Server Lockouts are limiting the growth of this game.

[Sanja]

Mega servers/instance servers kill RP. What happens to the RP servers then?

There is no "RP" server as designated by the game. The RP servers aren't official, just decided by players. So rather than say "Here are 4 rp servers, pick among them", you have everyone trying to crowd into one server and overflowing into another because that's the only place people think they can go to roleplay.

What happens to RPers like myself, who pick up the game to play and RP with friends, only to find out the server they're all on is always closed to me? What happens when I refresh servers from 3-6 am and Balmung never opens? What happens when I sit around at 5am to refresh servers after maint, only to find Balmung is already or still closed less than five minutes after the worlds go online? What happens when I can't even give Square money to let me onto the server I NEED to be on to play with everyone I know?

What do I do, RP by myself? Quit?

[Chukkaque]

And for the OP good news, they can make a character right now as I'm posting.
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...06d0909189e479

[myahele]

I remember there was a free server Transfer about a month or so after 2.0 launched.

I don't think there were any limits back then, but I do remember if you were in a Legacy server you couldn't transfer ... or was it the the other way around?

[Kaedan94]

So they can bypass hardware limitations for people who have money? Interesting.

Why do you think server caps are a hardware limitation? They are not. They are implemented so that queues don't get incredibly long.

If they didn't have server caps on several servers (like Balmung, for instance), the queue to log in would reach ridiculous levels. The servers can accept more characters no problem. The only limitation is number of concurrent players.

And paying for a world transfer gives them money which they can put towards improving servers.

[KisaiTenshi]

We were actually talking about this last night in FC Chat. For a free transfer, I'd consider moving to a new server (assuming it wasn't near impossible to replace the FC's House wherever I went).

And this is why people won't transfer. It's the housing system that has pretty much gauranteed that everyone who has a house will -never- move.

There is one tiny way to bridge this, albeit it's such a hassle, I'd only see SE doing it if they needed to "outright" split a server in half:

Step 1) Identify the busy server.
Step 2) Notify everyone on that server it is going to be split on X date.
Step 3) Everyone will have to "nominate" a server for which they wish to stay on. FC leaders and those with houses have to nominate which server they want their house/FC to move to.
Step 4) When the date comes, the server is taken down, all the data duplicated to both servers, and whichever server you did NOT nominate yourself for, your data is deleted. This includes FC's and their houses. All the former names and FC names are "reserved" for 30 days (to prevent mistakes) before being made free for reuse. Everyone in a FC is moved to the server with their FC house.

If not enough people nominate themselves to balance out the servers, SE would then need to force half the active FC's to move by outright going "Alright everyone on even numbered properties goes to Server A, and everyone on odd numbered properties goes to server B. Everyone not in a FC who didn't nominate a server gets sent to whichever server would be "underpopulated" from the split.

Again, this would be something that would likely happen on the three most populated servers, but it's such a pain in the ass. This is effectively what we did when we migrated from V1.0 to V2.0, Everyone on a Legacy server got the option to transfer off the server, but no new players could be transferred to it.

[Rekujin]

Took me a week to get into Tonberry, then I realized hey! I could just beat the rush when maintenance was over... maybe try that?