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.