Transfers to low populated servers are not worth it

[Rotnirik]

I transferred and made characters on Zalera because of the incentives, mainly the Road to 60 buff. Now that Zalera is no longer a preferred world, less than a month after incentives, we lost the incentives without any warning. That means that any preferred world that you transfer to can have their preferred status removed at any time and you lose those incentives. I have friends who transferred last week and lost the incentives with this patch.

There is no warning, you could lose them once the server is filled enough to Square's liking. That shouldn't be how incentives work, it's a cheap ploy.

[LunaFaye]

I disagree with that, Zalera as well as other extremely low populated servers, been like this for years. Constantly people were complaining that they can't get anything done via PF/DF/RF and that was before SE introduced data center duty queue's and cross world party finders. Plenty people transferred to that time, either to Balmung, Gilgamesh, Leviathan, Tonberry. Since all these servers are more than full/overpopulated for quite some time, they needed a reason, people would transfer off the overpopulated server, to a dead server. This initiative was introduced just because of that, and I have to say, it did a great job at that. With exp etc, buffed already years ago, in comparison to old ARR times, it is not difficult to reach level 60 and that even very quickly. Should have there a warning/notice? Yes, in that case SE dropped the ball, but should the buff still exist? No because now the server is medium populated, and that was the whole idea of it.

[Rotnirik]

But that's the thing, people could have utilized the transfer at any point between a couple of days ago and when the free transfers started. And they, like myself, uprooted their characters or made new ones to help balance out a server with the promise that they would have a helping hand getting established. Instead, the perks offered were taken away immediately, regardless of if you transferred to a new server a week ago or a month ago. Yes, it balances servers, and that's how they got people to transfer, but if they promise a kind of compensation for balancing and then take it away, then it defeats the purpose. If the perks are the incentive you have for transferring, then it's not worth transferring from a higher populated server. Those perks are removed whenever Square feels like it.

[worldofneil]

Sorry to be "that guy", but it does say this on the very same page that says about the incentives:

From: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...5d22338cf55ce7

Character Creation Bonuses on Preferred Worlds

Creating a new character on a Preferred World will earn you the bonuses outlined below.

These bonuses will remain in effect until the active player population of Congested and Preferred Worlds has stabilized. Please note, however, that the population status of a World is subject to change, and that if a World is removed from the "Preferred" category, the EXP bonus will no longer be applied.

That's always been there and it says that before it even tells you what the incentives are.