Character Creation Restrictions

[Defenestration]

I have a friend that I intended to recruit, who is more than willing to purchase the base game, the expansion, and based upon his earlier playing habits in other games likely paid at least a year in subscription fees... assuming he is permitted to create a character. He was not able to when I sent him the invite for the free trial 2 days before Early Access for Heavensward, but he was not able to join the server that I or the rest of his friends are on. So we waited and watched the character creation restriction page and up to the point that he was sent an invite to now, Balmung has *never* been available for character creation at any point, from 6/17 to the time of this posting.

[Defenestration]

I understand that Balmung is the most populated server in the game. With the new players signing up, one would want to make sure that the population of the more crowded servers does not fluctuate any way except downwards.

But... why at the cost of new players? My friend will not play the game if it is not with us. Why should he pay for a game that will not let him play with his friends after all? In the past, character creation restrictions dropped during the late/early hours so that the determined could still make a character. This is obviously not the case. It is not even possible to make a character on a different server and then pay an additional fee to transfer it to Balmung, as absurd as that is.

So I ask... could you please lift or revise the character creation restrictions? I see no reason for them to be as they are. It may have shuffled the server population slightly to be more favorable, but is that worth loss of increase in new subscribers?

[RuriHigeki]

I want to second this suggestion. I recently bought my friend a copy of the game and we spent 4 hours trying to make a character on Brynhildr, often seeing it listed as open only to be closed again by the time she hit create character.

The current system of servers opening and closing at a minute's notice is frankly unacceptable, especially since you can only refresh the server display once every three minutes. Even just some guarantee of how long a server will stay open when it opens up will go a long way to allowing newly invited players, such as through the invite a friend campaign, to play with people they know.

[LadyKairi]

I couldn't agree more. I spent MONTHS trying to convince my friend to play FFXIV instead of WoW. Now that she is willing to do the free trial, she can't even make a character on the world me and our other real life friends play. And she will not be wasting money to transfer a character, especially when she doesn't even know if she likes the game because SHE CAN'T PLAY YET. And even now I can't even log in myself. Right now, they are losing a future subscriber and person who throws money around for mounts and other cool things.

Something needs to be done. Seeing there is a recruit a friend campaign going on right now, why would you make it so they can't even play with the person who recruited them? Its unacceptable. Seeing how the amount of players they have is growing quickly, you would think they would try to accommodate for it. Even when I played WoW, I never had this problem. They need to fix this, because they're missing out on a lot of money.

[Chatoyant]

Haven't been able to make a character on Excalibur in a full 24 hour period. I even set alarms to wake up at 3 am and 7 am with no luck. This is simply unacceptable.

It's unacceptable that I had to awake myself up in the middle of the night, and it's unacceptable that this system exists in the first place. Just shows how mismanaged this game can be.

Say what you will about WoW, they only locked character creation in extreme situations.