I agree with all of the points in the original post of this thread. Aside from the egregious technical hiccups we're all experiencing today on patch day, I really want to emphasize the issues that I see having some long lasting and damaging impacts on a variety of communities in this game.

Quote Originally Posted by horsebirds View Post
A lot of these events happen on specific worlds, at specific times, and usually with a predictable schedule. All of this is important because the success of these events relies on having a lot of participants, creating an active community. They also rely on word of mouth, making it difficult if not impossible to switch their location on short notice to respond to congestion. A lot of these events happen on Crystal, which has a reputation as the roleplayer’s data center of choice, but which has also historically been pretty crowded. Before DC travel you had to elbow your way into that crowd and make a character on Crystal in order to participate. When DC travel first opened without restriction, it opened these events up to everyone on a North American data center. You could make a character anywhere, and still take part!
The roleplaying community depends so, so heavily on consistency and reliability in our events and venues. Simply transferring to another, less populated data center is not the answer for even modestly-sized social activities that require players to physically be in the same place at the same time. Not to mention the ongoing housing shortage/issues that moving data centers certainly will not solve (we have seen entire wards on Dynamis bought up by the same person, in fact). As any organizer of in-game and IRL communities will attest, trying to get a group of people to shift as one to something new is incredibly difficult if not impossible in a lot of cases.

Furthermore, a server that is one day "Standard" might suddenly become "Congested" with the next maintenance. So any amount of sea change that might happen within a community (moving an overworld event from Balmung to Mateus, for instance) is effectively undone at the whims of the developers.

You cannot say you want to foster a vibrant social community and then effectively turn each data center into a series of suburbs with unreliable travel between them.