I'll answer these to the best of my ability.
1) Balmung is kind of challenging to roll onto. Our server's pretty crowded and we wind up with a lot of closed periods. I've heard that transferring a character skips the process somehow, but cannot verify myself. For the most part, character creation is most possible immediately before/after maintenance and in the earliest early mornings. I know there's sometimes windows around 5am EST.
2) Peak hours vary. We've got a fairly lively EU population that rolls through long into the night when I'm asleep and up way early when I'm at work, but I also know a fair few folks spread all across US timezones. There's a lot of people active across the NA/EU ranges, I've found in my occasional days off and the like.
3) My experience with RP in other MMOs is light, I suppose. XIV's been completely comfortable for roleplay, though. Random walk-up RP? No problem (in Ul'dah, anyway. Not sure how it goes in Limsa or Grid). Community-run events? I can think of at least one regularly-run tavern night, a Fight Club and a number of major-plot-arc-running Free Companies that are all available. It's cozy for newbies getting their feet wet, it's comfortable for vets looking to tell stories, it's good for people just wanting to drift and listen.
4) SE's customer service is the stuff of legend. If you have problems, things turn out one of two ways: Immediate solutions or a lot of run-around. It depends on your issue, really; I've had a friend accidentally lock himself out of his account with his security code and that got resolved in one phone call. Appealing bans, though, frequently ends up being a nightmare. That being said, I don't know anyone in XIV who was ever banned for improper reasons (or proper ones, come to think of it).
5) Steam seems interesting: I know if you have the game on PC, Steam won't recognize it as an official game, only an imported one (if you've ever added a non-steam game to your library, you know what I mean). I don't know if it works in reverse; If you've got Steam!FFXIV, I don't know if you could run it stand-alone on another machine without Steam. Still, I can't think of any reason to skirt the game there. More than a couple of my friends on Steam play it there.
Edit: Double scooped! Damn you coworkers, I'm doing important nonwork stuff here!
1) Balmung is kind of challenging to roll onto. Our server's pretty crowded and we wind up with a lot of closed periods. I've heard that transferring a character skips the process somehow, but cannot verify myself. For the most part, character creation is most possible immediately before/after maintenance and in the earliest early mornings. I know there's sometimes windows around 5am EST.
2) Peak hours vary. We've got a fairly lively EU population that rolls through long into the night when I'm asleep and up way early when I'm at work, but I also know a fair few folks spread all across US timezones. There's a lot of people active across the NA/EU ranges, I've found in my occasional days off and the like.
3) My experience with RP in other MMOs is light, I suppose. XIV's been completely comfortable for roleplay, though. Random walk-up RP? No problem (in Ul'dah, anyway. Not sure how it goes in Limsa or Grid). Community-run events? I can think of at least one regularly-run tavern night, a Fight Club and a number of major-plot-arc-running Free Companies that are all available. It's cozy for newbies getting their feet wet, it's comfortable for vets looking to tell stories, it's good for people just wanting to drift and listen.
4) SE's customer service is the stuff of legend. If you have problems, things turn out one of two ways: Immediate solutions or a lot of run-around. It depends on your issue, really; I've had a friend accidentally lock himself out of his account with his security code and that got resolved in one phone call. Appealing bans, though, frequently ends up being a nightmare. That being said, I don't know anyone in XIV who was ever banned for improper reasons (or proper ones, come to think of it).
5) Steam seems interesting: I know if you have the game on PC, Steam won't recognize it as an official game, only an imported one (if you've ever added a non-steam game to your library, you know what I mean). I don't know if it works in reverse; If you've got Steam!FFXIV, I don't know if you could run it stand-alone on another machine without Steam. Still, I can't think of any reason to skirt the game there. More than a couple of my friends on Steam play it there.
Edit: Double scooped! Damn you coworkers, I'm doing important nonwork stuff here!
![[Image: yEROfKO.png]](http://i.imgur.com/yEROfKO.png)
