When should we start seeing movement to open closed servers?

[electrikALIEN]

I'm hoping to get some official word on this. Like many other players, I have friends wanting to come play FFXIV with me as I've told them how much the game has improved. However, since I am on Gungnir server, they are simply out of luck if they wish to play with me.

I'd love to see more movement on opening the servers. Please make it happen!

[viion]

Solution 1:
- Pay everyone 100k if they will gtfo Uldah zone A (you might need to be a multi millionaire for this) for about a week.

Solution 2:
- Hope everyone does the above on their own.

Solution 3:
- 2.0 =D

[Airget]

It would be nice, then I think we'd be able to make new characters. Even though we should be able to make characters on the closed servers since Yoshi himself said that one account having 8 characters on the same server wouldn't matter since only one of said character can log in at a time lol.

But I think at least people who come back from the welcome back program can play on the server they were sent to during the merge otherwise it be pretty bad if they set this up and some chars were still in limbo XD.

[EmSix]

I'd like to know this too, I actually bought the game to play with a friend on Aegis and to my dismay it was locked the day I made my account. I'm currently having to make do on another sever and play alone while I wait for the servers to open and it really isn't fun.

[Eekiki]

I'm in the same boat. All my friends play on Masamune, so I don't play. Yet I continue to give SE my money, because something's very wrong with me.

I even asked SE support, "Hey guys. I've been giving you money this whole time. Can't you help out a loyal fan?" They just said no.

FFXIV 1.0 failed because it was poorly designed and half-finished (opinion). If 2.0 fails, it will be due to gross technical incompetence. Yeah, I know SE is a publisher and not a tech company, but they're a video game publisher. When your entire business is dependent upon computer electronics and the internet, you simply can't cut corners with your IT infrastructure, and that's exactly what SE did when they shrank their server farm.

They looked at the server populations and did a funny math equation in their heads, deciding, "Okay. We have this many active players and our servers can each hold that many players, so we'll have this many servers." Except they failed to include potential growth in their equation. Then they sent e-mails out to everyone who ever had a XIV account and said, "Hey! Come on back!" What did they expect to happen? How did they not see this coming? For cryin' out loud, Ul'dah and its market wards were terribly overcrowded and laggy even BEFORE the server reorg. This should have been obvious.

Now, again, it seems they don't know what to do. I have a suggestion. But I'm sorry, SE. It's gonna require some work from your network team, and I know anything beyond applying patches and rebooting machines is challenging for them.

Add 2-3 new servers to the farm (Onion Sword, Bee Spatha, and Hornetneedle). Before opening them up to new characters, go to the people on the locked servers and offer them the opportunity to transfer to one of the new servers free of charge. Sweeten the deal by throwing in...I dunno...an exclusive chocobo mount or some other superfluous incentive to transfer, although the promise of less lag will likely be enough for most people.

While that's going on, introduce a paid character transfer service (be reasonable). I'm willing to bet there's more than a few European players that are seeing the error of not signing up to move to Ragnarok. That will help even out server population over time going forward.

Once all that's in place, throw open the servers for everyone. Done.

It's simple, and you can have it finished within a month if you start now. The hardest part will be pulling your heads out of the place you stuck 'em first.

Sorry for the curtness, but I'm pretty upset with how dismissive your support center staff was. "We can't do anything. The admins are all in Japan," is a damn cop out. If they're as powerless as they claim, there's no reason to employ them.

[Alhanelem]

The servers are closed for technical reasons. If you think they're just sitting around with their thumbs up various body crevices, think again. It's not likely to be a simple issue, and it's also one that's likely to be addressed by switching to the new client/server system when it is ready.

[Eekiki]

This is the new server system. You've seen the 2.0 roadmap, haven't you?

And it is also a simple issue. The servers are getting creamed. The solution is adding more servers and balancing the load.

You'd think for a company in Japan, where they build artificial islands and peninsulas to accommodate their expanding country, this would come naturally.

[JouriStarz]

They should at least allow people already playing who want to play with their friends transfer to a not closed server for free. I honestly don't get why they haven't done that yet.

[Eekiki]

To be honest, I'll betcha all the servers (besides Ragnarok) have reached this supposed "maximum" number of characters. But they can't very well close all the servers, can they?

[mysterytaru]

This is the new server system

No. No it's not. We're still playing on the old setup. The 2.0 beta will be the first time we get to play the game utilizing the new server configuration.