Pools Closed (Asura Is Full!)

I hope they keep Asura Closed Forever and Ban all cheaters in it.

If It haven't happen in the past decade, nothing will happen now.
From what I'm told, Asura barely noticed a difference despite been locked down for almost 5 months.

I haven't heard much from my buddies over on Bahamut (where I used to play before moved to Shiva) other than yell/shouts become more infected with RMT yells other than that its business like usual. I logged in last night on a mule there and it was refreshing to see 1700 people online.

What is this, 2018? You wish Square Enix would finally start banning cheaters after all the years these players have spent putting in countless hours, while Square Enix has done nothing about them? Pretty sick if you ask me.

Unlike the savage dupes, they are not harming the game (I assume they mean people using botting software with multiboxers and not exploiting the game mechanics).

On a principle we can dislike it but if someone are using cure bots they are not interfering with my gameplay, or I’m just naive and don’t see it/don’t care.

most people these days exist outside of the game they are playing. i.e if they are playing league of legends ARAM or something they are doing it in a discord voice channel with the friends they are playing with.

i'd assume the ingame chat systems are so infrequently used compared to 10 years ago, which makes your name relatively irrelevant most of the time.

i don't think anyone is saying that smaller server players should want there to be a merge, obviously having no competition on anything can feel kind of nice. however, i do not believe that is a healthy state of a game and will lead to more player attrition than not.

tbh I'm a huge fan of "character name came directly from character making screen", like, if someone was named Heightslider I'd be like "what a good name"

alt joke: it's Mallet aru. like Gallagher.
alt joke 2: it's french. Mal AY tuh RU.

I mean, it's definitely a dumb name, but it's still what everyone knows me by and people have gear signed by me from 15 years ago and it would suck if the character I was playing suddenly had a different name.

It would also suck if I had to explain to everyone I partied with: hey, even though my character name is Hownowbrowncow, this is Maletaru. Then people will keep calling me male, because that's been my name for decades, and other people will be like, who TF is male? Then we have to explain that I'm male, because my character name used to be maletaru. And I'll have screenshots from 18 years ago that show the same character as screenshots I take today, but with a different name. It sucks.

Plus, it's not just about ME. What if someone has a really awesome name, they just managed to get because they started early on, like their own first name, or sephiroth or some ***. Well, that name's getting nuked too.

It started with one closed server, and it became a second closed server because everyone who was getting banned from the first closed server, which was the largest in population, went to the second largest server. I'll give you one guess as to which server saw the greatest influx of population after SE put a second server on lockdown, you have a 1 in 14 chance to get this right.

Did you guess Odin, the third largest server? Congratulations! A winner you are.
Why did the third largest server see the biggest influx after the second largest server got locked down? Because people who want to play on large servers will choose to play on the largest server available.

The people who want to play on large servers will play on the largest server available. You cant tell people who want to play on Asura/Baha/Odin to go to Cerb/Sylph/Levi.

The only thing that will be accomplished by merging smaller servers is pissing off 70% of the playerbase.

Honestly, SE should have never closed Asura. They should have left it open and just straight up said the following:
"We have no intention to fix congestion issues. This is the largest server and we implemented queue systems on all modern content to ensure everyone enters in the order they signed up. If congestion is a problem, please feel free to use the world transfer service to move to another server". Use a laissez-faire approach to a problem the playerbase self-inflicted.

I dont know if you misunderstood what I was saying, but the 70% of the playerbase that would be pissed off would be the ones on the 3-5k servers who just got *** over into a 10k server.

Leave it alone and hope it works it self out is what they did for the previous five or so years.

The risk now is service interruption, which they would have to refund or make up for in some way.

And seeing as the small servers are staying small and not an issue, why would they change anything with that.

If anything, they might create more servers not fewer.

I thought everyone on small servers are just a bunch of "inbred LAN multiboxers"?

Why would an established group, who have their squad to do stuff in game, want to go to a larger server where they have to deal with all the nonsense like repeated RMT spams and congestion?

If SE really wants to screw with us, they should turn all of the servers with < 500 people into Dynamis Servers. Every zone is Dynamis'ified.... and we gotta transfer to save them.

What service interruption? You mean queue lines and congestion?

Do other MMO's offer refunds when there is congestion? Did Blizzard offer refunds when players couldnt log in to WoW due to congestion? Did SE offer refunds when players couldnt log in to FFXIV?

I feel attacked.

Nah, the server was failing basic things like sending out ROE info and logins around May. People were constantly being disconnected, etc. Another 10-20% likely would have made entire zones untenable, rather than just the issues around queues/instances. I don't think it was viable for SE to continue to leave it or they would have.

I still don't want small servers merged, but the argument held a lot more weight before Asura/Bahamut closed. Now, a new player who wants a high population server has to settle for Odin.. which isn't great, especially if it ends up locked too. Ensuring the people who do want a high population have that option is critical to growth, and if that requires merges.. it might just be an unfortunate reality for those who don't want them.

Personally, I think small servers have an entirely different social ecosystem. You tend to know every serious endgame player even if they're not in your shell, and you quickly learn who is good and who isn't. It's harder to schedule content and you can't do PUGs easily, but you're more likely to get random invites to things you need from folks you already know. Hanging out with the 50 folks at your local game store and a few random dropins vs going to disney and waiting in line in a mob of thousands.

I don't think it's fair to remove that ecosystem; more isn't inherently better and the different set of motivators on small servers leads to different interactions. But, there is a real argument to be made that new players who end up on these dead servers will quit. I'm just not sure that's conclusive either; it kind of depends on how they get along with the cliques already on the server and if they care to transfer.

They already had/have queues, interruption as in actually not able to handle more players. Of course you would stop accepting new players in that case.

When Asura was locked down, which servers saw a huge influx of new accounts?

Bahamut
or
any of or even all of combined: Cerb Sylph Quetz Levi Siren Valefor

You know what the answer is, and you know what the answer is to the follow up question for which server got the next influx when Bahamut was locked down (Odin, the 3rd biggest server).

This always seems to come back to the idea that "big servers are whats good for the game so the small servers need to be merged". I dont know how GHN got his numbers, but from what he posted a few days ago, here are the avg populations, in order:

Without having a similar dataset for June-July-Aug numbers, its hard to deduce much. However, if we are to accept these numbers as an extra dataset to compare with the database numbers from ffxiah estimating average accounts, then the previous statement I made continues to hold true:
Though when I went to dig up that post, I found this absolutely stupid comment I glanced over:

If its a thread about YOUR server, then stick to YOUR own server and stop talking about merging smaller servers that are not yours.

If Odin gets locked down, the waters get muddier in determining who gets the next influx because the gap between those server pops starts to shrink, but I'd be willing to rub my crystal balls and predict that the greater influx would still wind up on Rag/Fen/Pho/Shiv vs the remaining 9 servers.

But theres still wildcard variable that is Odin being a JP heavy server, I dont think SE will run the same playbook they did for Asura and Bahamut (NA/RMT heavy servers).

you are correct that it is hard to deduce much and i wish i had more data, this was something i always somewhat tracked but never with a very scientific method.

asura got to levels SE must have thought untenable when they had the free campaign/free bonanaza weapon at the same time, asura got to like 4400 which is the highest i had ever seen from tracking on and off for 6-7 years.

the data i've posted here though is taken twice a day (between 7-9 AM and between 7-9 PM) from search results. if /sea all is accurate, so are these numbers.

take this for what you will but here are some random asura numbers and timestamps prior to the data i have posted:

Poor Cerberus! It used to be the HNMLS hub for FFXI.

You're still yapping about my post on the previous page? Take some medication

EDIT:
ALSO; for all your tears, my proposed fixes were always mainly Not server merges. I merely said that they'd be fine, but not the ideal solution.
Also Also; Your server Carbuncle (if you're still there) is smack in the middle, and probably in a perfect spot health wise. That 600-800 range. Like Thorny addressed earlier having small servers isnt a bad thing, but it needs to be a choice.
My hope/suggestion would be for SE to incentivize the top servers to move a small percentage off into the bottom couple, to make more Carbuncles, not more Odins.

The entire topic in this thread is discussing a problem with the game and what SE's done. I'm free to talk about my thoughts on it however the hell I want. So no I wont stop talking about it, it's my opinion. I wont tell you to stop moaning about how perfect your server is as a private island and how seeing 1 additional person in Mhuara on a saturday will literally give you an aneurysm. I'll just think you're a moron and move on with my day

if asura's population is really a problem i think they could have gone about it a bunch of different ways

for example:

1. shutdown asura and allow free transfers off.

cap each server at x%(bahamut 200, cerb 1000 as an example) transfers until they no longer allow free transfers

2. split asura into 2 new(old servers, i.e titan/alexander). let people pick which one but keep in mind the above, once titan hits 2000 stop transfers and force alexander.

the way they are going about this is just going to result in wherever they don't close down being the next mega hub because it isn't done intelligently. asura is also not super likely to go down in population as they announced it in a way that gave people time to prepare and make accounts there if needed.

there is a chance that what i suggested also wouldn't work and would result in the same problem, but i would view that as not as likely as what they are doing now.

i think it's also pretty unlikely they open up asura or bahamut anytime soon which is terrible for the player experience on a 23 year old game and will result in people quitting due to not being able to transfer to do their empys on a dead server or result in someone not playing because they can't get into a locked server with their friends.

all in all, i think SE is doing the worst possible thing to address this issue