Congested Server Status

[HokujinDoujin]

This needs to go. Locking down a server for weeks, or even months at a time makes it impossible to play with your friends. "Your friends can roll on a different server and transfer over to play," is nice but has completely gutted Free Companies. And those with active Free Companies cannot recruit new players because they're on Congested servers, and those without active Free Companies cannot find them, because they're on low pop servers. You cannot fix this by telling players, "no, do not play with your friend, play on one of these smaller servers instead." No one is going to do that. Even with free transfers, Balmung, Mateus, Faerie, remain locked near year around. All it does is make the game unnecessarily frustrating.

Few years back, you could reliably make a new character or transfer over to a big pop server, so long as you did it outside peak hours. Now your only chance to roll on a server where your friends play, as a new or returning player, or simply someone who has made friends with a group on another server, is to wait for weeks, or even months, for the transfer window to reopen. It stinks. And now with servers getting shut for even visiting, you've turned what was a functional if unnecessarily complicated system into something that causes nothing but frustration.

You have had years to fix this. WoW doesn't have these issues. ESO doesn't have these issues. These are entirely self-made issues on your end. Fix your game. We've been patient. My patience, as an 11 year veteran of FFXIV, has nearly worn out.

Thank you.

[Valence]

Balmung used to be permanently locked and set as congested back in HW and it lasted up to ShB when they split the datacenters and started adding world visit. The difference is that paying for transfer was still allowed to move over to a congested server back then. I didn't even know they disallowed this since.

[Themarvin]

Stop making silly myths about servers and spread out.... more benefits as well if want eg. a house and other things...

[Aidorouge]

This needs to go. Locking down a server for weeks, or even months at a time makes it impossible to play with your friends. "Your friends can roll on a different server and transfer over to play," is nice but has completely gutted Free Companies. And those with active Free Companies cannot recruit new players because they're on Congested servers, and those without active Free Companies cannot find them, because they're on low pop servers. You cannot fix this by telling players, "no, do not play with your friend, play on one of these smaller servers instead." No one is going to do that. Even with free transfers, Balmung, Mateus, Faerie, remain locked near year around. All it does is make the game unnecessarily frustrating.

Yeah, as someone from Dynamis since a month after it opened, I can not in good conscience really recommend that people transfer to Dynamis. They stand to lose far more from leaving Aether/Primal/Crystal even if they don't have friends or and FC to leave behind, and they may find themselves regretting the decision even if they get a house out of it when they suddenly can't just data center travel back over to their preferred world for content, or when transferring back will cost them real money now, assuming the world they want to go back to is even open for paid transfers.

[SophiaDL]

This needs to go. Locking down a server for weeks, or even months at a time makes it impossible to play with your friends. "Your friends can roll on a different server and transfer over to play," is nice but has completely gutted Free Companies. And those with active Free Companies cannot recruit new players because they're on Congested servers, and those without active Free Companies cannot find them, because they're on low pop servers. You cannot fix this by telling players, "no, do not play with your friend, play on one of these smaller servers instead." No one is going to do that. Even with free transfers, Balmung, Mateus, Faerie, remain locked near year around. All it does is make the game unnecessarily frustrating.

Few years back, you could reliably make a new character or transfer over to a big pop server, so long as you did it outside peak hours. Now your only chance to roll on a server where your friends play, as a new or returning player, or simply someone who has made friends with a group on another server, is to wait for weeks, or even months, for the transfer window to reopen. It stinks. And now with servers getting shut for even visiting, you've turned what was a functional if unnecessarily complicated system into something that causes nothing but frustration.

You have had years to fix this. WoW doesn't have these issues. ESO doesn't have these issues. These are entirely self-made issues on your end. Fix your game. We've been patient. My patience, as an 11 year veteran of FFXIV, has nearly worn out.

Thank you.

This is all done to force people to transfer and for them to get money, that's why the entirety of Aether is closed yet again, funnily enough, right before they shut it all off, Aether was open for transfers, same for Balmung.

This is honestly just about the money, its to force people to transfer and make money off of them, this congestion stuff is also just to pretend that the game is booming with players while it has been going down extremely fast since DT with a massive drop from 1.4m to under 1m players (and probably more, that was for the previous Q, so this one will probably be worse), them removing it would be them admitting that the game's playerbase is dwindling so I doubt they will turn it off anytime soon, they would rather keep this image that the game is full to the brim (which is false, it's basically deceiving players).

Both Dynamis and Materia are also failures, in the case of Dynamis, they've tried everything to try and get people to transfer there, as an old Dynamis resident (this is an alt) I was stuck there for an entire month, people were forced to make characters there at DT launch, the second they opened the gates to transfer to other DC's, a mass exodus happened because no one wanted to be on a dead DC, they really thought that forcing everyone there and making them stuck there unable to DC travel was going to make people want to stay on Dynamis, all it did was convince people like me to get the hell out of there as soon as possible in case they decide to do another "lockdown" and keep us stuck there away from everyone. The idea they had to keep players on Dynamis actually worked agaisnt them and a massive amount of people left the second transfers opened.

[brinn12]

Dawntrail started with early EW numbers, and quickly dropped to mid SHB numbers. It's hard to believe so many worlds are still congested and require travel lockouts. SE not being open about this situation doesn't help much, just like with many other issues the game has.

[Jeeqbit]

To understand why this is necessary, you need to understand the history.

Before Shadowbringers, Balmung had been congested for years. It was so congested that creating a new character on it was technically possible, but only for about 1 hour a week at the lowest activity moment of that week and you had to plan it in advance. People got around this by doing paid transfers, and I made a linkshell there which filled to 128 new transferees in just 2 days. At that moment I knew the bubble was going to burst eventually and something had to give.

So SE invented "Congested" status to make paid transfers impossible as well. Combined with splitting Balmung from Aether onto its own data center (Crystal) with lots of low-pop worlds and adding World Visit, they effectively pushed people off Balmung. They either transferred to Aether to raid or they moved to other Crystal worlds, so that Balmung's reputation for RP could spread evenly across the other worlds on Crystal.

I know that you want to believe that servers can grow endlessly but that only happens because of cloud servers where you are all technically connecting to different servers that appear to link up. That's how Discord works for example and it's why bots go down on some shards but not others.

As for the matter of population, I can say that Aether and Crystal's active population often reaches 200,000, which is way higher than after the DC split and Crystal's creation. Crystal's population often surpasses Aether's quite regularly now. According to the last update by Lucky Bancho, the population of Crystal was as low as 138k, Aether at 130k, Primal at 120k and Dynamis at 50k.

Obviously this likely jumped due to the patch, so Aether and Crystal would be higher since then, and it therefore makes sense why they would want to push people elsewhere. And obviously they want to push people to Dynamis generally.

[Aidorouge]

According to the last update by Lucky Bancho, the population of Crystal was as low as 138k, Aether at 130k, Primal at 120k and Dynamis at 50k.

Obviously this likely jumped due to the patch, so Aether and Crystal would be higher since then, and it therefore makes sense why they would want to push people elsewhere. And obviously they want to push people to Dynamis generally.

If Dynamis is really sitting at less than half the population of the 3rd most populated data center even after two and a half years, I don't think this push is working, and there's probably been more to push people OUT of Dynamis then into it. (Cosmic Exploration being the latest reason for people to transfer away.)

It also goes to show just how screwed it always was if Crystal got seeded with one of the largest worlds right from the jump while Dynamis was left to try and grow with nothing to help it. Mind you, I know WHY they didn't just kidnap other worlds this time given the blow back when Crystal did it, but that still didn't leave Dynamis in a good spot (and it still isn't).

[SophiaDL]

Obviously this likely jumped due to the patch, so Aether and Crystal would be higher since then, and it therefore makes sense why they would want to push people elsewhere. And obviously they want to push people to Dynamis generally.

Which is failing miserably, and instead people are leaving Dynamis.

[Averax]

Which is failing miserably, and instead people are leaving Dynamis.

When they split Aether into Aether and Crystal. It worked because they didn't just make a new datacenter and tell people to go there. They took servers from Aether and moved them to Crystal.

When they made Dynamis they, for whatever reason, didn't repeat this. So now you've got an overcrowded DC that nobody can make a character on or transfer to, another overcrowded datacenter that you can still make characters on and transfer to, then Primal, and finally Dynamis.

Dynamis didn't have the benefit of a large popular server being shuffled to it like Balmung or Gilgamesh or whatever, so why would people ever want to go there. It might get better if queues and PF went cross datacenter without you manually having to visit one, but who knows.