EU Data Center (Chaos)

[worldofneil]

If you compare work vs profit, profit will come on top.

Extra income would only come from new players, but each server (which is actually probably made up of multiple servers) requires upfront cost and ongoing monthly maintenance costs. Unless there are new players to actually fill the new server, then you're just spreading the existing income around, so it's not profit, it's loss.

Plenty of dead NA and JP servers, just fuse some of them together

Which thanks to housing, isn't an option. How do you propose they merge the housing? They can't just keep all the wards because they're already working with constraints apparently because when they released the subdivision wards we all complained it wasn't enough, but it was all they were able to do for then, so a server merge (which hasn't happened since 2.0 launch) would require something very tricky with housing.

because lets face it, European servers are pretty much at their limit in terms of population.

Are they? Are there constant login queues to get in? Is there constantly a period where no European servers are available for new characters? If the answer to both of those is yes, then yes I agree a new server is needed, but I don't think that's the case or the General Discussion forum would be exploding with posts (where this post should be btw if you want to get more comments as this isn't really a technical problem)

There is plenty of people to fill up 1 new server, if we were talking about 16 new servers I'd obviasly agree with you.

And where are these people coming from? Even if SE deemed the servers overpopulated and setup a new one and offered free transfers, the majority of players won't want to switch. They'll lose housing, Free Companies, friends who don't want to transfer, it'll break up statics, the economy will be completely different/not even established (not a good thing!), not to mention if changing data centre there's a risk the queue times will drastically increase too if people play at different times.[/QUOTE]

To add on to the subject, just some general information on characters on each server:

Now if you compare it with the NA data center its hilarious how the EU servers are way way way way way more filled up with people.

Well aside from the fact you're assuming the 3rd party site is correct in the figures, those figures are just characters on the server. It doesn't tell us:

A) If those characters are alts and not really used
B) If the person who created the character even plays the game any more
C) How many people are actually connecting/playing at the same time (this is the really important bit that determines if a server is over capacity!)

This only concludes that the EU servers are the most populated servers. No argument against it here.

No, it concludes that EU servers (based on 3rd party data) have the most characters created. It doesn't mean that when you login they're all actually logged in, the might be from 2013 when ARR came out. Or maybe even 2010 when 1.0 launched and never played since.

We don't know how many connections there are to the servers at any one time and we don't know how many active accounts there are (in total or per server).

All we do know is that if a new player wants to start on an EU server, there is at least 1 server available for them to do so and therefore they can select that and play. As long as there is at least ONE server for a new player to play on, then it's not full.

You keep saying it's not good enough for there to be only one, why? The new player can only pick one server, what does it matter if they have a choice of 1 or a choice of 2?