(08-05-2013, 02:11 PM)sanguineFenrir Wrote: Forum roleplays and such are one way, but in my opinion, that's only part of the experience.These only go so far however, and in some ways are actually kind of disheartening. Let's say you're on Balmung and I'm on Gilgamesh. You create an open RP thread for anyone to join, this lasts over the span of weeks, or months, the two of us become really good friends throughout that time, but in game we have a substantial amount of investment in our servers, or merely our characters on those servers, so merely hopping from one to the other is not really a viable option. Sure we can create alts, but over the past few months we've been roleplaying as the characters we have been currently playing, this means that any relationships or bonds that form in a forum RP never transcend the forum RP, we'll never meet in game, never play together, never be a part of the same circles.
Several months down the road Gilgamesh' status as the Non-Legacy Server will become irrelevant because Legacy and Non-Legacy players will be on equal footing, at that point it's just RPC Server 1 and RPC Server 2. This is why I feel that the community as a whole, not just RPC, could greatly benefit from a single dedicated server (and the opportunity to freely transfer to that server) once the whole Legacy debate is no longer relevant.
This is not to say that Gilgamesh will ever become irrelevant as a home for RP if we don't gain an official server from SE, just that right now their main selling point is "we're new." Once the majority of the RPers on that server reach level 50, and the LS and FC all become well established as parts of the community, they lose that claim and they're no different from Balmung, and that could happen in only a few months, let alone in six months.
Edit: Ultimately though, I still think we will get a dedicated server, I just think that SE is seeing the division in their community between Legacy and Non-Legacy, and in the long run this is only a temporary thing. If they created an entirely new server (as opposed to adding a designation to an existing server) they would need to determine whether Legacy characters could transfer to it, or to treat it like all the new 2.0 servers. In the event Legacy players could transfer to it, all non-Legacy players would view it as just another Legacy server and stay away from it, if they restricted it to new players only all the Legacy players would opt to stay on their own server rather than roll new.
The best solution for this would be to wait until there's less of a gap between new and old players, then either create a new server or designate an old server as RP, allow for server transfers temporarily, and then allow the players to decide whether they want to join the new server or stay where they are. However with that said, the smaller gap between the two sides of the fence would make it much easier for the two sides to integrate together.