before, you know, screwing over a large portion of the playerbase as is the current plan... I don't think ping should be a major issue for RPers, so slap the data center anywhere and have NA/EU/JP servers in it perhaps...

oh trust me i completely agree with you, but i still think this was an inevitability for the NA side, for EU i think its more the DDOSing thats been going for months that pushed the split, other then that i do agree

[Barraind]

I mean, they would have to, if theyre moving servers for the reasons mentioned. Otherwise, youre going to end up moving 7 of the smallest servers in NA to a new cluster and keeping 4 of the 6 largest still in Aether.

[HyoMinPark]

I mean, they would have to, if theyre moving servers for the reasons mentioned. Otherwise, youre going to end up moving 7 of the smallest servers in NA to a new cluster and keeping 4 of the 6 largest still in Aether.

Crystal’s projected population based on a previous census (2018/09/15) have it at over 90,000. Aether is at ~86,000. Primal at ~85,000.

They’ve already established the list. Those of us who are getting screwed over are trying to make decisions and think about rebuilding our statics. Coming out with a “Surprise! We’re going to move 2 more servers to Crystal!” would just add gas to the fire.

[K1tt]

My concern is that with a smaller pool for the duty finder its going to be difficult to get my roulettes done in a reasonable time. Im hoping the duty finder pool would come from both chaos and light if that were possible.