[Balmung] Server Issues, safety, and overcrowding

[Rinari]

Ironically, attempting to lump the entire RP community into a single locked server is dividing it far more than giving a couple medium servers an 'RP' tag ever could. There are RPers scattered around all the servers because Balmung is locked and so overcrowded, that even a paid transfer there is a bad idea if you want to experience things like housing. You can't even get an apartment on Balmung. Balmung apartments sell (through paid releasing) for more than small houses on medium population servers.

Over here on Faerie, I see scattered RP and meet plenty of people that have RPed in the past and would like to again if there were a thriving community for it here outside of Balmung. For me, I engage in light RP here and there, making it a low priority thing. In WoW, I was much more into it on Earthen Ring, one of the official RP servers. That server had a large thriving RP community up through Burning Crusade at least. I'd like to get involved more here, but I'm not willing to pay transfer to Balmung AND deal with its overpopulated condition. It's perfectly possible to have multiple thriving RP servers in an MMO without stuffing them in into one giant overpopulated server. WoW did it after all.

To be fair though, the FFXIV RP community created the problem it has with Balmung. SE isn't helping, but they also didn't force everyone into Balmung. I've seen massive drama wars on FFXIV RP forums where players wanted to spur RP communities on servers other than Balmung due to the overcrowding. The result being lynch mobs and forum moderators dropping a hammer with basically 'we'll only allow promoting RP on Balmung to avoid splintering the community'... ignoring that of course, Balmung's state itself is already doing that by turning away newer players like me.

That's all a done deal though. I've made good friends on Faerie and even if Balmung's problems were fixed magically, I wouldn't transfer there. I've got roots now. That's true for most players. We aren't going to leave our friends behind. Even free transfers will have limited effectiveness, but maybe that could work a little. Tagging one or two medium servers with 'RP' could prompt some newer blood to attempt to build RP communities there, eventually luring away some of Balmung's RP crowd that want to escape the crowding and break the stranglehold Balmung seems to have... hopefully alleviating some of its overcrowding problems in the future. Just imagine those fun Balmung ques at 4.0 launch!

[Fuma]

Ironically, attempting to lump the entire RP community into a single locked server is dividing it far more than giving a couple medium servers an 'RP' tag ever could. There are RPers scattered around all the servers because Balmung is locked and so overcrowded, that even a paid transfer there is a bad idea if you want to experience things like housing. You can't even get an apartment on Balmung. Balmung apartments sell (through paid releasing) for more than small houses on medium population servers.

Over here on Faerie, I see scattered RP and meet plenty of people that have RPed in the past and would like to again if there were a thriving community for it here outside of Balmung. For me, I engage in light RP here and there, making it a low priority thing. In WoW, I was much more into it on Earthen Ring, one of the official RP servers. That server had a large thriving RP community up through Burning Crusade at least. I'd like to get involved more here, but I'm not willing to pay transfer to Balmung AND deal with its overpopulated condition. It's perfectly possible to have multiple thriving RP servers in an MMO without stuffing them in into one giant overpopulated server. WoW did it after all.

To be fair though, the FFXIV RP community created the problem it has with Balmung. SE isn't helping, but they also didn't force everyone into Balmung. I've seen massive drama wars on FFXIV RP forums where players wanted to spur RP communities on servers other than Balmung due to the overcrowding. The result being lynch mobs and forum moderators dropping a hammer with basically 'we'll only allow promoting RP on Balmung to avoid splintering the community'... ignoring that of course, Balmung's state itself is already doing that by turning away newer players like me.

That's all a done deal though. I've made good friends on Faerie and even if Balmung's problems were fixed magically, I wouldn't transfer there. I've got roots now. That's true for most players. We aren't going to leave our friends behind. Even free transfers will have limited effectiveness, but maybe that could work a little. Tagging one or two medium servers with 'RP' could prompt some newer blood to attempt to build RP communities there, eventually luring away some of Balmung's RP crowd that want to escape the crowding and break the stranglehold Balmung seems to have... hopefully alleviating some of its overcrowding problems in the future. Just imagine those fun Balmung ques at 4.0 launch!

Well said, the RP community can be so resistant to change its stifling. The idea of just tagging servers with the RP tag would be enough to start smaller RP communities on those servers and help bring more of those people together and breathe some life into lower population servers that probably have a lot of freed up housing as well.

[Rokke]

You can't even get an apartment on Balmung. Balmung apartments sell (through paid releasing) for more than small houses on medium population servers.

Small houses cost less than a mil on mid pop servers? :O

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Small houses cost less than a mil on mid pop servers? :O

They are talking about buying them from other players.

[Rokke]

They are talking about buying them from other players.

I think theres an FC currently trying to buy up LB ward 2 apartments so that ward might be more pricey, but otherwise the most common price in PF looks like 850k-ish for Gob/LB.

Admittedly I don't think I've seen Mist apts go up as often, so those are probably be more expensive :x

[Rinari]

Admittedly I don't think I've seen Mist apts go up as often, so those are probably be more expensive :x

Meanwhile, I have a mist apartment that cost me the default 500k without having to engage in a risky trade and I can feasibly hope to acquire a small house in another month or so of play (having already played only ~7 weeks)... unless I decide to save up for a medium. When I joined, housing was one of the things I researched. Granted, I did it with little notion of the relative value of gil and I looked at reddit's housing market board since PF isn't exactly an option before making a character. I didn't even know people used PF for trading then. It sounds like apartments in Balmung are cheaper than what reddit was marketing them for ~7 weeks ago. That's not sooo terrible then, but I'm at least happy I was able to get some My First Housing Space without any risk. Also I love mist's beaches!

My big point is from a new player looking in, Balmung looks like a rough option with its crowding and locked character creation. So even some of us that might want to RP aren't going there and that splits the RP community by effectively limiting the new blood.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

They are talking about buying them from other players.

I think theres an FC currently trying to buy up LB ward 2 apartments so that ward might be more pricey, but otherwise the most common price in PF looks like 850k-ish for Gob/LB.

Admittedly I don't think I've seen Mist apts go up as often, so those are probably be more expensive :x

I specifically recall the devs mentioning they had set it up to be able to increase the amount of apartments available...

So...
Why hasn't that happened yet...
:/

[Rinari]

Why hasn't that happened yet...
:/

A better question might be why are apartments even limited to begin with?

Storing the type, location, rotation, and state of 50 furniture objects along with some apartment configuration options (walls, floor, lighting, ect) would take a few kb of data... practically nothing, even with millions of players, it's not a lot of data. Aion, among other MMOs, already has an infinite apartment style housing system.

Clearly houses with buildable yards have to be limited. It should not be that difficult for the housing system to expand with larger apartments as well though, even manor sized... like those richy rich people that own several floors in a skyscraper... so all players could eventually own expensive manor size housing, even if they don't get a nice yard to work with. I can dream at least! It'd be a nice gil sink... just sayin!

[jameseoakes]

I specifically recall the devs mentioning they had set it up to be able to increase the amount of apartments available...

So...
Why hasn't that happened yet...
:/

I'd guess they need to do it to all servers at the same time and after having a quick look on Phenoix we've still got lots free so it's only a issue on the servers with an unhealthy population

[Kosmos992k]

This is a census of ACTIVE players

Source: https://ffxivcensus.com/

I'm on Behemoth, and to be honest with you I am not sure of the accuracy of the above graph. The reason I say that is that character creation is almost perpetually locked on Behemoth, in fact Balmung and Behemoth seem to be locked about as much time as each other. Yet that graph indicates an active population on Behemoth about half of Balmung. It doesn't make much sense for Behemoth to be locked so often if it's population is comparatively lower than say Balmung or Gilgamesh.