They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[Theodric]

I'll reserve my judgement. I'll confess to being a little worried about access to PvE/PvP focused players. If queue times and the party finder are affected to a large degree then I'll likely take my leave of Balmung altogether.

[Fredco191]

What the..? Is that a typo in “Aether”? Or another way of spelling it?

[Asheran]

I actually feel super depressed to play the expansion now lol. A lot of friends I did cross party stuff with are on Siren, Sargatanas, and Cactuar... I don't have the strength to make more alts to play on their data center so... I guess that's goodbye to them. T_T

[Paladinleeds]

Ah good, my friend who moved from Omega to Louisoix to join me won't be affected then. She'll be able to play with her friends still. And me. I'm happy about this. Also because Odin is getting siphoned off to a different datacentre. Had serious problems with quite a few Odin players.

[SaitoHikari]

A bit interesting, it seems they intend on using Balmung's population to populate all of the far smaller servers in the new data center.

Aether now seems to be comprised mostly of raid servers now, with the devs going out of their way to ensure they stay together. I was expecting Gilgamesh and Sarg to be split up, but it's good for the raid community that they weren't.

They probably did some very extensive research to ensure that this would be as least disruptive as possible while still reshuffling the population. Unfortunately, Balmung being as ludicrously overpopulated as it was, it was always going to be singled out for something like this.

[HyoMinPark]

I’m not happy. Because I just got ripped away from my static, and leaving my home server is not an option.
I shouldn’t have to choose between my home server friends, my housing, and my raid group.

[UnstablePersonality]

I just hope with this they change the cross data center friend list bit to cross region, I'm about to lose a decent bit of friends cause of this.

[Kallistra]

I'm okay with this.

[Rokke]

ain’t leaving my FC/house, rip my static and cross server linkshell

[Ryaz]

Well, my FC is probably going to lose some people because the forced data center change kills their statics and the ability to play with their friends.

And oh god, I'm stuck with the RPers.