They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[Nalien]

i don't think its just the world visiting feature, Harken back to the days of yore, known as... the storm blood launch, where balmung was so full of players the server broke, and took the data centre with it, then remember 4.3 where balmung broke, due to the server over stressing itself, the dc split seems like a way to lower overall stress between the data centres.

Well, I don't know about NA, but Chaos' playerbase is pretty sparse these days, it really feels completely unneeded... Major content launches are typically a problem no matter what you do though, the best way to mitigate it would be to have some form of branching story paths, that way you take the load off something like Raubahn since you don't bottle neck your excited playerbase on a linear path... That's why patches rarely have the same issues we saw at Stormbloods release, people spread out and do different pieces of content. You might do the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Crafting/etc., whereas with expansions they've always locked us to a single path. That's what causes that problem, at least.

Honestly though, if Balmung is the biggest problem, as the unofficial RP server... Why not see what impact an official RP server has before fracturing the community like this? Leave the servers as they are, take this new Crystal data center and slap "Official RP Data Center" on it, add incentive to move there, see how that plays out. It might not have the desired impact, but I'd say it's worth trying before, you know, screwing over a large portion of the playerbase as is the current plan... I don't think ping should be a major issue for RPers, so slap the data center anywhere and have NA/EU/JP servers in it perhaps...

[DracotheDragon]

Well, I don't know about NA, but Chaos' playerbase is pretty sparse these days, it really feels completely unneeded... Major content launches are typically a problem no matter what you do though, the best way to mitigate it would be to have some form of branching story paths, that way you take the load off something like Raubahn since you don't bottle neck your excited playerbase on a linear path... That's why patches rarely have the same issues we saw at Stormbloods release, people spread out and do different pieces of content. You might do the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Crafting/etc., whereas with expansions they've always locked us to a single path. That's what causes that problem, at least.

Honestly though, if Balmung is the biggest problem, as the unofficial RP server... Why not see what impact an official RP server has before fracturing the community like this? Leave the servers as they are, take this new Crystal data center and slap "Official RP Data Center" on it, add incentive to move there, see how that plays out. It might not have the desired impact, but I'd say it's worth trying before, you know, screwing over a large portion of the playerbase as is the current plan... I don't think ping should be a major issue for RPers, so slap the data center anywhere and have NA/EU/JP servers in it perhaps...

oh trust me i completely agree with you, but i still think this was an inevitability for the NA side, for EU i think its more the DDOSing thats been going for months that pushed the split, other then that i do agree

[Nalien]

This whole thing would probably be much more welcome if the new centers actually had a purpose from our perspective. There are plenty of regions that could easily justify their own data center I think, NA specifically could probably do with an East and West Coast option. Opening up new data centers for regions that currently have to deal with bad ping would be a welcome addition that would hopefully reduce some strain on the existing centers. It's a solid reason to move at least, not this purely arbitrary one we currently have...

[Jojoya]

Honestly though, if Balmung is the biggest problem, as the unofficial RP server... Why not see what impact an official RP server has before fracturing the community like this? Leave the servers as they are, take this new Crystal data center and slap "Official RP Data Center" on it, add incentive to move there, see how that plays out. It might not have the desired impact, but I'd say it's worth trying before, you know, screwing over a large portion of the playerbase as is the current plan... I don't think ping should be a major issue for RPers, so slap the data center anywhere and have NA/EU/JP servers in it perhaps...

Because that doesn't do much for those of us on affected worlds that aren't there for the RP.

I don't understand the perception that all the worlds being moved to Crystal are RP worlds just because Balmung is also going.

There's already talk about some people leaving Balmung to try and establish a strong role-play community on one of the Aether servers, so the people convinced that they'll finally be free of role-players will be bitterly disappointed.

They should be disappointed already in that case. Just about every server has at least a small RP community that doesn't draw attention to itself.

The number of people leaving Balmung to establish a RP community elsewhere would be small. Most transfers are more likely to be from people trying to get off an overcrowded server while SE is footing the bill or looking for more PF options than Crystal will end up having since most of the servers are low pop.

People who enjoy leading groups tend to migrate to higher pop servers because higher populations make it easier to create groups. Low pop servers tend to be an exercise in frustration for them. Fewer leaders means fewer group opportunities for those looking but don't feel comfortable leading. It's easier to be a leader when you're among friends but that's hard to accomplish when suddenly you can't play with friends anymore. And so people migrate to the servers where groups are getting made, leaving the low pop servers even more barren. That's going to leave the Crystal Party Finder very empty in comparison to the ones for Aether and Primal.

Group Finder in WoW did alleviate the problem for players on low pop servers there to some degree but Group Finder also gave them access to every single server in their region. FFXIV data centers are more akin to WoW battlegroups in size and WoW gave up group matching solely by battlegroup back in Cataclysm, switching first to data center and eventually to region.

FFXIV would need to create cross-region Party Finder to put a dent in the group finding problems this split is going to create for the worlds being moved to Crystal.

[KisaiTenshi]

So would I be correct in assuming the reason behind this is likely the World-Visit feature? I can see that adding extra stress to the servers that would require such a split... If so... Honestly I can live without that feature, when you spirit away half my friends like this it's already a fairly redundant feature anyway... Delay this whole mess until you can work on a cross-data-center feature that effectively removes the negatives of this change...

It's probably inconsequential to it. Like they're probably aiming for a super-server type of setup where your "home" world no longer is really relevant, only the DC you're in. So those home servers just deal with your home character registration, and you're free to roam to other servers as long as there is space. That saves SE some money if that means they don't have to have a bunch of 2.0 zones on every server running completely devoid of players when 5.0 content comes out.

But I still think the way SE is going about this is going to cost them more in support costs and negative PR when players who were away for this come back and wonder why their FC moved without them.

[Senn]

I wonder if more people are going to transfer to gilgamesh because of this

[Barraind]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Because surprise, nobody wants to move to crystal.

[HyoMinPark]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Please no. My static and friends are already being fragmented enough as it is.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I have no doubt that by the time they end up moving the servers, theyll have to add another server or two from Aether to Crystal, because people are nope'ing out of there already.

Because surprise, nobody wants to move to crystal.

Not only would that imbalance the servers 6/8/10, it would be an unmitigated disaster in terms of PR. If they started pulling crap like that, I guarantee people would outright quit instead.

[Barraind]

I mean, they would have to, if theyre moving servers for the reasons mentioned. Otherwise, youre going to end up moving 7 of the smallest servers in NA to a new cluster and keeping 4 of the 6 largest still in Aether.