How do you feel about them talking about divided servers?

[Fensfield]

Everyone plays in NA timezones so they all want to see the pretty "multiculturalism" while everyone else has to stay up till 4am just to do some decent content with other players. Fail.

Yeah sure that's why I posted the stuff above from the South of England -.- Lay off the generalisations.

Besides, if you speak English and intend to go to an English specific server, you'd probably get lumped in with the American players anyway.

Or.. are you seriously expecting one of the servers to have The Queen's English written beside it?

They're discussing dividing by language, not by region.

[Lakefingers]

Well it's better than nothing. So what if it doesn't work out for me? There are other people play the game.

[Esk]

I actually like it how it is.. to a point..
They need to balance servers so they all have a good mix somehow, Maybe removing servers with hi populations from a specific region from the list for new players in that region..
From the brief time i played XI, i know that being on a mostly JP server had a lot to do with me not sticking out the game longer.

An to avoid the i wana play with my m8 argument, every accounts gets 1 code to get a friend onto there server if its needed that resets 2-3 months after a new account uses it?

[Fensfield]

Well it's better than nothing. So what if it doesn't work out for me? There are other people play the game.

And I'm sure they're perfectly capable of finding other people speak their language, even moreso with the plans to implement cross-server party play, assuming it's not totally random.

I'm sorry but having Americans on the same server as you .. doesn't just negate there being people that also speak your language.

Everyone plays in NA timezones so they all want to see the pretty "multiculturalism" while everyone else has to stay up till 4am just to do some decent content with other players. Fail.

In this scenario, you go from having Americans to play with because nobody from your region's online to.. having nobody to play with. I'm sorry but 'increased chances of meeting the odd local night owl' does not really scream 'reason to segregate the servers and deprive everyone of the benefits of global-only' to me.

And as I've said, albeit perhaps not articulately enough, but still - there are benefits to all the servers being global, beyond those of merely having global servers beside language-specific ones. If enough people feel differently to me and/or the developers simply veto that, well, at least I spoke for what I felt was the better option.

Anyway, speaking of, it's one in the morning and this is just plain depressing. I've chalked my name up beside being against regional/language servers and offered my reasons why, so.. yeah, goodnight.

[Onidemon]

Separating the servers is a good thing. Better response time, less lag etc... better communication, etc. Localized server is maybe not what everyone wants but it is what we NEED.

[Fensfield]

Separating the servers is a good thing. Better response time, less lag etc... better communication, etc.

Before I go -

For the umpteenth time, they're only talking about making the servers language specific. Yoshida has specifically stated they have no plans to move the servers closer to their languages' home regions in the event of their becoming language specific, and even considering doing so is way, way down the line from now due to the sheer amount of expense involved.

Merely changing the language of the servers will not improve latency anymore than the general increase in performance all the servers will see from the scheduled server code rebuild. The only performance benefit you will see would be from some players having a slightly more level playing field due to being a theoretically similar distance from the servers as everyone else. And even then, that's questionable. The four languages supported by this game, Japanese aside, are spoken pretty widely outside their home countries. For instance: German, or close relatives of it, are spoken the length and breadth of Europe. English is spoken in America, Canada, Australia, and England, not to mention a few other former colonies. The English servers' average latency will probably still be all over the place anyway because half their population probably won't be in America.

Yeesh.. please you lot if you're going to argue for the blasted things at least argue benefits will actually come of them.

[Rowyne]

After my four years of experience playing FFXI, I have to say I would be in favor of regional servers.

I played on Siren, and watched the English speaking population eventually dwindle. It got to the point where I couldn't even have a simple conversation with anyone without having to use the auto-translator. Sometimes it just doesn't cut it. And, as others have said, Google translate is pretty much fail between English to Japanese.

After I left FFXI and played games with regional servers, it was a relief to be able to simply talk to others.

As for FFXIV, I chose to bring my linkshell to Besaid because it was designated as the unofficial NA RP server, and I knew that with the large English speaking population, it had the best chance for longevity.

It's honestly something I don't want to worry about anymore. I would welcome regional servers.

Plus, I would really like to see the servers move to their respective regions. There's a SE-NA office, why can't we move the NA servers there?

It was never fair that it was impossible for anyone outside of Japan to get a claim first, because we were always 6 seconds behind.

[lackofwords]

Not sure if I made this clear, but giving a choice players would split players regardless of what the choices are. Such as, half my FFXI "friends" went to Rabs and other half went to Selbina when FFXIV launched. There were no particular reason. It's sad to see people you've been playing with for a prolong period of time go, but that's just the natural progression.

Now, the choices given for the international servers versus its counterpart would no doubt do one thing, mentioned above, redistribute players. In what way? The median players online for the international servers would drop initially, and they would attempt to evenly distribute players into the other servers. The peaks of the language specific servers would be tied into more regional peaks of the spoken language. Whether if it language specific or regional, concept of peaks are applied similarly. Such as, English speaking server would have peaks during NA and a one for EU.

So, where does my opinion fall in? I will dislike seeing the median of player online drop because of redistribution. Or simply put, the average number of players online at a given time would be lower. The shape of the login behavior patterns would remain somewhat similar though, however you'll have two distinct patterns for international vs language specific/regional.

If pictures help, take a look at a statistics graph on players online for a regional/language specific game such as WoW, http://www.joystiq.com/2005/09/02/in...t-census-data/ and you'll notice it looks something like a bell curve with an extreme peak at prime hours of that particular region/language, and then low stretching plateau shaping more like wide sine curves at off hours. Then take a look at the FFXI census simultaneous logins graph, which looks more like a heart beat monitor. http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/gui.../09/index.html

[Madruk]

Actually, you know what, I'm just going to put this here, if only because of the poster above (Madruk):

Having players like random NPC's roaming around isn't much of a reason to force players to play on the server you want.

It all boils down to choice. You want to be on a global server, and there's going to be one. What you fear is the majority will want to be on their native regional language server and thus your global server will be empty. What does that say? The majority should be forced to suffer because the minority want to force everyone on a global server?

We're playing a game, not a concentration camp. Options are good.

[Davorok]

Don't forget that they are thinking of implementing Cross-World Dungeon Raids, so you will still end up grouping up with random people, probably even more than you do now.

Theoretically, you could end up making more foreign friends with Language-Specific Servers & Dungeon-Finder.