SE, please designate a Role Play friendly server!

[Fensfield]

<Above>

Just so as not to appear the un-sympathetic US-timezoner with the following..

I'm in England, and four of the seven people I roleplay with the most in FF XIV are from England as well >.>

Anyway, you are right that the RP community is somewhat skewed toward the US timezone, but insofar as that is true I can assure you, a lot of us EU-RP'ers are pretty used to accommodating the timezone preferences of US players when it comes to event scheduling and stuff =.= And a lot of us aren't native English speakers either - two of my closest friends in the RP community natively speak German (which itself seems to be a country with a remarkably large online interest in RP) and generally profess to preferring more people to play with over being able to play in their home language (heck, one of them hates playing in German).

Honestly I really don't know what to say about your argument though, Mychael. Compulsive need to assert my own timezone aside.. I'll leave that to the more informed and able or something. But I seriously doubt any possible RP server would see a complete dearth of non-American players and strongly suspect most non-American roleplayers would sooner go where the majority of RP'ers are, regardless of timezone.

Heck, judging from my own, admittedly limited experience, I'd also not be terribly surprised if the majority of EU roleplayers that don't speak English well enough to play in it would still prefer to go to the primary roleplay server rather than one supposedly for their timezone, if only on the off-chance they'd be more likely to meet people that speak their language and share their interest there, anyway.

I guess.. my point really is that this particular aspect of the argument is really all too vague and hard to judge to have awfully much bearing on the discussion, whether for or against. Thanks for being so nice about it though!

[Mychael]

I'm sorry if I came off as rude to anyone outside of the US. The reason why I mentioned you specifically was because I know you are from England (or at least I knew you were somewhere in the European Union ;>) and didn't want to step on your toes by pretending I knew exactly how you felt. My intention was only partially trying to point out that an RP server would be skewed toward the US time zone. I also have no ability to predict what effect that would have on peoples' server choices.

The point I originally was trying to make was simply that the creation of a server recommended for a specific time zone didn't have any relevance to the argument of creating a server for a specific community; someone before me had attempted to justify an RP server because of the EU server's existence. What happened when I tried to write it out spun off in a different direction.

To try again, the Server 10 recommendation was, as far as I can tell, because there are so few players near GMT that they had to bend their hours to be able to have access to as much activity as the US or JP players had; whether or not you guys minded that is something I can't say, but I believe that SE's primary goal in this merge was to make sure there was always someone for everyone to play with.

The idea of a role-play server is a slightly different boat. In my experience, the Role-playing community on Besaid does not have a shortage of players to play with, unless they limit themselves to only playing with other RPers. And even then, the items and achievements of the non-RP community do somewhat affect the RP community. I somehow managed in that last post to get off onto the topic of one of my other posts, which was that I don't think the RP community is large enough to flourish without the help of non-RPers.

I also maintain one of my previous points, that I feel that whether it's a "suggestion" or an official label, there will be a large majority of non-RP players who avoid that server so long as SE recognizes it. While a lot of people will avoid the RPC's choice, that will most likely be viewed as a sub-community, much like it is now. If SE says anything at all regarding which server is the RP server, the community will begin to view it as a server dedicated to role-players. Then, even those who would happily co-exist with you and probably (possibly) make your world a better place will be deterred. I don't agree with this mindset, but I do believe it would emerge. Coincidentally, that's just a gut feeling, and may be far-fetched.

That said, I'm not able to say certainly whether an officially-recognized server is good or bad.. I just have a bad feeling about it.

I am not so sure I buy that. If it were the case, they would chose to segregate the english speaking EU regions from the Americas english speaking community for the sake of time zones.

I for one work rotating swing shift. Thus, I play various hours, depending on what shift I am working. COnsequently, I play with alot of EU players in my LS who speak english, yet are in a completely diferent time zone. So the logic of seperating regions due to time ones vs. Language doesn't seem to be justified.

I don't like the idea either. I can't claim to have "international" LSs, but one of mine does have an unusually high number of UK residents, and I play with them often as I have three mornings a week with no classes, but can't help waking up at 5am. I know that a lot of people from other time zones are up during a "EU peak time" as well, so I'm not sure the servers are "barren." Nonetheless, SE chose to correct the page to say "EU time zone" instead of "FR/GE players," so I have to assume that their goal was to have one server with a high population during that "peak," and let the rest suffer. I'm not sure that's a good idea either. I think I actually preferred the language grouping, but I'm just referring to what SE said and how I interpreted it. I'm probably wrong.