Server Mergers

[Makeda]

Yeah the housing is the biggest hurdle. I wish they would come up with some way to figure it out, because servers like Mateus shouldn't exist; and the incentives haven't been enough to correct it.

Uninstanced housing was ALMOST the worst short-sighted decision this MMO has ever made...

Carrying a copy of your entire inventory around as an active object though - is an even worse one... (read every response to why we can't have more inventory - if you understand what they say, from a tech point of view, you will be shaking your head and wondering just how a dev managed to not realize that would be a problem. Then again, I work in tech; and I'd say every company has something like this buried in it's code. Many companies have a lot more of them than SE does... devs who join later always find these things and just wonder WTF somebody was smoking... but also realize fixing them would require some major architecture revisions...)

You are right, they shouldnt exist. Balmung should have been locked at the start of 3.0, and then there wouldnt be this problem. Server mergers are bad, and usually only happen when a game is on its way out, like 1.0.

Some people actually leave games when server mergers happen because it is such a well known 'sign of the apocalypse.' Back when WoW was bleeding players, it did some mergers, and I'd wager that only served to hasten the flight and inspire a lot of people to go look for a 'WoW killer'.

[Moonlite]

Unless they do major changes in how servers are set up, etc. I'd say server merges are out of the question for now.

Many servers are quite full - to the point where they have been declared congested and you can't get into them if you aren't already there. SE is currently trying to get people to move away from those servers and onto less populated ones.

Server merges are usually done when overall population gets too low. Right now FFXIV has rather the opposite problem, so new servers are more likely than merges.

First part you get a cookie. For a company that had an MMO and a design team that is supposedly gamers. They have not designed this in anyway to make merges as painless as possible.

Second part not so much. If you look at unofficial numbers pre free transfer. About 5 should have been merged. Considering what population numbers were and if a server got locked or was considered a destination. Again I admit the math is a little wonky since it tracks characters and not accounts.

[New_Game_Plus]

No thank you! As someone who has been on Mateus since around 2.X I'd rather there be no server mergers. I miss the small feel of Mateus, and hope it kind of dwindles back down after the SB hype, however, it is growing on me that I've been seeing people actually doing things in the server. Mateus hasn't been dead in the slightest since SB hit. Hell, there are even people hanging out in Ul'dah- which used to be a barren wasteland. Someone told me that's Mateus become another sort of un-official rp server since Balmung is closed.

As for it not being active. There are plenty of people hanging out in Kugane. I asuume everyone else hangs out at their newly acquired houses or are off doing other things in the game.

[Sylvina]

Pros of one big server: Everyone can play with their friends, becuase its just one server, No RP servers required because you RP where you please, and those are both pretty big pros.

But with the way a lot of the game is designed, it might not work out well, because instances would become mandatory, and you'd never be able to escape that free company you hate or the jerks who offend you just by looking at them.
(although the latter is just a con of one server games)