The character creation restriction is bad, bad, bad.

[worldofneil]

They need to offer special transfers *off* Balmung and Greg, rather than special transfers *into* them.

I agree it wouldn't be a bad thing to do, but would it actually help though? Or rather would anyone actually do it? What incentive is there for someone to leave the (very) populated server? "Free transfer to another server with a lot less people on it!" I'm not everyone, but it doesn't sound very appealing to me A lot of people (most?) will already be established with friends/free companies/linkshells, possibly even housing... any of those makes the decision to transfer away harder.

If this is the case I think forcing auto log out after say, 30 minutes in afk status or just 30 minutes of no character action could be helpful.

I agree completely, but the few times in the past they've temporarily implemented an AFK kick, a large part of the community seems to complain. Threads even pop up on places like Reddit with ways to get round the AFK kick.

For whatever reason a lot of people seem to think they get better value for money being permanently logged in than only logging when they want to play. Or they feel they paid a subscription, they have the right to stay logged in.

Or maybe none of them pay for electricity (or it's incredibly cheap) so it's just out of convenience that they save the 1 minute login/load time.