World Transfers before Heavensward?

[Dsherman]

There are a number of worlds that are a little over-crowded in the NA/EU data center groups. Such over-crowding does not seem to be causing server crashes at all, but it does make it such that the game server software can't do all the stuff it should be doing. There is just too much especially if a large group all goes to the same place to fight something (like Odin, Behemoth, or a S Rank Hunt monster). It also creates a lot more congestion problems when something new comes along such as what happened with Gold Saucer the day it was introduced on some of these over-crowded world. And then there is the problem of no available plots for housing on these over-crowded worlds.

A lot of the over-crowding problems were created way back at ARR launch when there just were not enough servers for all the people that wanted to play, and it was made worse on the Legacy Servers by a merge that had been done in V1.0 back in March of 2012. I believe many people who had played V1.0 on servers that went to the Japanese Data Center in V2.0 but live in North America ended up transferring to Ragnarok because it was the only one available at the time they tried.

And now I have seen things that make me believe that they will be moving the Chaos Data Center group from the Data Center in North America (Montreal I think) to a new location in Europe. This could be a bit of a problem for people that got on these worlds that were recommended for people in Europe, but who live in North America.

It seems to me SE should be considering putting together some kind of World Transfer program to relieve some of these problems. However, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to do it because of the design of Free Companies and Housing in particular (both Personal and FC housing). People do not want to transfer if it means having to give up all the stuff they have earned in the Free Company, and built into both FC and personal housing. And of course, there is the additional issue of people not wanting to be separated from all of their friends. The currently available World Transfer process does nothing to help with these problems. And it's made even more unable to help by the fact that SE charges for that service ($18 for a player in the USA).

So I would like to know if SE is considering any kind of special world transfer service before the release of Heavensward to relieve some of these problems. It would need to address the possibility of moving an entire FC, as well as all housing (both FC and personal) of players involved, and it would need to be voluntary and free of any charges. It may also need to include additional incentive(s) to go in order to get people to actually move.

Yes, I know... the most likely answer from SE is a big thumbs down on the whole thing. But that doesn't do much to help.