Quote Originally Posted by Arillyn View Post
I agree in theory (edit) that this needs to be a thing, however SE would also need to add more servers on the NA data centers at least (and have needed to for quite a while IMO). For example, NA has 24 worlds and JP has 31. According to Lucky Bancho, NA also has on average double the amount of characters on each server (I'm not counting Balmung as that world is WAY higher than that) as JP has on their servers.



Right now every world has 5,760 housing plots (4 housing districts, 24 wards, 60 houses per ward). Add 24 for Ishgard and that brings it up to 7,200 total houses per server. JP servers have more players on their worlds than that right now and NA has roughly double of JP on each server (some a bit less - some way more like Balmung). Until SE adds more servers and completely lock existing servers to new characters to be created or transferred (that in and of itself is bad business when people join to play with their established friends) OR make housing completely unlimited either through wards and/or instance housing (with real houses and not apartments) the housing problem will always exist.
Of course SE needs to add more servers. With the cross world and cross data center features, they are making it easier for people to play with friends without having to be on the same server.

Locking a server is not a bad practice if you think you can sustain/grow a population. It's the responsible thing to do so you don't have long wait times to enter every time there is a rush of people playing. It also helps within the world as you can determine how many zone instances you need to account for people flooding a particular zone for whatever reason.

Not locking a server (and not adding servers), assuming a sustainable growth in population is just bad. And if there is a massive decrease in population, then server merges would be the answer to that.