I think that has more to do with them not wanting to completely eliminate the ability to play with your friends altogether than it is some scheme to force more money out of people. It's just a way to push new people away from the high population servers, and their desire to do that is more about trying to shore up populations with smaller servers than there being a hard limit on Balmung's capacity (I don't think there is one, since SE seems to handle population limits by zone rather than be server).
