Datacenters: A Plea For Community Building, Not Fracturing

[SomeRandomHuman]

And Balmung wouldn't have become so congested if Square Enix didn't happily pocket $18 per transfer for the better part of four years. It also wouldn't have happened if they designated official Roleplayer servers (not the plural) like WoW did. When SE finally did wise up and realize their mistake, people had long formed connections that weren't willing to lose, especially when it meant giving up a house they likely wouldn't get again or losing their FC. Putting fault on Balmung conveniently ignores SE did literally nothing to prevent it until the situation reached critical mass.

Again, there's fault on both sides. SE waited so long partly due to the sense of community. And then when they finally did, it took mere seconds for people to start having a fit. SE gave them what they wanted, and the whole DC suffers from it. So yes, please excuse the hate from the rest of the DC when Balmung costs up Sub time because of their congestion.

As for housing yes its a total mess and SE doesn't seem to want to fix it. I'm lucky to have both mine and my FC's house. If I lose them I can just find another place that's quiet and easy to access to afk and enjoy some quiet ambiance.

People are quick to blame the product, but the people are equally guilty here sadly. Just because you can go to the server doesn't mean you should. SE enabled yes, but ultimately the people that went for it are what are causing the problem.

The reason for the overpopulation isn't the issue, the server crashing an entire DC and taking all the other servers with it is the issue.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Again, there's fault on both sides. SE waited so long partly due to the sense of community. And then when they finally did, it took mere seconds for people to start having a fit. SE gave them what they wanted, and the whole DC suffers from it. So yes, please excuse the hate from the rest of the DC when Balmung costs up Sub time because of their congestion.

As for housing yes its a total mess and SE doesn't seem to want to fix it. I'm lucky to have both mine and my FC's house. If I lose them I can just find another place that's quiet and easy to access to afk and enjoy some quiet ambiance.

People are quick to blame the product, but the people are equally guilty here sadly. Just because you can go to the server doesn't mean you should. SE enabled yes, but ultimately the people that went for it are what are causing the problem.

The reason for the overpopulation isn't the issue, the server crashing an entire DC and taking all the other servers with it is the issue.

No they didn't. They waited because it was profitable. Balmung's uneven population totals were evident before Heavensward even launched. They had years to address it and did absolutely nothing. SE didn't give them anything as the server stayed locked despite what amounted to only a handful of complaints. And we're once again back to this congestion nonsense. You know what caused the DC to implode? The devs put an instance roughly ten quests into the MSQ, thereby making it inevitable virtually every single player would all attempt to queue at nearly the same time. If it were merely a Balmung issue, why did Primal and Chaos also explode? NEST even posted a mock video where Drak waited two days to access Duty Finder. Going a step further, this exact issue occurred again during Deltascape. Why? They put another instance almost immediately into the quest chain. Yoshida even admitted outright that caused the servers to crash.

The other issue is their auto log-off system is laughably easy to exploit. Target a market board, craft, summon your retainer; the list goes on. This rendered it useless since people were sharing how to get around being logged out even in-game. Now yes, Balmung obviously had a larger volume but every server had people doing this. The queue times subsided when they implemented a forced log out. Even Balmung had queues less than ten minutes afterwards.

Good for you? While you may not harbor attachments, others do. And once settled into their communities, they had little incentive to leave. A free transfer to only preferred worlds certainly wasn't going to motivate them.

As for going to the server. Many people were entirely unaware. I used to be on Balmung myself; transferring three days after my free trial ran out because I had friends on the server who sold me on the game and roleplaying. They, themselves, were also relatively new and simply went to Balmung because it had been deemed the unofficial RP server. I wager most players had similar experiences to me. Meanwhile, FFXIV's closest competitor avoided this problem by actually locking overcrowded servers and not taking extra money to get around it.

People blame the product because the product is at fault. You can't ignore a problem for almost four years than point the finger at the playerbase for not fixing the very problem you created.

[Cleanse]

Just because you can go to the server doesn't mean you should. SE enabled yes, but ultimately the people that went for it are what are causing the problem.

The reason for the overpopulation isn't the issue, the server crashing an entire DC and taking all the other servers with it is the issue.

If the server is unlocked and/or accepting paid transfers, how is it the player's fault?

In a pay to play game (with a cash shop on top), SE should feel that investing in modern server technology is well worth the expenditure. They have had a few years to plan for an overhaul. Tacking another datacenter on and calling it a day is a bit silly. There is a reason people congregate to a bigger server, people to play with. MMOs are more fun on populated servers.