[ Unlock Aether Servers ]

[AyahM]

Now that they've hard-locked all Aether worlds, I'm not sure unlocking them without changing the datacenter fundamentally would be beneficial. What I mean by that is, the more its locked the more people pile into Aether when it is unlocked. I live on Dynamis and while I plan to stay indefinitely, the cycle really is

Oh house! Dynamis.
Oh, not as popular. DC travel!
Oh, what a pain.. transfer to Aether.

This is not a Dynamis problem, when I was first on Aether before Dynamis, they had more characters from all 3 data centers than from Aether most of the time. Which means, Crystal & Primal are also experiencing this as people have pointed out. Truly, besides Cross-DC queuing, I truly believe datacenters should consolidate by absorbing worlds, not deleting them. If that means "new" named datacenters (2 or 3 total for example for NA) or, the current named datacenters have an odd number of worlds, so be it. With the lower player pop overall (and I don't see a return to the peak for an extended period, sorry) -- this is the easiest fix which won't cause too much stress on the "servers", and either way, we could just pay for more server bandwidth.

At this point, it is required to maintain a popular game to perpetuate people playing.
As you've pointed out, less people = less people.

I do not need the data from SE to determine that low-pop worlds lose players faster than high-pop worlds. Leaving this issue unresolved is the worst possible solution.