Quote Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra View Post
Seriously get over it. It's been done because it's necessary. They're not doing it to make people upset. I have a Balmung alt that won't be able to play with many of my friends now but waiting in a queue of over 3000 to log into the game is kind of ridiculous.
This happened for only two weeks over a two year span. Was it annoying? Absolutely. But I think a good number of people would rather be inconvenienced for a handful of hours over a two week period than having to uproot entirely. That being said, the OP doesn't present a good counter argument. A merger isn't remotely possible, especially given SE seems intent not maintaining their current, heavily dated, infrastructure.

Quote Originally Posted by Kurando View Post
I feel like SE somewhat expect the PF to help with this (thus avoiding long or any queues) and also the World Visit offering more opportunities to find other like-minded players to run content with. Of course some players will lose social connections by the split but we'll see how that goes. Humanity (i.e the players) might actually surprise us and prepare for it... but wishful thinking eh.
Oh, they absolutely do. I suspect they lumped mostly low population servers with Balmung and Mateus in the hopes people will spread out more. What they aren't accounting for is NA/EU's preference to congregate hence why you're seeing so many people talking about transferring back to Aether. And why it took them outright locking Balmung down to stop people from transferring to it. We could very easily end up with the same Raubahn bottleneck again if enough people dogpile one datacenter. This is especially true if they put another instance very early into the MSQ, which is what caused a lot of their problems to begin with.