They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[Nalien]

What annoys me the most is the reasoning behind this... OK, Raubahn Extreme was a pain, but you know why that was a problem? Because it was a bottleneck... You literally funnel everyone into the same instance, very early on in the expansions story, of course there will be problems... It's an expansion, lots of people hyped about it and want to progress through it... The solution, IMO, is to not bottleneck like that... I know mentioning XI is taboo around here, but go check out the progression for expansions like Chains of Promathia and Wings of the Goddess. Chains didn't funnel everyone into a single instance, it split them across three Promyvion zones. Wings did something similar, rather than you all doing the same story, it sent you off to pick from one of three nations to progress with, again effectively splitting players up rather than bottlenecking them...

I mean look at major patches... OK, they're not nearly as hype as an expansions launch, but you still have a lot of people doing the content. Where are the Raubahn Extremes on patch day? Not there, because people split their attention across the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Sidequests, Crafting, etc. People aren't funnelled into a single thing and, low and behold, there are no issues. Apply that kind of logic to the MSQ with expansions please... Heck, XI didn't even need to for the sake of stability, it did so simply because a non-linear experience is generally more engaging... Honestly this is an issue with XIVs design philosophy I think, the game is too linear, too focused on purely vertical progression... It really shows with an expansion, because until you're at the level cap again? Nothing else matters, there's nothing else to do. You grind through that single path of new MSQs to reach the end and unlock everything. The expansion itself doesn't really add anything else to do to distract you from that path, that's left to patches adding things like Deep Dungeons. You reap what you sow, I really don't think it matters how you split it, when you have such purely linear progression like this, with everyone focusing on the exact same thing, you're going to have issues. Please prove me wrong, but I expect 5.0 to have its own Raubahn Extreme regardless of this split, it's just unavoidable when you push almost your entire playerbase into the same instance at roughly the same time...

Bottom line for me, this change negatively impacts a disproportionate number of players. Some lucky people are completely unaffected, others are in a lose-lose situation. To me, that makes this "solution" to server stability completely unacceptable, you don't "punish" random players like that, but well... As I've been saying, we're valued SE customers, I guess... I see plenty of other solutions to this problem, but they cost more, they require more effort, smarter planning, etc. We just get the cheap option and those of us who lose out as a result? Whatever, we don't matter.