New character creation restrictions

[Hasrat]

The way I see it, if they could afford to have Mateus as empty as it was for as long as it was, they could afford a few new worlds to alleviate this problem. Yeah, sure, it's mostly just expansion hype, might probably die down. But it remains a pretty shit business decision to put out a new expansion that a large player base won't even be able to access. "Try getting in on dead hours" is bad advice for the new player that could just as easily decide to play another game instead.

[RealReal]

It is extremly restrictive. Not only can't you create characters in most servers, but you also cannot play with friends. If you happen to create a character on a Preferred server, either without realizing or because you were attracted by the "PREFERRED" naming, you essentially lock yourself in that world for 90 days. So even if transfers/new characters are enabled on your friend's servers are available, you can't even transfer there because of this extreme restriction.

"Oh but if your buddies are on a Congested world and you on a Preferred world, they can switch to come to you!" Not necessarily. Maybe your friends created their characters recently, while their congested world was considered PREFERRED, meaning they fall under the same aggressive restriction.

There were even times where absolutely NO characters could be created on any servers, which is downright ridiculous. Imagine buying an MMORPG, log in for the first time excited and realize that you can't play because you cannot create any new character. MMOs have a history of bad launches, I'm not saying this never happens. But it currently only affects new players trying to create their first character ever. Their first interaction witht he game is this.

New Players are an afterthought.

[savageink]

I"Oh but if your buddies are on a Congested world and you on a Preferred world, they can switch to come to you!" Not necessarily. Maybe your friends created their characters recently, while their congested world was considered PREFERRED, meaning they fall under the same aggressive restriction.

Not really. (Ignoring the times when all servers are closed to character creation, which I agree is stupid.) As long as you are on the same data center you can go to any main city Aetherite and switch to their world or vice versa to play together. The caveat to that is if you made your character on Aether. Aether is currently completely closed for character creation until at least the next time they adjust the server standings, that happens at most once a week (or so). all aether worlds are listed as congested. However if you are on Primal or Crystal there are worlds that are listed as standard or preferred, and those character creation restrictions are adjusted every few hours.

[Niwashi]

SE really needs to redefine "congested" to mean "more congested than the others" rather than "more congested than they used to be last year". It defeats the whole purpose if they set it on everything. The point of blocking character creation on the busiest servers is supposed to be to get people to start on the other, lower population servers instead. I'm not sure how SE thinks that's going to happen when they're ALL marked as congested, like they are on Aether. They can't all be the highest.

Along with that, and for the same reason, the rule that temporarily locks servers with too many people online needs a higher threshold whenever its current threshold would lock out all of them at once. It's only supposed to be spreading out the population more evenly, not blocking people from playing at all. (And sure, that could sometimes mean having a login queue when creating a character, but it still beats not being able to create one at all.)

[savageink]

SE really needs to redefine "congested" to mean "more congested than the others" rather than "more congested than they used to be last year". It defeats the whole purpose if they set it on everything. The point of blocking character creation on the busiest servers is supposed to be to get people to start on the other, lower population servers instead. I'm not sure how SE thinks that's going to happen when they're ALL marked as congested, like they are on Aether. They can't all be the highest.

It means Aether, the whole datacenter, is overcrowded and they don't want anybody else on it.

[Niwashi]

It means Aether, the whole datacenter, is overcrowded and they don't want anybody else on it.

I might have believed that if they hadn't just finished reorganizing the data centers to set up Crystal. While their populations may well drift apart over time, all three should be pretty even now, at least even enough that they shouldn't be locking one of them out entirely.

[MistakeNot]

I might have believed that if they hadn't just finished reorganizing the data centers to set up Crystal. While their populations may well drift apart over time, all three should be pretty even now, at least even enough that they shouldn't be locking one of them out entirely.

They also gave free transfers in conjunction with the reorganizing, which a bunch of people used to move away from Crystal - and many moved to one of the Aether servers.

[savageink]

There were several weeks of free transfers after the datacenter addition. During that time the majority of the people on the new crystal servers who weren't avid RPers decided that the Datacenter would become a giant ERP zone and they would catch cooties if they stayed. So, they all moved to the other 2 data centers. However, Gilgamesh which had shared Aether with Balmung as the defacto home for the "Hard Core" became the target for the majority of those people and because of world visit the other worlds on the DS. Oddly enough there are a lot of people out there who think they are raiders. So, now all of them get to complain about 3,000 long queues which Balmungians used to get crap for complaining about. I haven't seen a queue longer than a couple hundred the whole launch cycle so far.

[Hasrat]

I would argue that the whole "new NA datacenters" thing was more about freeing up instance servers more than anything. NA got no new world servers out of the deal. Free transfers, preferred/congested, population balancing. While some of the current issues may indeed be player-induced, it's a straight fact that there are times when all NA servers are locked to new character creation. That's just not a good thing to have during your big expansion launch hype.

I'd even argue, anecdotally, that with the data center split, worlds seem like surely they must be smaller now. Maybe yes, we've had a big influx of new players or something and legit everywhere's pushing full at times. But part of me wonders if it isn't a sort of throttling issue on SE's end, deliberately restricting capacity so things don't break like they once did. No breaking is great. But it's not great presenting new players with a locked door, with rather suboptimal options to getting through/around.

I was on Mateus back when 4.0 launched. At the time, Balmung had only just been locked, and the organization to set up Mateus as the next RP server was still pulling itself together. At the time. Mateus was the dead server. It was the world you'd often hear players (typically Balmungians) suggest "just merge this one to make more space." I can remember hitting one queue of about 200 near 4.0 launch, and never really anything else until the population finally exploded.

So, anecdotally, now, as seemingly every world (I assume) isn't safe from login queues, either we've got way more players (possible), or capacity is reduced to ease strain. Idk. Just my own conspiracy theory.

[MistakeNot]

I'd even argue, anecdotally, that with the data center split, worlds seem like surely they must be smaller now. Maybe yes, we've had a big influx of new players or something and legit everywhere's pushing full at times. But part of me wonders if it isn't a sort of throttling issue on SE's end, deliberately restricting capacity so things don't break like they once did.

Not according to SE themselves. They even claim to have temporarily increased the number of characters allowed on each server, to help handle the large number of people.
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