In regards to Square Enix Customer Support & Data Centers

[Enkidoh]

The trouble is, there was a number of changes made to the servers in both the period of version 1.0's service and following ARR's launch - the original FFXIV 1.0 servers (like Saronia) were all merged into new servers during 2012 due to declining populations. These 'new' servers became known as 'Legacy' servers when they transferred into ARR service, and it is these servers that your 1.0 character data would be on. This information is now old info and hence it's little wonder the SE Support Centre were not aware of it, as it was involving 1.0 which is now shut down.

Additionally, at the start of ARR service, the character selection screen indeed showed all servers at once, but due to a combination of lag and new servers being constantly added, the list became so long that SE decided that to make it easier to read for clarity's sake, the servers were grouped into 'data center' groupings, which is actually a misnomer - they're just groups of lists on the selection screen and are not physically separate from each other, other than being in two physical data centers (Japan and Canada). This change happened in December last year as part of the 2.1 patch.

So yes, you select a data centre now on the title screen and it will list the severs connected to it. Unfortunately though this doesn't help a person like you from 1.0 who is coming into the game late and cannot remember what server their character was on anymore. I agree there needs to be some way of telling what server group a character is on at a glance, to avoid this problem.

As for the 1000 character limit, that is a restriction that SE implemented due to the Beta forums degenerating into trolling - you can easily get around the problem by simply typing a few sentences and posting that, then going back and editing the post - it's allowed by SE and isn't too difficult using copy and paste.