Annnnnnd They're Gone

[Jojoya]

New people usually have a congested servers vs favoured servers as a guideline though.

Balmung isn't marked Congested any more. It's mostly been a Standard world (since mid Shadowbringers. There was a period of about a month when it was marked Congested, then a longer period when it was Preferred along with the rest of Crystal when the Aether population exploded.

It's also generally open to new character creation except during peak log in hours. When it was first moved to Standard, it was generally still closed to new character creation outside of a couple of hours a day.

It feels like a lot of the long time players don't understand the state of the NA worlds in general. We're ALL overcrowded now. It's not just Balmung.

I don't know what Balmung that person was looking at because there are not 28 open personal plots. Every single house had 200+ bids on them for personal housing.

Every apartment is gone.

People play on Balmung because there's a huge population of RP'ers there, and a decent amount of statics for raiding. New people come to Balmung because they want to play with their friends who are already established there. We lose our apartments if we move, we lose our houses if we move, we lose our FCs if we move: None of it transfers over - so why would we ever leave? The only people who don't want instanced housing are those who want to feel special because they clicked a placard the fastest, or got lucky on a lotto. Housing shouldn't be a status symbol of luck: It should be accessible to EVERYONE, equally. Just like in real life. You have to practically be rich with a perfect credit score to get a mortgage in America: I'm sick of feeling like housing is inaccessible in the game too.

I didn't say 28 personal plots. I said 24 plots and some of those were FC. I was physically on Balmung taking the count just before I posted. Were some of those plots pending a winner's claim at the time? I don't know. I was only looking at the ward listings, not the actual plots.

Here, let me go back to Balmung to list what I currently see available:

LB W15 P25
LB W21 P12

EM W9 P4
EM W3 P50
EM W5 P44
EM W7 P33

SH W18 P44
SH W24 P18

Gob W23 P 38 (medium!)

So some of the houses that were there have since been claimed. There are still some left unclaimed.

Will the unclaimed houses disappear eventually? Sure. I don't think anyone doubted that. They're disappearing on all the other NA worlds as well.

As for why people might leave Balmung? Because they don't have an apartment. They don't have a house. They don't have a FC they have close ties to. They don't have close friends playing there or those friends have the same lack so want to transfer together to a world where they can get a house, get an apartment, get a FC they care about.

I agree it shouldn't be difficult for anyone to get a house let alone an apartment. But just like real life, sometimes that means moving to go to where those things are available.