Quote Originally Posted by Kazrah View Post
As bad as it is, I only have two words for it: blame Balmung. I'd argue that this is all happening because players on crowded servers like Balmung don't want to leave their servers for various reasons.
Really not just Balmung anymore. The issue is that Aether has the three most populated servers in the entire game. Balmung at 17k according to LuckyBancho, Gilgamesh at 12k, and Mateus at 14k. A quick check at the other servers on Aether show similar signs of being larger than their Japanese or EU counterparts as well, with even our smallest servers dwarfing theirs by a couple thousand players in some cases. Which all combine together to create massive server strain.