Splitting up friends defeats the spirit of an MMO. Please reverse this server mess.

[Malzian]

That is still SE's fault they pick inefficient ways of running things. I do not care of the reasoning, it is not a defense to keep taking cheap shortcuts like this. At some point I am sure survival of the fittest will take place and if SE can't keep up then what?

This is nice info and such, but it does not change the fact on how dead the game will appear during the slow times. I am in strong disagreement of having this change just because of 2 weeks of congestion. What will happen in the months after that? You know the mass unsubing during the second and 3rd month after a patch? Or PvP? did you ever think about these effects outside your selfish "Raubahn or Pippin EX" issue? You rather have an issue fixed that only lasts for 2 weeks vs all the negative impacts for months and years? I consider that selfish.

On BALMUNG!~!! BALMUNG!!!! the game is slow as is during those slow times, and pvp queues even more so, how in the heck you expect this to thrive with an even smaller population????????? How you think I even know a cap exists for that queue timer? its 999 mins and 99 seconds, it wont display anything more then that. Hunts? same thing, they are active as can be after a patch that uses books for upgrade the current gear, but a few months after?dead, hard to get people come to them, even with our dedicated linkshell to them. Every once in a while you may hear reports though the NN too, but outside those 4 weeks after a major patch the game feels really dead and empty.

It blows my mind how small of a population these servers seem to unable to handle.

I'm going to stop addressing the server issues now since its obvious that you just don't understand how these things work and the practicalities that are involved.

Let me go on to my "selfish Rauhbahn and Pippin EX excuse". I used this issue as an example of the types of issues the Datacenter population causes, it's the metaphorical tip of the iceberg that is the most apparent symptom of an issue that runs much deeper. You are worrying about the population living on top of the tree and not the tree itself. The congestion you see at these points is emblematic of the deeper problem that the instance and lobby servers in general cannot support the load the current population distribution places upon them. This affects the performance of instances and lag and server ticks and all of that in general play - the more people on the DC instance server at the same time the more strain and the slower it functions creating degraded performance and issues. This is why we saw the "bug" in Suzaku EX during the Simon phase - too many people running it at the same time causing the server performance to degrade. Let me make this clear - this is not a solution for a one-off problem, it's a solution to stabilize the instance and lobby servers in general so all of the actual gameplay benefits, not just your queue times.

You're worrying about how dead the game will appear during the "slow times", which is itself a non-starter since they're called "slow times" for that specific reason. The times when no one is playing will still be the times when no one is playing, and the only difference will be is that Rhalger's or whatever will have less people in it. But the thing is, while the over-all population of the DC shrinks, the proportions of Tank to Healer to DPS should not vary greatly. They are not going, "Okay, all the DPS seem to come from Excal, so let's move them to another DC". Chances are your queues will not change no matter how they split or rearrange the servers, even if they have is a Mega server, that balance will not change.