Not a single server on primal is available for new characters right now

[SturmChurro]

The active population is 30-35% at level cap right now, and it hasnt increased for 6+ months.

If people were coming back, we would see an uptick, which is potentially worrying both for short term stability and for long-term sustainability, especially on the smallest datacenters.

When you go from preferred to congested, but you still have the same number of people having reached Shinryu and then 4.1 content as you did more than half a year ago, its worrying. You're trading off long term investment for a lot of free trial players, with incredibly low retention rates.

That's why I think they should hold off on any new NA servers, at least for now, until Shadowbringers settled. I forgot where I read it, but I think it was on this forum with an interview with Yoshida, where he said that NA players fluctuate like crazy.

[Wynn_Storm]

I know this may sound kind of iffy.

But i am happy that this is sort of an issue.

It means the game is really doing well and there are tons of people playing.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

It's obvious why this is happening. When the DC shuffles were announced everyone started making plans to get away from Crystal given it was being made to host Balmung (and to a lesser extent, Mateus) away from Gilgamesh. The Crystal doomsday spergs have been going on about it over the likes of reddit and any new player researching a server is going to try to go with them. They are marking servers as congested to force people to crystal and avoid the issues of SB's launch as much as possible, the standard servers are getting dogpiled on the hour still as a result and I wouldn't be surprised if they get locked either.

Don't count on them adding any new servers till crystal gets full.