Being on Crystal or Aether, there is zero incentive to bring new friends to the game

[virianna]

The absolute joke about this is that you can pay for transfer and bypass the whole " This world is congested! go and pick another world!".

If you want to talk about something at least know what you're talking about:

Congested World: A crowded, highly populated World. Cannot be selected for new character creation or Home World Transfer destinations.

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...nsfer_service/

You may be mixing that up with semi-congested world status, that is temporary ie. certain servers are loaded to the brim in the evening local time so you cant create a new character/move there. Do it in the morning and you will be able to create character/move there because the overall status of the world is Standard/Preferred and server load at the moment is not that high.

Source: I moved servers where Odin was classified as standard but often temporary congested between ~6 PM to ~~ 1 AM.

[Batbrat]

I am once again asking them to redistribute Dynamis across the other DCs, or lock Dynamis so that none of them can leave and they are all forced to play with each other. Aether, Primal, and Crystal all grew during a time where DC travel did not exist. People joined those data centers and had no choice but to stay in them and play with those in their own DC. Dynamis however, did not have that same barrier which allowed for growth, and player retention. It was doomed from the start, because no one was ever forced to stay. So either make them stay, or sort them around. Ideally though, make them stay, because we keep having someone from there traveling to Gilgamesh just to spam shout chat about his marital problems irl for hours on end-please take him back.

[Aidorouge]

so that's a broad statement, i would 100% LOVE to only play on Dynamis, to build a static there, pvp there and have 0 reason to DC travel as a hate DC travel in general honestly. Problem is Dynamis (and honestly think Primal is feeling this too) is suffering from DC travel mindset. Lvl 100 "I HAVE TO" travel to Aether to do anything and this creates a eternal problem because people hit 100 other have left so dynamis population at max level is low so they feel forced to dc travel, and its a never ending loop. Reason i say its a mindset problem is when DC travel was blocked at start of expansion Dyanmis did have people to do stuff with. It wasn't to aether level of course not but it showed there actually was a pretty manageable population on the server that could accomplish and there really was no super long que times. I saw then the server was alive enough if DC travel ended Dyanmis could function competely with its population, However as soon as DC travel opened back up the "must leave for Aether" mindset kicked back in and well we are where we are as a housing suburb sadly.

I never personally saw this improvement when we got trapped here, if anything it was the opposite, I got pretty much nothing done for almost a month, which especially stung for PVP Series progress having to sit there and watch it not move for weeks at a time until they finally lifted the lockdown.

And no, I don't believe Dynamis could function on its own if it was subjected to some kind of permanent lockdown, Cosmic Exploration proved this when we were one of the only data centers (alongside Chaos and Materia) that was pretty much forced to let the pity system allow us to advance on projects, rarely ever completing them on any of the worlds with the exception of maybe Seraph (and they still needed the pity system for some levels). It's only gotten worse since a bunch of our gatherers and crafters mass-transferred after they got fed up from being literally punished for the crime of being on a low population data center.

I also reckon that Primal is doing fine, given it's become the default some people travel to instead of Aether when all of its worlds are too congested for travel, it's the only place anyone from Dynamis can transfer to right now, and new players/alts aren't barred from choosing it over Dynamis if they want to (and they should).
+++

I am once again asking them to redistribute Dynamis across the other DCs, or lock Dynamis so that none of them can leave and they are all forced to play with each other. Aether, Primal, and Crystal all grew during a time where DC travel did not exist. People joined those data centers and had no choice but to stay in them and play with those in their own DC. Dynamis however, did not have that same barrier which allowed for growth, and player retention. It was doomed from the start, because no one was ever forced to stay. So either make them stay, or sort them around. Ideally though, make them stay, because we keep having someone from there traveling to Gilgamesh just to spam shout chat about his marital problems irl for hours on end-please take him back.

Allowing DC traveling was only part of the problem (and then became the only solution), the biggest thing that doomed it is that Dynamis wasn't "seeded" like Crystal was, it was all fresh worlds forced to fend for themselves. And we know that seeding is the most effective source of growth for a new data center because Crystal eventually overtook Primal in population and almost rivals Aether in size.

Trapping people here again will just result in some people abandoning their Dynamis mains to re-roll on whichever data center isn't locked down, or worse, they'll just quit outright. It happened last time, and that was when it was temporary. Them announcing that I'm to be imprisoned here until further notice just means this character gets left for dead while I start all over on Primal. Nobody is going to force me to play on Dynamis again, it's not worth it to me after 3 years of trying to make it work.