I disagree that everyone will flock to Balmung when there is little incentive to unless it's to specifically play with someone you know on the server or rp but Mateus can fill that role now and it costs nothing to create a character.

The big reason people wanted to play on a bigger servers were mainly to have an active PF because some servers it was completely dead like Zalera and if you wanted to raid it was almost impossible.

With the cross server PF those issues are gone now.