What a dumb and heavy-handed way of dealing with server congestion. I'd like to remind Square Enix that the fact that it took a hard restriction of transfers and character creation just means that they've already failed multiple times as far as spreading out server populations.
Firstly, there's not even a generalised indication of a server's population, like WoW's "Full", "medium", "low" realm population indicators. People transferred or waited to create characters on Balmung or Gilgamesh because the locked-server status was the only guarantee they had that the community wasn't too small for their tastes. People who are just looking for a different community regardless of size can pick whatever server they want, but if your main concern is having a lot of people to do things with whether its PvE or RP or whatever, you have no information to go to any other server without doing a lot of surveying on your own...which as a player you really shouldn't have to do.
Secondly, I'm still a bit miffed that Square Enix has yet to acknowledge that the Western RP community is even a thing. There was a vague one-off mention by Yoshi-P being surprised that "roleplaying" was even a thing among Westerners--which by itself isn't a huge surprise given that Asia in general, to my knowledge, doesn't roleplay at all to any significant extent--but Balmung's population issue could be solved entirely by just accommodating that portion of the community, either by designating Balmung or another server as a sanctioned RP server and offering free transfers.
I dunno, this whole thing reeks of "We could have prevented it from coming to this if we actually understood the numbers of our metrics", which is a pretty bad smell overall.
Firstly, there's not even a generalised indication of a server's population, like WoW's "Full", "medium", "low" realm population indicators. People transferred or waited to create characters on Balmung or Gilgamesh because the locked-server status was the only guarantee they had that the community wasn't too small for their tastes. People who are just looking for a different community regardless of size can pick whatever server they want, but if your main concern is having a lot of people to do things with whether its PvE or RP or whatever, you have no information to go to any other server without doing a lot of surveying on your own...which as a player you really shouldn't have to do.
Secondly, I'm still a bit miffed that Square Enix has yet to acknowledge that the Western RP community is even a thing. There was a vague one-off mention by Yoshi-P being surprised that "roleplaying" was even a thing among Westerners--which by itself isn't a huge surprise given that Asia in general, to my knowledge, doesn't roleplay at all to any significant extent--but Balmung's population issue could be solved entirely by just accommodating that portion of the community, either by designating Balmung or another server as a sanctioned RP server and offering free transfers.
I dunno, this whole thing reeks of "We could have prevented it from coming to this if we actually understood the numbers of our metrics", which is a pretty bad smell overall.
