Server Selection and Region Selection In Depth

[Quesse]

there was a topic recently that said players wouldnt be able to transfer servers until sometime after release. so for example if you logged out on sargatanas thats where you'll log in on the release of ARR. (subject to server names) but the regional servers weren't going to be opened to existing players immediately or something along those lines.

the idea was to give existing players a chance to decide with friends and linkshells etc where to go or something rather than just log into arr and find all your friends are somewhere else.

I agree with this.

I don't see any reason to believe that the existing servers will be anything but JP based. The new ones will be in the new regions. No initial transfer allowed. Same servers and community although names might have changed.

I think this would count as Option 3: You're on your previous server (with name change) and no transfer allowed.

As far as regions go Option 2 is definitely correct except all existing players will be on JP servers. Reasons:

-- It would be madness to lock in players randomly on JP or NA servers. All previous servers would be JP. Mainly because of the next reason.
-- It is unlike SE to give players no prep time and force them to pick a server at launch. Look at the last server merge. There was a lot of thought put into how LS's and community's could stay together or part ways. To just allow people to pick randomly among servers at launch is not anything SE would do.