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.