I figured I'd chime in here. I'm that poor sod that maintains the FFXIV RP Event Calendar, and helps maintain a few role-play events and does a lot of encouraging open world / walk up role-play.

This change is, frankly, an anathema to what role-play in the open world is.

At the heart of it, organizing anything social and open is about openness, discoverability, and consistency. These are the bulging blocks of community, and what causes people to return to make lasting connections.

Currently we have lost this.

This change is slowly killing organized social activities. To consistently get to any server in the Crystal data center we're having people need to log in hours ahead of time and spam the aetherites in a similar manner to the old housing plot purchasing debacle. Even then it is a dice roll if you'll be able to get to any particular server in a reasonable amount of time. It’s become nearly impossible do some open world bit of roleplay on Buscarron's on Balmung for a few hours and still drop in on someone's new gathering over on Goblin in the late evening.

Since Heavensward, we have been encouraged to spread to other servers, with world visit being the promise that we'd still be able to play with each other, both socially and otherwise.

This update is punishing us for listening and spreading out instead of sticking to a single overloaded hub server.

Some of these impacted groups have spent nearly a decade building their communities, and now they wonder what next?

In the end, we’ll survive, and roleplay will happen. But this is damaging very long running communities and outright smaller ones.