Balmung, Solutions to fix your.. population balancing.

[AriaXIV]

Hey all, Aria here again with another post though this time its not about Eureka!

It's about Balmung, I am an avid FF14 fan and love being part of the Balmung community. I've thought about leaving before though to join friends on other servers much like many if not everyone has at some point or another, But Balmung is closed due to instabilities?

Well i had a few thoughts to consider, because let us be honest Square Enix. People are not going to leave Balmung this time, you are very poorly handling the balancing issues. People dont want to leave and flatout wont because they love the server community or have alot of friends there and are fearful they will never be able to get back. So what are your potential solutions? Well lets discuss that.

#1 Server merging: Hardware is a bottleneck for most issues like these, proper balancing can be achieved via server merging depending on if you have the ability to assign sections of each physical server to a portion of the virtual server AKA Balmung itself. Aether has alot of lower population servers and i think those are valuable to solving the issue here.

#2 Proper Incentive: Free server transfers from a community of players who struggled to get to where they wanted to be to begin with? It wont work, at all. Yeah cool we get a few silver feathers, but we lose alot more than we actually gain. Give us a reason to leave or we wont, some may still not move but its the fact that we are so poorly incentivised i think that no one is willing to xfer off.

#3 Adding onto the crossworld system: Lets be honest, the crossworld system is an incomplete mess and to say its even remotely in a good state right now is.. out there. If you want people to feel like they can group with their friends anywhere, you need to make this seemless. What happened to the crossworld linkshells and FC's that were talked about? The ability to right click our friends on our friendslist and invite them to a party no matter where they are? Or just the ability to type in their name @whatever server and add them to the friendslist? The friendslist also does not auto-update so its hard to know when they are or arent online without manually updating it. Come on, fix it already. Please, i actually would pay for this.

These are just three of my personal thoughts on the matter, keeping it locked is unhealthy for both balmung and the surrounding servers because they all have people who want to move to join their friends but just cant. So you will lose subs if this isnt fixed and people feel like they cant enjoy themselves.

[JohnnyDevo]

Well if population is a problem you could always police all the breeding that happens at the quicksand.

[Rokke]

this deja-vu tho

[Mhaeric]

I'm reasonably certain a significant chunk of what happens there can't actually result in anything being bred.

[Kazrah]

What about promoting other servers to Balmung players so that they'll flock to them rather than whine and complain about the lockout on Balmung because the server has too many people on it (psst, that's really why it's locked). Something like "COME TO <server name here>! WE HAVE -NO- LOGIN QUEUE!!" or "Want a house? Transfer to <server name here>!"

It's a problem caused by players that is most easily fixed by the players causing that problem. No amount of griping will ever change that.

[Transient_Shadow]

I think whats needed is a cultural solution and not an incentives one. Balmung is huge because of its culture. I live on goblin which is a preferred server and while I got the path to sixty bonus for my alt... its a downright abysmal server. there's no hunts to be seen, the economy is atrocious and it has no culture to be seen. And that's a big reason why people don't want to go to "preferred" servers. because there's no one to interact with and they have little to no culture.

If each server had some kind of spark or theme to them that attracted players we wouldn't have this problem.

[Reinha]

I've thought about leaving before though to join friends on other servers

... fearful they will never be able to get back.

Don't fear. The server was already unlocked once and it's bound to happen again because people (on Balmung as well) quit the game naturally. When activity goes down on a locked server it will be unlocked. So if you want to leave your friends on your current server to join friends on another server, just do it.

Servers don't need to be merged and players don't need to be bribed because this system is working fine in terms of balancing population numbers: it is preventing growth on large servers while allowing growth on small servers. Crossworld systems do need work though.

[Ageofwar]

#1 Server merging: Hardware is a bottleneck for most issues like these, proper balancing can be achieved via server merging depending on if you have the ability to assign sections of each physical server to a portion of the virtual server AKA Balmung itself. Aether has alot of lower population servers and i think those are valuable to solving the issue here.

If I was SE, I would go for the inverse of this soloution due to it being easier to implement and cheaper..... Server split

it would solve the balancing and instablities over night.

Well before going a head with this option I would give the people on Balmung one last shot for them to solve it on there own. if this doesn't work then though a random process split the population between other servers on the data center and lock balmung out to anyone that was transfered in the split for 3 months

The reason this hasn't been done yet? I would put this down to SE actually caring about the community (dispete what the fourms thinks) and a desire to let the community solve this comunity issue themselves

[Rita1989]

If I was SE, I would go for the inverse of this soloution due to it being easier to implement and cheaper..... Server split

it would solve the balancing and instablities over night.

The reason this hasn't been done yet? I would put this down to SE actually caring about the community (dispete what the fourms thinks) and a desire to let the community solve this comunity issue themselves

The reason it hasn't been done is because it's not nearly as big an issue as people are making it out to be I don't even think there was a queue to log in tonight and the server is not close to as busy as it was in HW. The main issue why the server was locked was probably due to the massive amount of bots flooding the server rather then legitimate players. Also forcing a split won't do much rater then pissed off their most active community.

[BillyKaplan]

I think a split wouldn't help so much. Think about all the people who want to rush to Balmung, be it returners, alts, or new players outright. Only now instead of one Balmung, they'll have two, with both having enough of a core of the original Balmung to be interesting. It'll only increase the problem in the long run, I feel like.

That said, I don't see them doing anything about it. Locking the server has proved to be a good measure for other servers, and at the very least keeps Balmung stable enough so we don't take the data center down half as often as we used to. Get rid of the influx of bots we got when the server was reopened and I dare say we might be good to be reopened for a while again. Their mistake this time wasn't unlocking Balmung at all, it was unlocking it to new characters. Things would've been different if they had allowed paid transfers only. The people who really wanted in would've still done it, but anyone else, including the bots, would've stayed out.