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

[FoxyAreku]

I get they're trying to be well prepared, but this might be a bit much. Hopefully everything goes back to normal after the 28th. Finally got a friend to try the game and this might have turned him off again lol.

[Tempest222]

Looks like at the moment both primal and aether have no worlds available for character creation, but that changes hourly I believe. Only the worlds marked as congested are perma closed until further notice; standard and preferred world status varies throughout the day, so I’m sure all standards on primal and aether will be available a little later on today.

[Mitracia]

To be honest I don't expect to be able to play on the 28th. My server will most likely have a 4k+ people queue, and I doubt they made any changes to that since they didn't talk about it. Even worse it will probably last for a week minimum.

Guess I'll play some other games while I wait.

[WaterShield]

To be honest I don't expect to be able to play on the 28th. My server will most likely have a 4k+ people queue, and I doubt they made any changes to that since they didn't talk about it. Even worse it will probably last for a week minimum.

Guess I'll play some other games while I wait.

Can you not start queue and do something else while you wait?

[Rongway]

To be honest I don't expect to be able to play on the 28th. My server will most likely have a 4k+ people queue, and I doubt they made any changes to that since they didn't talk about it. Even worse it will probably last for a week minimum.

Guess I'll play some other games while I wait.

Grab everything you need from your retainers and World Visit one of the less busy servers before maintenance.

[Fayup]

Just noticed too. I'm pretty new to FFXIV and my wife just agreed to play with me. Got her all set up and all the servers are closed besides like 3-4 on crystal, feelsbad.

[DevilsDontFly]

I get they're trying to be well prepared, but this might be a bit much. Hopefully everything goes back to normal after the 28th. Finally got a friend to try the game and this might have turned him off again lol.

I have the feeling this is less about "being prepared" and more about SE trying to force new players to populate Crystal. Every time I went to the world status pages, Aether and Primal were all evenly distributed between congested (Gilga/Cactuar/Leviathan), standards with the occasional lock on characters because of people online (Faerie, Sargatanas, Siren, Hyperion, Behemoth) and the others fluctuated between being standards with or without locks. For the last couple of months pretty much all Aether and Primal servers were having lockouts on character creation during peak hours.

Then you look at Crystal and it seems like people there only ever cared about Balmung and Mateus, while Primal and Aether had a better server population balance on them.
Even now as I'm writing this the only congested server on Crystal is Balmung, with plenty of prefferred and standards.
I guess people just didn't like Crystal for some reason, and now SE is basically forcing everybody to either move out of Aether/Primal if they want to play with new player friends, or be stuck on your home server as is.

[Paladinleeds]

I guess people just didn't like Crystal for some reason, and now SE is basically forcing everybody to either move out of Aether/Primal if they want to play with new player friends, or be stuck on your home server as is.

Given the heavy-handed approach SE seem to take, I feel if that were the case, all Aether/Primal servers would be marked as congested. That way you can't even use transfers/wee-hours character creations to get around it.

[DevilsDontFly]

Given the heavy-handed approach SE seem to take, I feel if that were the case, all Aether/Primal servers would be marked as congested. That way you can't even use transfers/wee-hours character creations to get around it.

That's why I said new players. Aether and Primal are on a 24 hours lock for character creation, with 3 servers each allowing transfers. Either way new players will be forced to go to Crystal, and then attempt a transfer afterwards if the game allows it. And I'm assuming that's exactly what happened to a lot of people on Crystal, because a couple of days after they tagged Primal and Aether worlds as congested outside Gilgamesh/Leviathan, some of the Crystal servers that used to have character creation locks during peak hours are no longer having that issue. I guess there's an influx of people transferring out of Crystal at the moment. Which might lead to a perma-lock of Aether/Primal after the Early Access maintenance.

[Mitracia]

Can you not start queue and do something else while you wait?

That's what I meant.