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

[dotsforlife]

These threads keep getting better and better.

[Atlantasia]

Why 3 million is not adequate incentive (yes, I get we get the full cost of our house back):

#1.) No guarantee we'll regain our housing unless it's a small house and even the best plots for those are going to be harder to find free on a server. For myself, I have plot 6/36 in Mist, and I waited 2 years for it! I'm not moving my main character and giving up that prime real estate. I don't give a flying flip about Ishgardian housing or even Shirogane, I just want my Medium Plot 6/36 in Mist and I want to always stay here.

#2.) Amount of Items from my house and the ridiculous amount of time I'd have to spend reducing my materials/items to be able to obtain enough of my items that I'd be okay with transferring.

On a Medium House:
> Outdoors 30 items + 30 storage spots, mine are currently 60/60 full and I have a few extras in my retainers already.

> Indoors 300 items + 300 storage spots, mine are not full, but I'm looking at around 525/600 slots.

So in total, to move and take most of it, because most of it is harder to obtain items, holiday items, etc... I would have to clear off at least three retainers! And that's assuming I could obtain a new medium house, to be able to not have three retainers constantly stuffed up with housing items. I already have 8 retainers, and they're full, my inventory is almost full too. The life of a crafter/gatherer... :/

[wereotter]

Boy this thread alone just made me that much happier that we're losing Balmung from our data center

Also this really is needed for the health of the game overall. The game is too bogged down with too many people trying to access content causing lagging and crashing. We all remember two years ago the issues with Stormblood and the Rauban/Pippen instances, and people literally standing in lines waiting for their turn to try to talk to Rauban to get through that content, being stuck in the Fringes for days. Even then my own friend group was split up from progression as three of us got through the instances day two while the fourth of us was still stuck there three or four days later. Taking a third of the population from both data centers and creating a new one is good to help prevent this from happening again.

Also for the vast majority of players this will have little to no impact. Speaking for myself, I have two people I play with who aren't on my own server, both of them players who were formerly on the same one and transferred off for different reasons. Obviously this will have some impact on a small number of players, and I do feel for people who might not be able to play with all their friends anymore, but I think Square is also being as generous as they can be when it comes to free server transfers and reimbursing you for housing. Yes I know some people might have paid more initially out of pocket for the house than they're getting back, but you also have to consider into that the value you got from it by actually using it for the time you had it, and realize that you're still getting a reasonable offer.

[Atlantasia]

As for why this has me conflicted:

I am a raider and have been since T6-9 was relevant. I raided prior to the cross server party finder scene, and prior to it, while raiding wasn't impossible, it was a nightmare to find people with the same competency levels who also played the classes needed and were on the same page with raiding goals. Took me months to get into groups (still does to find a good group), this won't be AS bad, but it will still be worse for me, because I'm on a server that will become a part of Crystal, the new unoffical RP server, and the data shows clear that raiding clears will not be happening on that data center as much as it will on Aether, Reddit's done the number crunches, Crystal as a data center is nearly 50% less effective at clearing end game raids across the board than the new Aether is.

On top of this, because I'm a raider, my friends are leaving my server to be able to stay with their raid groups. My own FC leader is leaving and taking over half the FC with him! Not all my friends are going though... but a good half of them are or I'm losing access to my cross world friends.

And on top of this, half my raid group is on the new Aether and half are on Crystal... so it's move or find a new raid group.

I'd take Rauban Savage in a heartbeat over this to be frank. The effort it would take me to move would be extreme. I have to choose 50% of my friends + my Medium house or my raid group + 50% of my friends. That's a crap decision, either way it effects me horribly.

[Atlantasia]

As for solutions, I'm not an IT person, but if another big MMORPG can put all of North America on the same Data Center, then this tells me it's more a money issue than anything.

So what if I can still talk to my friends on Discord? I can't PLAY with them. That's the problem. I agree with people, saying the impact of this would be much less had they done this before the cross world party finder, because if you don't know what you're missing, then it's not as big a deal.

I went to FanFest this year, it was my first convention and the hype was real, but it's like giving a child candy with the cross world teleporting, then telling them they can't eat it by taking us away from our friends and connections we've made over the last few years. It left this very bittersweet taste in my mouth and my friends and I at fanfest left downright depressed. :/

A few other solutions:
> Cross Data Center Party Finder.
> Add new wards or new servers for transferring people to obtain housing only for that two week period.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Because blizzard isn't really all on the same datacenter, in a way. They shard everything because they have a zillion physical servers. Basically it's the same as the zone instances on expansion releases, except all the time.

It works for some things, but has its own issues. They do not have everyone logged into the same server at the same time like people think.

[Jojoya]

Why 3 million is not adequate incentive

It's not intended to be an incentive to get people to move. It's intended as partial compensation for items potentially lost by those who might feel a need to move.

They don't want people moving. The new data center arrangement is set up with current server populations in mind so overall populations will be balanced.

If you're trying to get a bribe to move, you might as well give up.

Because blizzard isn't really all on the same datacenter, in a way. They shard everything because they have a zillion physical servers. Basically it's the same as the zone instances on expansion releases, except all the time.

It works for some things, but has its own issues. They do not have everyone logged into the same server at the same time like people think.

Just to clarify this for those not familiar with WoW, in addition to data centers WoW realms are divided up into Battlegroups, clusters of 10-15 servers. They're actually about the same size as the FFXIV data centers.

Players used to only see players from other servers in their Battlegroups in cross server content until Blizzard made the content cross data center instead.

[Knahli]

Not really following the big argument but to add my own two cents, I did wonder why they decided to do this at the same time as implementing World Visit as opposed to sampling the effects of it first. If a world is congested then I assume visits will not be permitted for the sake of the actual residents, so I like to think Balmung would not suffer further for it, though I wonder how many people would visit other worlds and spend more time there, particularly during patch time for the sake of less congestion and competition out in the world. Perhaps it would not have a significant impact, but I still would have thought it was worth at least a short sampling period before jumping to such an extreme measure.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Not really following the big argument but to add my own two cents, I did wonder why they decided to do this at the same time as implementing World Visit as opposed to sampling the effects of it first. If a world is congested then I assume visits will not be permitted for the sake of the actual residents, so I like to think Balmung would not suffer further for it, though I wonder how many people would visit other worlds and spend more time there, particularly during patch time for the sake of less congestion and competition out in the world. Perhaps it would not have a significant impact, but I still would have thought it was worth at least a short sampling period before jumping to such an extreme measure.

Because they solve 2 different issues. One solves people not being able to do open world type content with friends on different servers, the other solves networking issues with the number of hosts connecting to the servers login, lobby, and instance servers. Instead of a set of 2 lobby, instance, and login servers for NA, there will be 3 sets.

[Atlantasia]

It's not intended to be an incentive to get people to move. It's intended as partial compensation for items potentially lost by those who might feel a need to move.

They don't want people moving. The new data center arrangement is set up with current server populations in mind so overall populations will be balanced.

If you're trying to get a bribe to move, you might as well give up.

Poor wording on my part, but it's poor compensation. :/ I'd never get my house back or my items if I left.