Quote Originally Posted by tocsin View Post
its an incentive to join one of the many other, slightly smaller servers.
That's not what happens, though. What happens is that people who are joining because they want to play with their friends eventually end up just giving up on playing the game. I have personally seen three people do this exact thing-- they wanted to join Balmung because their friends were there, and after a week of trying they finally gave up and decided the game wasn't worth the trouble.

The advice of "well then the people who are already on Balmung should just go to a new server" is quite short-sighted. A lot of people don't really feel like grinding a brand-new character all the way through the story again, and as things stand, world transfers are $18 or so. There's all the incentive in the world for them NOT to leave Balmung, meaning that there's no incentive for the people who want to play with their friends to pick another world either.