Pools Closed (Asura Is Full!)

And as people leave the small servers more and more, it eventually gets to the point that servers become so inactive that SE is forced to take action. That's what happened during the last merger many moons ago. Regardless of how you may enjoy roaming wastelands by yourself, SE from a business standpoint has every right to cut costs and condense where they see fit.

My original premise that, as someone on a highly populated server who sees congestion at its worst, I can say with confidence that if you were to see a population increase, whether its from a merge up or from incentivized migration down, you'd still be content doing all the content you want by yourself. You're simply adamant that other people like myself are wrong and you shudder at the idea of one additional player logged into a zone you want to occupy... I also have the perspective of a player who's server was merged in the 75 era with another server, as most people can attest to.

Also, Many players simply play where they were put and deal with the cards they were dealt. It's not a matter or Wanting to be somewhere or not. They made their character in 00's some point in the early days, came back from a hiatus and are making it work at their own pace. It's not really fair to say to them "Well just leave its only 9-18 $". They can still find it frustrating that they cant team up like they once used to be able to. They shouldn't have to pay a premium to enjoy their gameplay experience just because you selfishly want them to leave.

I think the fracture in our perspectives stems from my lack of sympathy for the desire for an empty server. I dont really see what your insistence on having this exclusive sandbox to play in comes from. I'm not advocating for server mergers per-se, but i'm not against them. What I want is a redistribution of players to make it less extreme. That'd have the bottom servers see a 5-10% increase of players and the top servers see a 5-10% decrease in players. I truly believe if you had 5% more players on your server you wouldnt even notice

I'm good. I'm not playing an MMO like a LAN party

Dont care
Worry about your cesspool server instead of pitching ideas that *** my server up
Thanks

Ditto? Cool, we really made headway there. Complaining really solves all the problems.

The point was clearly that I care about the game as a whole, not particularly the server I'm on. More than 1 server is locked, and all servers have an imbalance in population. SE needs to address it one way or another. Whether you like it or not.

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If you don't like how me or others express our opinions on the health of the game... In a thread about OUR server, you're free to ignore it and keep your 'cesspool server' ideas to yourself. It's not a thread about your server in particular. If your gonna come in here and yell at everyone that you want your private hugbox server all to yourself and we all need to shut the *** up, I'll continue to engage in your arguments from my perspective. Sorry, not sorry

Again
Here us why i dont care:


Server hopping is s thing. Anyone who doesnt want to be on a small server can literally leave at any time they want.

Dex is right, the inbred LAN party people are what got other servers locked so you are negatively impacting our experience, so can hardly *** we want that the other way around.

If by 'inbred LAN party people' you mean multiboxers, 6 boxers etc... I think it's clear that's become pretty systematic across every server, especially with the advent of more readily available, easy to use tools distributed around such as Silmaril... Not a fan that the state of the game has come to this. It has pushed the higher end over the top though, you're not wrong there

Not just those, more the "omfg how cud u ever ask me to play with anyone but these 2 people that can stand me on [insert Wrong Turn server] when they never want to leave because we're in this weird homo polyamorous bff situation" people. Not sure if Nynja is one of them but there are a few that normally post in these threads.

And yet you play on the most popular server for the ability to get PuGs, so what makes you think *** up the smaller servers will fix anything?

Again, I dont see why you're so adamant that my proposed 5% pop. increase would somehow *** UP your entire play experience. If your intention is to play by yourself, you're going to do that anyway regardless of who's on your server or not.

You continue to shout "Dont like it get out". What's your ideal # of players on your server? Just yourself?

This is the weird thing though. If these people only want to play with their inbred clan of 2-3 other people, would they make their own server together with noone else on it if they were given the option? I'm guessing not because, being an MMO, they want to the gear to impress people they will never even play with.

It is a very strange situation created in FFXI that never happened before and will never happen in any other MMO.

What if I told you one of the issues of the current state of the game was SE moving to party only content?
Sortie is long grindy content that isnt really PuG friendly.
Gaol requires 303000 segments at minimum to work your way from V0 to V25 Bumba kill, that presumes going 1/1 on every kill only using 1 KI, and also doesnt factor in RP farming. This number goes down if you have someone to carry you up a couple tiers, but thats not a small number.
Even Omen started as party content.

Party content tied behind a daily use-it-or-lose-it entry whos rewards are gated behind a long grind for currency is *** up the current state of the game

The ideal # of players is one where I dont have to *** about congestion and lineups when trying to partake in content.

The number its at right now is perfect, thanks for asking.

It is largely SE fault, particularly when they make things where you have an advantage if you have 16 chars and then even more accounts with 16 chars (e.g. Ambu grinding currency).

And I continue to will because its a flawless argument.

Migrating from one server to another isnt like migrating RL to another country. Log out, press button, log in on another server.


Once again, another flawless argment:
If you hate the server you're on, but you continue to pay 12.95 per month to be on that server that you find so miserable because its low pop, you're an idiot because you can pay a one time $9* fee to go to a high pop server.

"But they shouldnt have to pay $9* to enjoy the game"

Theyre already paying 12.95 per month.



This "premium" is a one time payment that is cheaper* than their monthly subscription.


*If youre smart and do this during discount campaign which shows up 2-3 times a year.

Sortie's actually really PUG friendly if you're a good communicator, and have at least a solid friend or two to keep a through-line in case the PUGs are bad.

Party content in and of itself just has the strict six person limit, such that almost nobody in the group can just show up and be completely carried. Everyone has to do a bare minimum level of work to get the content done to a satisfactory degree.

There was a 1-2 month period this year where I had to PUG 1-2(sometimes 3) members in my Sortie group everyday. And at the time we were barely managing 6 boss clears. But everyday my shouts were answered by multiple people, even some JP. One time our LS's resident 6-boxer even came on his COR w/o his 6-box (his thoughts were, "How do you live like this?")

And this is really no different than grouping for EXP used to be in this game. You used to be expected to show up, and able to follow basic instructions on where camp was, what SCs were being employed if any, who was pulling, who was healing, who was trying to tank etc. etc.

The thing people really seem to hate about Sortie is the lockout, but also that it can't really be exploited like a lot of other content. It doesn't really tie into the game economy in a, "If I do this content, it will make me filthy rich." sort of way.

It really is good content, if a bit repetitive (with a little too much running). But that's XI in a nutshell anyway.


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Anyway, small servers can be nice, but it's always a little weird having as much control over the game world as you can on a small server. A couple years back I was on Odin when its pop was a lot lower, and I was able to change multiple zones to Bastok per week just by exping or meriting at 75 in them. Can't do that on bigger servers.

And that's what you want and like, isn't it? The world being your oyster? Well, it's not your oyster. It's your timeshare at SE's behest.

You don't have to like high pop servers, and you don't have to be on one(for now), but XI is ultimately part of a business, and they will do merges again if push comes to shove. Conservative approaches like Dexprozius suggests are far less invasive than mergers, but mergers are SE's modus operandi, so I don't get why you're all up in arms about the suggestion.

If I were still on a small server, I'd love a small injection of players as suggested. In my experience groups on small servers will put you on a ***list for the slighest of transgressions (you sold something at full price instead of letting Johnny Small Server Prince have it at half price. Obviously you're a selfish money grubbing ***, and shouldn't be allowed into any groups.) More players means more opportunities, fresh faces, new crafters, and more parties can be made to do party content. Everything about it is good from a big picture perspective.

So what's really your beef with a less invasive measure than full merger?

tl;dr

But you're not, so please dont talk about what the experience for people on small servers should be like because you prefer to be on a larger server. People on small servers are getting their preferable experience, evidenced by the fact theyre continuing to pay 12.95 per month subscription fee to FFXI to play on their small server instead of:
a-unsubscribing
b-paying $9 and migrating to a larger server


I aint ever seen a "pls merge the servers" post from anyone that plays on:
Cerb
Sylph
Quetz
Levi
Siren
Valefor
Laks
Bis
Carb
Shiva
Rag
Fen
Phoenix
Odin (likely)

It always comes from someone on Bahamut or Asura.

Answer my question.

This one?

Basic math
Cerb 2942 + Sylph 3035 = 5977

Asura 12k
Odin 11.9k
Bahamut 11.1k
Sylphberus 6k <-
Phoenix 5.5k

There are 87.5k active accounts over 16 servers. That should be an average of 5473 accounts per server. Yet only three servers are above that average, though Phoenix is right on the cusp.
35027 accounts on the big 3 11k+ servers, 52,550 accounts across the other 13 servers.

The majority of the playerbase prefer smaller population servers.

+1 to basically everything Nynja has said here.

Here's why it would *** up everything:
1.) Server merge means you lose your character name (potentially) which is a big PITA and, especially if it's your main, really annoying.
2.) Adding extra players means more competition, for everything. More congestion at Ody, AMAN trove, Abyssea NMs, Einherjar. More people trying to sell the thing you're trying to sell.
3.) Very often (always?) on higher pop servers, there's ***like mercing and content clear sales. We don't want that ***.

Again...the Asura crowd comes around assuming that low-pop servers are just people 6-boxing or playing with their 2 "inbred friends", whatever the *** that's supposed to be.

I have 5~8 people I regularly do 6-man content with, plus another 3~5 that I do dynamis with (in addition to the 5~8), plus a linkshell filled with ~60 more people that I chat with, ocassionally do content with/for, trade with, do favors for/ask for favors from.

It's called a *** community. We have lots of them. That's why we play an MMORPG instead of a single-player game. We're happy with the situation as it is.

k lol

You realize it's more to do with if someone has your name and your buddies all think it's you like "Hey, K123, wanna go do some Ambu?" but the person who has the name K123 is like "*** you guys. I banged all of your moms" or whatever.
Meanwhile K123 now has to change his name to Icantimgur or something and tell a whole lotta people that K123 isn't actually him

Imagine giving a rats fat *** about your character name

How sad

That one, but also the one about why/what you like about being on small server. You, personally. You!

And I know you missed it, or chose to ignore it, but Dex laid out that he used small server merging as an example, but his actual want would be some arrangement where they incentivize players to leave the big 3 and migrate to low pop for a few percents of population.

5% from each of the big 3 is like 1800 players moving into the other 13 servers. It's way less extreme than a merger. If they evenly spread out it'd be about 139 players going to each server. The horror! (of course, whatever the incentive is, they may just move to the next biggest server to collect, but whatevs. XIV does this thing a lot with enhanced EXP gains for choosing small servers and other niceties)

I'm on Bahammie nowadays, and even though it's supposed to be crowded, most people dogpile endgame. You only find crowds at Mhaura, Rabao, Limbus, Selbina, Norg, Sparks vendors, Curio moogle zones, Nashmau, Kamihr Drifts Bivouac #4, and the Eastern Adoulin AH. Most people are AFK if not actively in an event, and it doesn't feel any more crowded to me than being on Bismarck, Sylph, or Odin (all servers I have played on in excess of 1 year+ in the past). With the exception of there's way less Japanese than when I was on Odin, and so there's less language barrier issues. And I can't manipulate conquest all by myself (granted the regions I care about manipulating are ones I can't really gain exemplar in so...).

And I, personally, didn't move to a higher pop server for the higher pop. I moved to Bahamut because my brother was playing there (well, is). In the past I only moved off of Asura to Bismarck to be with the girl I liked at the time. Later I moved from Bismarck to Sylph to play with Shadowlina. I moved off of Sylph to Odin to play with my friend from XIV, Vox.

In general, I think most people operate the same way or at least in a similar way. There needs to be a strong social incentive to uproot and move servers, or a strong gameplay one. When server transfers were first introduced they were largely used by endgame shells looking to take the resources they'd gained on higher pop servers, so they could dominate HNM timers on small servers. Hell, even Asura was victim to that, back in 2007 when the HNMLS Twentyfourseven transferred onto Asura from wherever the hell they came from.

Not a lot of folks instantly started transferring servers left and right. The only way to experience another server would be to purchase another character slot, and make one on the different server, and they didn't allow server choice til sometime in the 2010s as far as I recall, meaning you rolled the dice or got someone to golden world pass you to experience other servers.

Which, you know, brings up the fact that your metric for accounts being associated with servers is useless. You can have multiple characters on the same account all be on different servers. Some people do, some people game the different server economies that way, even.

But most folks just like where they landed. They built their relationships/groups/LSes, and if it ain't broke, don't transfer. It has less to do with population size, and more to do with having no real reason to transfer. I'm sure there's plenty of folks on smaller servers who think to themselves, "It would be nice if I could find groups more easily when my group can't be online, but I can be... but it's not worth throwing away what I have here."

So I think it would be more accurate to say that most FFXI players are happy to be where their friends are.

Especially when your name is *** "male taru", the least interesting, novel, creative name possible.

I'd happily hop servers to play with friends on other servers if it wasnt so restrictive. It's exactly that. No one wants to alienate themselves from friends that they took the time to build up.

Larger servers are more opportunities to make new friends and experience more diversity in players (pugs) or find likeminded groups, at the cost of more competition and opportunists. At the same time this competition breeds a more vibrant market with larger and more accessible resources.... Theres a reason you used to see people transfer to the big 3 servers to buy and offload goods and then return home to flip...

One big issue behind the whole thing is the lack of a global market. I'm sure the naysayers will jump down my throat to point out micro flaws, but if all servers connected on one auction house it'd be alot more flexible for players as a whole and less incentive to create scarcity for profit and market manipulation.

With that out of the way, SE could come up with better ways to incentivize roaming between servers, even if its temporary or trial jumps. If people have more freedom, they can then make more educated choices on where they want to be and who they want to associate with.

ULTIMATELY, the condition of the game is as it is currently. Theres 2 closed servers, with that having no end in sight. It may have been a long game on SE's part to trim the RMT markets by preventing them from making new characters post ban.. but where it stands now we have no real incentive to lower the population of active real players.

I never said I wanted players who enjoy a more relaxed server to be upended. I simply stated that there's a # in everyone's head that is different player to player, on what they consider a healthy amount for their server to enjoy playing there. It all correlates to ease of play, be it resource acquisition, wait times, competition etc.... What i'm suggesting is, that most people arn't being honest or are being far too strict on what they deem that # to be.

A small enough nudge in one direction or the other wont generally impact any individuals play, but Will reduce the stress on the servers as a whole. For example, instances have a set amount per piece of content. The higher pop servers will be at capacity with people waiting, and the lower pop servers will often not be at capacity. There's a world where the lower pops have 1 more instance used without impacting anyone, but reducing stress on the higher pop. The problem is that the burden is on SE to create an incentive structure and balance system that threads that needle... which is asking quite alot from the current team.

Yes, I play on the "most populated, horrible merc, everyone multiboxes" server... yet I've had a plethora of opportunities here to play with real players, make groups, make friends, and try other perspectives. Every server has positives and negatives. While you all talk about how people like myself make assumptions of your servers, you levy the same types of assumptions and generalizations at us.

People on large servers want to play on large servers. They dont want to play on small or mid-sized servers. If they wanted to play on mid-sized servers, they would go to one of the 5k population servers.


By all means, please point me to a better one since the metric I used is useless according to you? I highly doubt it would skew the numbers that much though.

Even GHN's numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt as a lot of people dont log out.

Imagine playing a character for 20 years and having no attachment to their name, identity, or reputation. Psychopathic, if you ask me.

Plus, signed equipment...screenshots, lu shang+1, etc.