Thank you for your replys!

Well the problem is that 2 of my friends were already on the server and have been for a while. I've been wanting to get FF14 for a while now and finally decided to since they were playing. Had I known Balmung would be pretty much closed I would not have bought this game. I actually played till level 15 when I realized I wasn't in Balmung and just decided to pay the 18 to transfer since one person paying is less than two.

After 3 weeks or so the game goes on sale and lo and behold 3 of my friends decide they want to join the 3 of us already playing. So it's not quite as simple as had we all joined at the same time, in which case we would have just chosen a less populated world. (We're not that stubborn where we just had to join Balmung lol)

No I thought there wasn't a good way around this but I figured I'd ask just in case someone knew of a way. We'll just keep trying to find an opening, but so far even 3am EST has seen Balmung closed