Which world is the best...

[Lity]

Inside of the Aether data center?

I'm transferring from Crystal to Aether to play with a bunch of friends, old FC mates and some people who are starting fresh. Unfortunately Cactuar is congested and I can't transfer to it, as that is where most of my friends are. Leaving the server I've been on for almost 2 years of game time, I'm at a loss as where to go. To be honest, mainly just looking for an active friendly community, which I know for the most part is all of them. Whenever I play I mainly just end up spending my time helping out new people. I don't static raid at all, barely do EX primals unless it is old content. Is there a specific server that'd be best for me?

I know with world visiting this type of question is rather moot, but I'd just like my home server/FC to be one I could always just sit around and B.S. with people and relax on.

Opinions?

[Senn]

Odd... For me, siren, gilgamesh, midgardsormr, adamantoise, and cactaur are all locked. If these servers are really locked right now, your choices are narrowed down to jenova, faerie, and sargatanas. You can also try waiting for cactuar to open up.

[Dhaid]

If yer fine with buying a second world transfer, go for a non preferred world so when cactaur opens up again you can join your friends without a 90 day wait. Unless you talk mostly out of game, in which case it won't matter too much because of world visit and linkshells

[HyoMinPark]

Odd... For me, siren, gilgamesh, midgardsormr, adamantoise, and cactaur are all locked. If these servers are really locked right now, your choices are narrowed down to jenova, faerie, and sargatanas. You can also try waiting for cactuar to open up.

Cactuar and Gilgamesh are currently congested and not open to new characters or transfers because there’s too many people already on the server; where as the others are just locked to character creation right now (but not transfers) due to the amount of people currently logged in. So the OP could always transfer to any of the Aether servers outside of Cactuar and Gilgamesh regardless of them currently being locked to creating new characters.

The earliest Cactuar would open would be Early Access/ShB Launch, but given how some unofficial censes are calling it the 4th most populated server (and stating that it had the highest influx of characters since the Crystal/Aether split), I wouldn’t be surprised to see it remain congested.

[Senn]

...

Oh I see. So would the most populated servers be balmung, maetus, gilgamesh, and cactuar in that order?

[HyoMinPark]

Oh I see. So would the most populated servers be balmung, maetus, gilgamesh, and cactuar in that order?

Yes, that is the current order according to LuckyBancho’s latest census.

To the OP: If you want to hang out with friends, while you won’t be able to join their FC, you can still World Visit to Cactuar and hang out with them there, as well as do cross-realm PFs for content and stuff. So any of the Aether servers would do. From what I know of them—

Gilgamesh & Sargatanas — raid servers
Cactuar — sort of an “everything” server (probably why it exploded in popularity—we used to be lower mid-pop in HW)
Faerie — I’ve heard they have a very active LGBT community there
Siren — I think they’re a bit of everything; always heard they were kind of a “midcore, chill” server
Midgardsormr — same as Siren from everything I’ve heard
Jenova — I think there were a lot of people from Balmung that moved to Jenova. I’m not sure what kind of community they have, but I have friends on there that are friendly and like to help people

[linay]

Oh I see. So would the most populated servers be balmung, maetus, gilgamesh, and cactuar in that order?

If so, I'm surprised that Mateus is not a congested server.

[Anienai]

Gilgamesh is the best server.

[SannaR]

Midgardsormr likes to Yo-yo from being prefered to not and we do have just about anything. The only rule that we have comes to hunts and that's really only to use the PF. Other than that we are pretty chill and we have ok MB prices.

[AlliciaCapulet]

I don't think there is a world better than another one. Even the classification of noone raids except gilgamesh is wrong. Almost every content now is cross-world, and you can travel between them. You can have a premade made of cross-world for raiding, or the party finder is crossworld too. At this point, I would say it depend of if you have a fc that you want to join, it's like the most limiting factor.
The economy, with the possibility of travelling over the worlds, is now almost the same everywhere. For things like hunting, some world are better, some are horrible with lots of early pullers.
So, I would say that the fc you want to join will be the decisive factor, since you can have friends on every servers too. Also, on a high population server, you may have problem to get access to housing or stuff like that.