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.)