Naunet

Oh boy. I'll just leave these here and let others figure out which ones go with who. :3

Eh, people play what they like. I don't really have any negative feelings towards the number of women characters (or the number of miqo'te ). So long as people are having fun with their characters, then it's all good. FFXIV was the first time I actually made and roleplayed a male character, though. I had a male castanic alt in TERA, but he didn't really see any action - was just eye candy.

World of Warcraft, back in 2007, on the wonderful server Ravenholdt. My roommate at the time got my girlfriend (also at the time ) and I into both the game and the concept of RP, though previously I had experience with reading and writing fanfiction. The transition felt pretty natural. Maybe that, and the fact that I didn't start until I was older and much more knowledgable, is why I knew to stay away from the typical traps that new roleplayers fall into. I feel no shame about my first character - actually a bit of pride - and still roleplay her even to this day! Ah nostalgia... I wish I could go back to those years sometimes. They were super fun.

Not only do I not consider level when thinking about my characters, 90% of the time I don't really think about their class either. I just kind of pull from themes, lore, flavor, and details to construct a character of my own. Sometimes the class I pick for that character OOCly has some sort of influence, but not always or even often. For example, Antimony is OOCly a WHM and SCH/SMN, but IC... well, "financial auditor highly skilled in traditional shamanistic medicine involving a mix of alchemy, first aid, and aether manipulation." Sure it takes cues from bits of conjury lore and whatnots, but it's definitely not quite so straightforward as, "My character is a conjurer!" So yeah, that's my take.

Oh boy. It's not just WoW, you know that, right? (Though you seem to think I have some sort of love affair with that game... I haven't played it in... 3+ years.) Every other MMO I've touched out there manages to run their servers better such that any creation restrictions that may ever come up are not nearly so obnoxious and pervasive. That you think XIV is so very much more "advanced" than WoW (or any other MMO... many of which are much "bigger" than XIV) is rather funny, though. This game doesn't even have high resolution textures, and it's certainly not the only MMO out there with smooth, realistic models. You're not using the "space" of 12+ characters, though. You have a bunch of gear in your inventory. That is NO different than someone in any other MMO who keeps a bunch of gear in their inventory. Are you concerned about the storage space of, what, your spells? Say hi to Rift! There's really no reason to try and excuse SE. They've got crappy servers. That's pretty much it. They need to invest in better ones.

You don't pay very much attention to the official forums, then.

For me, alts aren't even a roleplay decision. I just get bored looking at the same character and in my mind, only certain classes are "appropriate" for certain characters. Thus, alts are necessary. Glad you think it's a strawman, allgivenover, but what I wrote is precisely the attitude that has been expressed over and over again on the official forums. You had alts in XI? Awesome. You are not the type of person I'm talking about and are very much in the minority of XI players.

They can - in terms of quality of service to the end user. Ultimately, that's all that matters to the customer. You can give 'em all the reasons for why it can't be done, but they don't give a shit as to why it can't be done - they give a shit about what the fuck you're gonna do about it. Right now, SE isn't doing anything about it. Which is why there's angry people. Precisely! As consumers, our main concern shouldn't be trying to find ways to forgive SE for falling short of various industry standards; it should be holding SE up to those standards at minimum. It's the weird-ass FFXI-indoctrinated people, I'm sure. The people who cannot fathom ever using more than one character because you can do everything on one character. That combined with their blind faith in their Chosen God SquareEnix creates some pretty ridiculous opinions. You never saw alt-hate and strange beliefs about character data in WoW because Blizzard actually has good servers and population policies, and alts are not just expected but even encouraged by the community. The FFXIV community is really, really weird.

That's a whole lot of words to excuse SE for shitty servers. A million and one other MMOs have this figured out. The second most successful P2P MMO out there should be able to as well.

IMO go for it. Sounds like a very plausible and interesting bit to your character's backstory. Unique dialects form all over the place, even when people are mixing, so a reclusive Seeker tribe developing their own is perfectly within reason.

This is a rather poor analogy. While I rather dislike internet analogies, at least something that would make it more accurate would be if... All your friends and peers and community had chosen a particular restaurant, but when you get there, the hostess is turning people away at the door and doesn't give a rat's ass that she's telling you to go spend your evening alone and isolated from all the people you care about interacting with. Suddenly, just "find[ing] a place that isn't so crowded" doesn't sound quite so simple, does it? Or it just means I value what little sleep I do get before my very demanding job and have no tolerance for poor decisions on the part of SE.

This is really clever!

This certainly isn't the first time I've called SE bad on their character restrictions. Been doing it almost since the moment they closed down creation, so no need to try and diminish my arguments with that line. In whose book is the ass crack of dawn only actually an acceptable thing to have?

I don't think I'd count those times as "loose". xP

"Deserve" is a strong word and practically screams entitlement. If you're a level 50 monk, you can change to monk and hide your weapon. I mean, it's called a Fistfighter's jacket. You deserve to wear it if you are fistfighting. Nothing wrong with entitlement when it's deserved. If one levels the job, they rightfully deserve to make use of said armor however they wish.

It's also rather unacceptable that the only way to really make a new character on Balmung is to destroy one's sleep for a night. ;

Glad to know things are settling down! *eagerly awaits*

Just wondering if there's an update on these? :3 Really looking forward to my other one! Hee~ These are all so cute.

From accounts, it's doing a piss poor job at keeping bots out.

Ahahahahahaha... wat. This can't be serious! Was 1/4 joking with the transfer money thing. Though people paying them certainly doesn't encourage them to change stuff. My main point was that it can't possibly be a hard character cap that's causing the problem. SE trying to direct the flow of traffic makes some sense, but it's a very heavyhanded way (especially since they don't even let players already on the server make alts).

It's so shiny! *polishes* But seriously. "We don't have any room for more people here! Completely full! Oh, what was that? You want to send us $18? Well, lookee here, seems I missed an empty space..."

If the server was hitting some kind of storage cap, people wouldn't be able to even transfer characters. Character creation is on its own lobby server anyway (as evidenced by how you don't even pick your server until the very end), so I am not so sure the problem is some sort of Balmung population-induced cap. I think the blame falls on their horrendous login/lobby servers, which would make sense considering those were the things that have ALWAYS caused the worst of the game's connection problems. This whole thing just smells really fishy to me. If Balmung was hitting its population cap, they'd shut down transfers too. But oh, wait! Transfers earn them money. Yup. That's why.

My favorites are the ones who clearly have no clue what alts are, how they work, and how they are different from simultaneous logins. FFXI-->FFXIV white knights are hilarious.

They need to bite the bullet and invest in architecture appropriate for the level of popularity their game has garnished. They're in for a world of hurt come the expac if they don't do this. (edit: Though on second thought, with how easily people just toss money at SE to buy server transfers to get around the restriction, perhaps they'll just languish in their outdated architecture because people are freaking stupid. ) At the very least, they need to let players who already have characters on a server to freely make alts.

You're finding causation when there's only correlation. Balmung is a legacy server and when ARR launched had the benefit of retaining its 1.0 RP community. Gilgamesh had to start from scratch. It makes perfect sense then that Balmung has a larger, more entrenched RP community and is thus seen as the more desirable server to be on from a roleplayer perspective. The creation restrictions hurt everyone, not just non-RPers. Potential roleplayers and current roleplayers who desperately want to make alts are all harmed by the policy, and that's just not a good thing.