Kilieit

I think it's fair to expect to be able to have fun playing with friends in an MMO you pay for. I also think it's fair to expect the company running that MMO to prioritise making this possible. The incentives for people to transfer off are going to be aimed at people whose anchoring to the overpopulated worlds is monetary and practical - not social. The people complaining here are complaining about the social exclusion brought about by the action. This change was made with no warning - not even 3 days' worth, which would have allowed people (several of whom have posted in this very thread) who were very certain they wanted to be on Balmung, for social reasons, to ensure that they were. Regardless of the back-end reasoning for the decision, the fact remains that it is going to feel unfair to some people, and leave others feeling bereft or just disappointed. I think they're allowed to express that - especially in the calm manner they generally have been in this thread.

I think "perfectly good servers" kind of misses the fact that a lot of people play MMOs for the community. Yes, the game is accessible there, but if you just pick a random server based on low population then there is a good chance you won't be able to find any of your friends. Yesterday, my dad was asking me why FFXIV hasn't started structuring its servers more like other MMO's yet, where players are dynamically assigned to shards (and can travel between them to play with friends) instead of being restricted to a single "server". I said I don't know if FFXIV will ever do that exactly, but that I do think they're laying the groundwork for something similar, what with the increase in data-centre-wide tools like (already released) party finder and (planned) friends list and free companies. Maybe in the long run that'll start to make "what server you're on" less of an issue in terms of social interaction. But until then, I'll just say there's a reason things got this way, and it's not because people hate having houses.

That's your choice, but I don't know if it's a helpful contribution to this particular thread. It's important to remember that it was never intended by Square Enix as a "ban for roleplayers" - in fact, the restrictions apply to 5 other servers, as well. It is - as far as I can discern - an emergency measure designed to ease the login queues and server stability problems that tend to surround a new expansion release, such as the upcoming Stormblood release. Balmung's predicament is, essentially, a problem at least partially of the RP community's own making. And I think it's one we should - and can - work together to equally partially solve, by creating and/or encouraging the creation of a viable alternative for people who aren't on Balmung already. Going forward, if this alternative attains the value I think we should be hoping for from it, it will remain a valid option for new roleplayers, and a valid alternative for existing roleplayers - whatever their reasons for desiring one. I understood discussing the nature of that alternative as the point of this thread.

Here's what I would want anyone who's trying to be involved with the creation of such a community to ask themself: If moving away from my home server was what it would take to create a stable alternative community, for the good of every roleplayer outside Balmung, would I do it? I'm not saying that such necessarily is what it will take; I'm asking folks to ask themselves what their priorities are. I also don't think it's a bad thing for someone to be proud of something they've made, or to want to continue how things were, especially in what's ultimately a hobby... but that is different than wanting to do something that's "best for everyone", and it's important to recognise that difference.

I think there's merit to both approaches... Picking an Existing Community to Bolster Pros: • some infrastructure (FC's, linkshells, inns, event nights, etc) will already be in place • people who have worked hard on something will be acknowledged for that • preparations can begin as soon as a server is chosen Cons: • immediate resentment on the part of players whose communities weren't "chosen", when we want to be encouraging their cooperation • people will have to pay full transfer fee or start from the bottom regarding character progression Starting Over on a Bonus Server Pros: • presumably no one's existing server will be chosen; everyone will be on a level footing, starting anew, preventing "politics" over who was here before and who wasn't • all those bonuses sound really good for transfers in general • guaranteed that the server population is low to begin with, meaning it will be a very long time before any of the problems that Balmung has experienced regarding character creation are likely to apply, and giving the RP community more clout when it comes to setting server atmosphere Cons: • everyone still has to transfer and set up their infrastructure anew. With enough zeal this isn't a problem, but for people on the fence it could be an issue • we have to wait for more information about what servers will have the bonus and when, leaving an undesirable gap in having a solid "place to go" for new RPers

This is harsh, but I think if people can't put aside their pride and their desire to be "The One In Charge" to actually effectively achieve the thing they say they want to do, then... I don't know what to tell them. You should be aspiring to be one leader of many, not the One Important Guy Who Everyone Loves. The One Important Guy thing is exactly how these small communities fail in the long run. I want to be crystal clear that I'm not accusing anyone, especially not anyone specific; I bring this up because EliBallard reminded me, and I've seen it before in all sorts of communities (most recently, a tumblr RP community that I almost joined and then swerved at the last minute just before it imploded, lol). At most, I'm suggesting people to check themselves. Maybe a discussion where people can bring forth the merits and establishments in their fledgling community, followed by a poll in which nobody is allowed to select their own server? Obviously it couldn't be anonymous. I'm not quite sure how it'd be organised, but...

I said this longer (much longer) further back in the thread but I'll say it again shorter here for good measure: I honestly think youse need to coordinate and move your alternative communities together onto one server. Like, keep doing all the stuff you're doing, but next to each other instead of worlds apart. I'm not involved, so I think it would be presumptuous of me to start a thread and begin gathering people together. But I would really recommend beginning the process of reaching out to others and consolidating onto a single server - maybe one no one has populated yet, to avoid people feeling weird about who "has to" move and who doesn't - and seeing where that gets you in terms of notoriety, activity, and stability.

I come from a small pop RP server in WoW. I played there for almost 10 years, and roleplayed there for over 8. Here's my 2p (more like £2... oops) on the challenges you need to be addressing and the things you need to consider moving forward if you (any of you) want to make a genuine, valid alternative community to Balmung. Here is the shape I've seen small communities take. At the beginning, everyone is really excited about the opportunity to have a fresh start. There's a boom in RP guilds, events, and community get-togethers, there's some method of communication established like a chat channel or a forum or both. People usually think this is the hard part, because it takes a lot of effort and promotion and logging in every day and it is hard, no doubt about it. But by comparison, it is the easy part. The hard part comes a year later. By this stage, the original person or people (usually a group of 5 people or less) who began the community have begun to burn out. When someone burns out, what happens is they pull back their operations and start mostly doing their in-game stuff, or their personal RP plots, or just stop logging in as much. And the thing is... there's nothing bad about this! It's a healthy, good reaction to burn-out. Pushing through burn-out without heed to your own mental limits is a recipe for shitty events and shitty relations, because you start to resent the hobby, and inevitably lash out at the people related to it. So pulling back and doing something else for a bit is absolutely the right answer. But here's what you need to recall. Who is going to provide roleplay for people in your stead when that happens? Here's my key point: roleplay communities under a certain size are NOT SUSTAINABLE. Let's say you're the singular leader of the entire RP community on a given server. You will reach burn-out. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe next month. It's going to happen. What next? If your answer to "who is going to provide RP" is "one of my friends who's been helping me so far", that is not adequate. Your friend's probably been working just as hard as you! Maybe even harder, depending on the systems you're using and how easy they make it for non-leaders to do stuff like set calendar events. There's only so many friends in a friend group - and if you go through all of them without the first guy feeling like he wants to come back, then you're screwed. If your answer is "I don't know but I'm sure someone will step forward", I have a little spoiler for you: no one is going to take over. That won't happen. Sorry. This is my experience: during their leisure time, people naturally gravitate towards either leader or follower roles, because they will have a preference (either conscious or subconscious) for which one they enjoy performing more. If no one has made themself apparent as enjoying the leader role so far, it's a vanishingly small chance that they're suddenly going to leap forward and take it up. So, then... things fizzle out... or people start getting upset that there's "no roleplay any more", and turn on each other in blame. What you need is another group who's been running RP separately but concurrently to you. Let's take three Balmung events I attend regularly, and which I know have no overlap in leadership: Matron's Reach on Mondays, Stellazio Pizzaria on Wednesdays, and Fight Club on Thursdays. What happens if the leader of, say, Matron's Reach burns out and doesn't want to lead it any more, and nobody steps forward? Then I suppose that event would stop running. But what happens to Stellazio Pizzaria and Thursday Fight Club? Absolutely nothing. And if someone wants healer-based RP after that? Then there are three free companies I can think of off the top of my head that could scratch that itch, also not dependent on the Matron's Reach in any fashion whatsoever. Because these RP outlets are concurrent and separate, the overall community is stable. One person dropping out won't kill the whole community, no matter who it is. That is the thing you need to strive for, even in a small server. If one person or FC stops operating, the overall community needs to have the stability and breadth to continue without them (maybe in a different fashion, but still to continue). Because if it doesn't, then this starts happening: I'm not trying to single you out. I'm using this quote because it is so accurate to what happened to my server's community, in another realm, on another game, 5+ years ago. My guild was in the position "your guild" is in. We were the pillar upon which the rest of the community depended to initiate RP. Then our leader burned out, and took a break from big RP events. His inner circle closed ranks around him... excluding most of the members of his actual guild, including me, despite the fact that I was far and away the second-most active in organising things next to him. That's the familiar part - the part that sounds like it's happening to you. Here's the rest of my cautionary tale about the original community on my small server.

No, the article says it is locked now. I can forgive people being confused, because it took me two or three read-throughs to comprehend this, but I'll try to explain. Here I will use two separate concepts: character login (accessing the game on a given server through a character that's already on that server), and character addition (placing a new character onto that server by way of transfer or character creation). The timeline is essentially: • On the 20th June, they will be adding new EU servers, with bonuses to incentivise people adding characters to them (by transfer or creation). • On the 20th June, they will be restricting login for high pop servers, i.e. throttling the number of people able to log in to the World at once. This is nothing to do with addition of new characters to the server (by transfer or creation). • Because they want to reduce the number of players affected by this login restriction, by increasing the proportion of players who are on servers not affected by the login restriction... • ... AS OF RIGHT NOW, as a preventative measure for login congestion on the 20th, they have begun preventing ANY new characters from being added to the server BY ANY METHOD (either transfer or creation). You will note the sections regarding transfer and creation are written in the past tense. • FURTHERMORE, they are adding some incentives for people to transfer away (i.e. raised gil cap). • This is a measure intended to ensure that between now and 20th June, the population on the overpopulated servers can ONLY GO DOWN.

I've been using this for a while and it is WONDERFUL. Can strongly recommend. The one thing I will say is that (at time of posting!) for daily blasts, you really want it set to a timezone that is UTC-5 or behind, because I had mine set to UTC+0 for a while and it kept missing events from the daily blast because they were after midnight UTC+0, therefore "the next day", but the "next day"'s blast didn't go out until 5am UTC+0... after the events had already ended. Took me a while to work out what was going on there - I figure it's an artefact of the already-fiddly timezone setting method - so I thought I'd pass on my recommendation of setting it / keeping it set to UTC-5 or behind!

I don't have a house, that's the issue. I have multiple private chambers in a free company estate.

Unfortunately, I'm too entrenched (over 1mil's worth of private chambers purchased and more on the way - I just don't have that kind of gil to throw around, especially if I'd be wanting a house) and I mostly keep a USA schedule anyway (despite living in the UK). Furthermore, I already have 10 alts to try and shepherd - they used to be split across Aether and Primal, but I recently transferred my Primal alts to Midgardsomr (on Aether) because I kept forgetting they existed what with having to change data centres to view them... Lastly, I'm kind of allergic to small communities/servers. I played in one for almost 10 years and it ended horribly for me - something in my personal life which shouldn't have been an issue quickly became a matter over which I could expect to be namecalled even by strangers, and by people who had been my friends since I was a kid. Unless the new community manages to reach Balmung-like proportions, I probably won't be comfortable there. So, despite being an EU RPer, I probably won't be joining you. I wanted to share my reasoning... mostly so you could see it's largely personal, and nothing that's being done wrong by yous!

I think OP means YdaLyse's uncanny resemblance to the Lady in Red, being as they hadn't caught up MSQ yet and didn't realise that this had already been revealed in patch 5.56.

Here is my obligatory post: xaelaaaa

I'd imagine Dragoon jumps require some manipulation of aether, but I'm not sure if there's a hard confirmation on that. There is, yeah. They draw aether from their "inner dragon" to enhance their combat - the Azure Dragoon doubly so, because they also draw from the Eye of Nidhogg. I mention the Azure Dragoon because although there are/were only 2 in the span of the game (Estinien and the WoL), that's... what the in-game abilities are based around: being the WoL Azure Dragoon. Lancers are another matter, though. I will say that Life Surge is a LNC ability, and that must be aetheric - which opens the door for other LNC abilities being the same. Regarding the example in OP - Samurai - I think it's extremely likely that the bulk of its in-game abilities will, like the Ninja abilities, focus on the storing and release of aether in order to enhance combat: -- HOWEVER. In terms of RP, I think you could definitely do a character who fights martially with no aether. You'd just describe it as such in your emotes - that there's no magic fancy sparkly flippies going on. I think it's good practice to describe exactly how you want your character's abilities to be working, anyway, even if it's the same as they appear in-game. And I think it would be interesting to see what shape a character who aspires to stand alongside aether-users without using it themself would take! Just as you don't have to follow job archetypes to the letter (i.e. just because your character punches things doesn't mean they're [going to be] a Monk), you also don't have to follow class archetypes. Not everyone who wields knives is a Rogues' Guild veteran, and not everyone who picks up a spear is going to use it with aetheric enhancement - even if that turns out to be how the in-game abilities are.

This maintenance begins tomorrow/"tonight", depending on how late you usually play! (About 15 hours from now!) Make sure you get all your weeklies done, because it effectively swallows reset. And make sure your plants are out of the ground.

I'm actually mostly looking forward to the new lore we'll get? My main is a xaela who is 100% convinced he will die if he ever goes back to Othard, so he has absolutely zero intention of ever going back there, and - by happenstance - also very few plot leads that could take him there against his will. So I sincerely doubt I'll be doing much actual plot-related roleplay... ...but as I recently said on another thread, we know extremely little about the au ra, despite their visibly unusual biology and obviously starkly different culture. I'm really interested in seeing what new details the sidequests and environment in the Azim Steppe will give us about the au ra. I'm under no illusions that the MSQ will focus on that stuff... but if we manage to go to the Steppes and learn nothing new about au ra, I will be very, very surprised.

I've done this once, and it was really fun! But we cleared out the instance before we started RPing. (We actually did this twice in the end due to time.) And RP'd out our own scenario and monsters in the given environment, instead - giving us more freedom and flexibility VS the in-game scenario. I did IC clears back in WoW, and I always found it kind of stressful switching so quickly between "modes" of gameplay... and while it wasn't an issue for me (I type ridiculously fast), I know some of my friends said they felt like they couldn't really join in because by the time they were done typing, we were fighting the next thing. We fixed that by taking it slower between groups in future and doing stuff like everyone switching to level 1 weapons and everyone but the tank switching to level 1 gear, but... with 90 minute limiters on FFXIV instances, maybe another solution would be better?

I kind of really want to, but lol disabled. I might ask to be a +1 to one of my guildies... UPDATE: Guildie successfully swindled persuaded into taking me as their +1. Will probably be there.

In order: - Probably fine. Chances are, 99% of the players you meet are going to have about as good a grasp on 15th century Mongolian as you do. I think I've met one person, ever, who claimed any sort of further knowledge. Basically, if the resources aren't online for you to read, they probably aren't for anyone else either - and something that looks right to you is going to look right to that 99% of players, too. I used Lingua Mongolia for all my xaela name needs. Which is cheating a bit - what can you do? No one's mentioned anything wrong yet, so at the very least, it can't be glaringly obvious. As much as I hate to advocate doing something you know could be incorrect... honestly, on this topic, we don't have much choice. I think it was a bit silly of the devs to decide on a naming convention that relies on resources that aren't freely available... but I digress. - Honestly, there are no rules. Aghurlal's custom tribe names (he was born into one, and now goes by another) are just amalgams of two different words - "isü" (blackened by soot) "siregen" (throne)"; "qar-a" (black) "kimusun" (talon). Think about what your tribe's founding members would've wanted in a name (something with meaning? Just a random word that sounds good?) and go from there. I've also never had flak over his weird surname - and more often than not he just totally neglects to give a surname ICly, which has also raised surprisingly few eyebrows. - We don't know yet, and... - ...not yet. Everything we know about xaela/au ra in general is in the character creation screen, naming convention thread, and this quote from Las Vegas FanFest 2016: (...there wasn't more in the lore book. The only thing there that isn't on the character creation screen was calling the steppes they live in more specifically the Azim Steppe.) Watch this space, though. In Stormblood we are physically going to the Azim Steppe, the home of the xaela tribes. Chances are we'll get a whole bunch of new info then. I actually vague-ified a lot of previously refined story details for my other (standard-tribe) xaela character, because as soon as I learned we were going to the Steppe, I knew a lot of the stuff I had previously made up as "ehh they'll never cover this may as well do whatever" could potentially be overriden by official lore come Stormblood. Maybe I'll restore it back to how it was because it turns out my ideas coincided with the dev team's; maybe I'll have to do some thinking about how to keep the same "spirit" with different facts. Either way, that's what I'm looking forward to at the moment. TL;DR: We don't have a whole lot of resources available right now, but my recommendation is to keep things open and flexible at least until Stormblood launches. So like... do it! And be prepared to adopt/adapt to the new stuff that's coming out next month.

I think my point is more that you can't always rely on assumptions based on IRL observations. We have to go by what windows we have into the game's world, not the real world. The foremost scholars in FFXIV's world say that wind-aspected aether extinguishes fire-aspected aether. So, it probably does. By what mechanism? Are they mistaken somehow? Who knows - all we can extrapolate is that it can't behave exactly like IRL air and fire do. We have to look to observations in the game itself for anything more in-depth - not IRL observations. TL;DR: No, it doesn't make sense IRL. That's because it's fantasy.

(wiggles hands) Giant tortoises can fly, if you wish hard enough then your god can literally physically manifest in front of you, and also FFXIV lore is based in 16th-18th century understandings of the world. If oxygen even exists in the world (rather than "wind aether" taking its place as a separate but similar substance), it probably hasn't been discovered yet. In the world of FFXIV, it has been stated that wind-aspected aether extinguishes fire-aspected aether. For purposes of FFXIV roleplay, that is the rule you have to go by.

And here's where I'd put my variety selection of curly hairstyles... if I had one! ...for real, I am limited to like... 3 hairstyles on this dude, all around the same length, 2 of which could only be achieved if he was aggressively gelling it down throughout the day. There aren't any others that come even close to the Type 3 curly texture he's supposed to have... unless you count the four available to Roegadyn F but nobody else for some reason? So for all the times it would have made sense for him to cut his hair super short or grow it out... I've just had to... quietly... have him not do that because of the lack of available hairstyles to represent it. Be thankful for your variety of hairstyles, straight-haired characters! Yes, even those of you whose characters are supposed to have long hair! You have more than one your character can casually wear! Be thankful! Okay I'm done. But for real, I think most people take their cues for whether a character's hair is dyed or not from the character/player themself. My character's hair looks unnatural/dyed, but it's actually a representation for a hair colour that also isn't available in the creator (dark auburn) that is most assuredly natural. No one's ever questioned it, in or out of character.

Levelling Roulette > Ifrit (story) on my alt, Shuukami Kanshi. I'm going to lie down now.

Weapon/armour displays are confirmed for 4.X series: ...but that means it'll still be a good few months before they show up...