(10-23-2017, 03:45 AM)Valence Wrote: Personally I disagree with a lot of the statements or observations made here.
I've seen the economy of smaller servers and I can safely say that while it might seem like a crafter heaven, it's actually crazy expensive for every little thing, or sometimes you can't even find what you're looking for just due to the scarcity of things. Sure, you don't get much competition when you are trying to sell something, but at the same time, demand is lower as well. I actually think that big servers like Balmung have a wonderful and healthy economy. The market is full of everything and the flow of goods is unmatched here.
The argument that a community gets stale... might be true, but I have my doubts. Considering the amount of people rotating on that server, between returners, old sprouts, or just the sheer amount of people in itself, I really, really doubt that it could get stale. If that's what you're afraid of, you'll meet new people all the time. We are speaking about the tens of thousands here.
Now then, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind at all a RP designated servers but. What if we get one or two? Do you think that every RPer will migrate there all of a sudden? Leave their FCs, houses, contacts, statics, and whatnot? They didn't do it for Mateus or Omega, so why would it work better here? I would even argue that it would work even less since most of the players that actually wanted to transfer already did it.
You would be essentially left with an empty server not filling up.
Expensive at least means that someone, somewhere is making money unlike Balmung right now. Mateus did get a pretty good influx of people, and still is where most new players interested in RP are going. Besides, wouldn't it be better if not every role-player on Balmung migrated to the hypothetical official RP server? It means the strain would be divided between two servers and not all lumped onto one.
Though I agree with Liadan, Gilgamesh and Balmung definitely do not need to be on the same data center (though I guess moving one might cause too many issues).