Quote Originally Posted by Aidorouge View Post
I'm quite familiar with it actually because for the longest time I lived in Houston, TX which was considered "East Coast" when games like World of Warcraft and Star Wars the Old Republic recommended servers for me, and now that I'm in Eugene, OR my long-time characters were effectively left stranded on less than ideal servers unless I was willing to pay to move them to West Coast ones, and since I didn't want to re-roll entirely, I just quit.

This would basically be the same thing, but instead of it being the result of my real life moving around, it would be Square-Enix forcing my character elsewhere, and what are the odds I'm expected to pay to fix that issue too? Unless by some generosity SE allows me to free transfer to whatever the remaining West Coast server is, assuming they would even let me. Say for example... Aether was the one they left over there, but they still labeled it "Congested" and therefore not eligible for transfers (or even new character creation).

Not that East Coast players should be made to suffer if it's really that bad (I wasn't aware until now), I just don't know how making other people suffer in your place (as you would have your East Coast servers but now West Coasters are stuck in it) is supposed to help the situation unless Square-Enix allows for free transfers so people can regionally resettle, otherwise it's just going to end up a clown fiesta of stranded or even quitting players. In fact, they already had a similar incident in the past when they created the Crystal data center and forced certain then-Aether and Primal worlds into it to serve as an initial grow bed, and this was *before* data center travel so if you ended up Crystal when you didn't want to be... best pony up the dough for a transfer or "deal with it".

Regardless of whether SE goes with data center physical relocation or actual merges, it's important that they let people migrate effortlessly during such a transitional period.
They could easily provide free server transfers and make sure non-congested servers are available on each data center. It would be like when they gave every character a free fantasia for the graphics update in case players wanted to make adjustments.
Speaking of congested servers, one goal of this whole thing is reducing congestion. If Aether stays on the west coast then most east coast players are probably going to move to the east coast which will free some space for you.
Even if they didn't provide free transfers, your situation wouldn't be as bad as it currently is for us. You wouldn't be "stuck", because as I said above you'd have the option of DC traveling or transferring. Hell, right now I'd happily pay for a transfer if I had a low ping option.

I mentioned this but it bears repeating that ~80% of the US lives in the eastern half of the country.
Personally, I think slightly inconveniencing 20% of the playerbase to make 80% happier is worth it!