Quote Originally Posted by Tillie View Post
Resident Balmung player here.

It is absolute hell trying to log in during peak times. The housing servers are literally down half the time (aka, people can't get into their houses) because of AFK people hiding inside.

Idfk why no one is looking into this glaring issue. I literally can't wrap my head around it, and the only solution that I'm coming to is that they are letting this continue to further exaggerate the server's limited capacity to try and force people off of the server.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly it. The goal is to increase the population on underpopulated worlds by reducing more heavily populated worlds. Any obvious QoL fix that threatens that goal isn't going to happen.

And, yes, Balmung is totally shooting itself in the foot right now with the tricks to thwart the AFK timer. At this point the queues would probably be under 100-200 on Balmung if players would just log off when they're going to be away for an extended period of time. But no one is willing to do that until everyone is willing to do that, and (understandably) nobody trusts anyone else to do it. So, instead Balmung's community is creating its own personal login queue hell at this point, and SE is getting those population boosts to lower population servers it so desperately wants.