About the World Merge and Character Transfers (02/09/2012)

[DemonFury]

Referring to a post a few pages back about the "clashing of 2 communities", think of it this way, if you please:

World A and B are merged together (I.e. option 1-3), yes one may be larger than the other, but there would only be 2 worlds needing to coexist, plus anyone who chose to come to the server to start fresh. Of course there will be bickering, and clashing, but that tends to happen when you have different people with different lifestyles.

Now, consider, if you will, what will happen when a majority of linkshells from 6 different servers all choose to go to World 10. Now, suddenly, you have 6 different communities clashing instead of just 2.

Also, with this method (option 4), you also have a high chance of having people randomly pick one world over others and we will end up in the same bad situation we were originally in (highs and lows, instead of balanced). However, with the servers being at a cap to stop this overflow from happening, even if you have 6 linkshells band together to transfer to the same server, suddenly it will be full and it may be too late to choose together once the time comes. Then, you have 3 server's worth of linkshells that made it in, 2 server's worth of linkshells that managed to get together, make a quick decision and go to a different server that isn't full, and then another group that went their own way. Essentially, your entire community has effectively been yanked apart due to a decision pushed upon players to make on their own, but with limitations and high risk due to randomness of thousands of players and their choices. The idea of "oh, well, just make new friends!" is -not- an option for me. I love making new friends, but I'm not going to risk losing my old friends in order to do so. I'm personally more of a social person, and while I'm not huge into endgame, my friends are, so what happens when they want to persue endgame with a crew they are used to but don't want to leave me behind either. Now they are torn between the two (or perhaps 3).

I'll have to put my ballot in Option 2, honestly. I agree that it gives players the choice and freedom to either stay or go as they please, with less random chance of a server being filled more than it should be. I feel like some people (aimed at no-one in particular) are siding with the idea of Option 4 simply because it's what SE chose and -want- to do it the hard way. However, IF you want to do it the hard way, with Option 2 you can still choose to go where you wish, if you want.

And as far as the "non-active players" issue is concerned. What if, after 1.22+-2.0 I tell my friend "oh, man, FFXIV is so awesome now! You should come back!..oh..but wait, who knows what server you'll be on if you do :/". I don't know about you all, but I am -not- going to wait 7+ months on a server of people I don't know just to wait for 2.0, nor will I make a friend do the same and pay for the game when they can't play with me as well. As someone said before, it makes me wonder how many people would have actually chosen 4 if it were displayed in a poll instead of first shown as the major decision.

A little hitch in your theory on server merging using options 1-3 vs option 4... you pointed out that just merging world A with world B would only have 2 communities clashing together which is a completely false statement within itself. because each server is almost guaranteeing to have minimum of 15-25 different communities within it. Furthermore in those 15-25 different communities there are those that are already clashing on the same server. now you are merging it with another server with similar circumstances so now you have double the amount of communities with the possibility of endless conflicts

[Kailok]

A little hitch in your theory on server merging using options 1-3 vs option 4... you pointed out that just merging world A with world B would only have 2 communities clashing together which is a completely false statement within itself. because each server is almost guaranteeing to have minimum of 15-25 different communities within it. Furthermore in those 15-25 different communities there are those that are already clashing on the same server. now you are merging it with another server with similar circumstances so now you have double the amount of communities with the possibility of endless conflicts

Note that I did say "2 worlds" originally. "Worlds" implies that I mean multiple communities. Those sub-communities have become, as a whole, an entity within the server and as such the server itself can be counted as a community. So then how is 2 worlds (and their communities within) different from a mixture of 17 different servers and some of their communities? You'll have people trying to figure out their place in their world, eventually one majority will take power, and then suddenly we're all slaves to some sort of Lalafell dictator's campaign.

But in all seriousness, you have to think of it in the way that someone earlier, I believe it was Gramel, said: Our worlds are spiderwebs of communities.

I know a person, and we're friends, good friends, but they also know a person, who knows a person, who knows a person, and that person's friend likes to do Endgame, but I don't, so some friends want to go with other friends, and so on and so forth. It'd be wonderful if I could trust the majority of linkshells within my server to get together and figure it all out, but what happens when it fills up and 2 linkshells get left out of it all? Suddenly, they've lost -tons- of friends.

Either way, with option 4, you lose friends. Sure, you will gain more on your new server, but why should I sacrifice friends for that? I WISH I could get every single person on my server in the same new server, but chances are, it won't happen that way.