I need server transfer now!

[ArkhamNative]

It's just sad when people lie to pretend they're the victim, rather than accept that their choices or lack of choices put them where they are today. And when they stack outrage on top of it and blame others... *sigh*...

Some facts:

SE never "dumped" v1 characters onto random worlds. All FFXIV version 1 worlds were in the Japan data center.

When the 2012 world merge happened (still only one data center in Japan), new worlds had new names. No characters were "transferred" unless the player specifically requested it. For example, characters on Besaid and Fabul were now part of one world called Balmung, except for those who were able to request to be on a different world.

The one exception was Ragnarok, which required people to specifically sign up for it -- no other worlds merged into it. The reason was "*Recommended for European time zone players." You had to choose to be on Ragnarok.

When the new "NA/EU" ARR data center opened in Montreal (Canada, North America, to state the obvious), some worlds were "moved" out of Japan to North America. No worlds were "moved" to Japan. At this time (beta phase 3) v1 players were given the opportunity to move to a data center of their choice. Some players closer to Japan had characters on NA worlds and they moved them back. Some players had characters that *remained* on Japan data center worlds, and had the opportunity to move them to a world in the NA/EU data center.

There were emails and announcements about this, but understandably some v1 people weren't aware, maybe changed email or something in the years since v1 launched. Anyway, those people's characters simply *remained* where they were, on a world that either remained in Japan, where it had always been, or was "moved" to North America. SE chose not to move individual characters or accounts because they did not want to break up LSes and friends.

If you do absolutely nothing, you won't be placed in a random world. Everyone that was on that world, who also did not transfer, will be moved to the same place together.

As for the legacy characters thing, we're still on the original plan of keeping "new" worlds "new". There's this SE post from over a year ago, September 25, 2012:

For those of you that have friends that are not currently playing and you would like them to play with you, rest easy knowing that new players will be able to select the existing worlds instead of the newly created worlds. However, in the case that there is a large amount of people who come back to the game and the world reaches it population cap, the regular rules will apply and there is a possibility that we will suspend new character creation on these worlds.

Also, for current players, it will be possible to create a new character on the new worlds. However, existing players will not be able to move to these new worlds for a certain period of time.

And lastly, the only "free transfer" currently announced is a time-limited, 5-day period, to make up for the launch overcrowding that forced SE to restrict worlds and caused players to be unable to create characters on their desired world. Otherwise, the world transfer service is a paid service. Characters from version 1 on legacy worlds is not an unexpected situation that SE needs to hand out free transfers for.