Pros and Cons of Balmung

[Rowe]

I've been on the server roughly four days now and I have not had a single bad interaction with any RP'ers yet. One person /told me my character's armor looked cool, another one /slapped me repeatedly and then we went off leveling together and one kind soul even helped me find the next NPC I needed to talk to in order to continue the main story line. Definitely one of the nicer communities I've been in! I haven't ran into any cons of Balmung yet but I am completely new so I probably just haven't been around long enough. The futas sound troubling.

[Warren Castille]

Pro: Balmung has been an established RP spot since the game launched.

Con: Balmung has been an established RP spot since the game launched.

 

To echo what a lot of people have said already, Balmung's got RP in spades. With a pretty diverse population of EU and NA, and spread across many timelines therein, you can probably find roleplay somewhere in the world nearly around the clock.

 

...it also means that there are more than a handful of characters who have been roleplaying here for years. Balmung is a Legacy server, so not only do you have some people who've been RPing here since the relaunch in 2013, but there are some still roleplaying the same characters from the 1.0 release. There's a lot of history here; Friendships and rivalries, events and happening. Lots of longstanding stuff.

 

The comparison to high school is somewhat accurate, if only because starting here fresh is the equivalent to transferring into new classes mid-semester. It's not necessarily going to be comfortable, smooth or pretty.

 

Consider that we're all here for the same reason, though. People roleplaying in public are more often than not open to people joining them. If you're not so bold as to waltz into a scene, try asking in tells first. The many events on the calendar aren't listed there to show anyone what they're missing: Event hosts want people to attend! That's why they get hosted.

 

Don't feel too uncomfortable. Everyone was new once.

[ɴᴘᴄ]

Hello everyone! I know that obviously this is a very Balmung and Gilgamesh-focused website since those are the main RP servers, however I was wondering what your Pros and Cons for Balmung would be? I am considering making an alt to transfer there but I just want to basically know a little of what to expect before I spend the money. Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

I ended up moving and deleting my RP characters from Balmung, leaving just an old legacy character. The main reason was a lack of diversity. All FFXIV Worlds are skewed against certain races, but Balmung takes the NA average and completely inverts it. Based on December Lodestone data, 32% of all characters >Lv20 are either Miqo'te or Au Ra females. That's one in three... among almost 30000 characters.

 

While I grant it's a fantasy game not fully tailored to Western sensibilities, and it's a flawed game that is nonetheless fun to play in many respects, the demographics of Balmung made no sense in the context of Eorzea's lore and were so boring to me that I tired of seeking out the kind of content I wanted.

 

Judging by your avatar, this is not a problem for you, but it is a point some may want to consider.

 

In any case, best of luck to you.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Hello everyone! I know that obviously this is a very Balmung and Gilgamesh-focused website since those are the main RP servers, however I was wondering what your Pros and Cons for Balmung would be? I am considering making an alt to transfer there but I just want to basically know a little of what to expect before I spend the money. Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

I ended up moving and deleting my RP characters from Balmung, leaving just an old legacy character. The main reason was a lack of diversity. All FFXIV Worlds are skewed against certain races, but Balmung takes the NA average and completely inverts it. Based on December Lodestone data, 32% of all characters >Lv20 are either Miqo'te or Au Ra females. That's one in three... among almost 30000 characters.

 

While I grant it's a fantasy game not fully tailored to Western sensibilities, and it's a flawed game that is nonetheless fun to play in many respects, the demographics of Balmung made no sense in the context of Eorzea's lore and were so boring to me that I tired of seeking out the kind of content I wanted.

 

Judging by your avatar, this is not a problem for you, but it is a point some may want to consider.

 

In any case, best of luck to you.

 

There's an issue with those statistics.

 

They report on characters created. Not characters logged in. Or characters most actively used.

 

When 2.0 came out, nearly everyone I knew had a male Miqo'te because that was the shiny new thing. (Female Roegadyn too, but people wanted cutesy races :

 

At the same time, people should be able to play the race/gender they want. The game lore gives us what the world expects, but that can't adjust what the players want.

[LiadansWhisper]

I ended up moving and deleting my RP characters from Balmung, leaving just an old legacy character. The main reason was a lack of diversity. All FFXIV Worlds are skewed against certain races, but Balmung takes the NA average and completely inverts it. Based on December Lodestone data, 32% of all characters >Lv20 are either Miqo'te or Au Ra females. That's one in three... among almost 30000 characters.

 

While I grant it's a fantasy game not fully tailored to Western sensibilities, and it's a flawed game that is nonetheless fun to play in many respects, the demographics of Balmung made no sense in the context of Eorzea's lore and were so boring to me that I tired of seeking out the kind of content I wanted.

 

Judging by your avatar, this is not a problem for you, but it is a point some may want to consider.

 

In any case, best of luck to you.

 

So...what you're saying is...Miqo'te and Auri girls ruin your immersion?

 

[LiadansWhisper]

There's an issue with those statistics.

 

They report on characters created. Not characters logged in. Or characters most actively used.

 

When 2.0 came out, nearly everyone I knew had a male Miqo'te because that was the shiny new thing. (Female Roegadyn too, but people wanted cutesy races :< ). Just like now, we've got a mass surge of Au Ra from 3.0. If additional races are added, you can sure as bet good money there will be a huge influx of people who fantasia over to it.

 

At the same time, people should be able to play the race/gender they want. The game lore gives us what the world expects, but that can't adjust what the players want.

 

Yep. Technically I am contributing to the statistics because I have a Miqo'te alt I created to tend the garden in a friend's FC (who has never been actively played, mind you) and a Lalafell alt who I made as a joke but might someday play. :lol:

 

Edit: Also, OP, I'm not sure that anyone cares all that much about ERP. I know that certain people are saying that it's "heavily sitgmatized," but in truth, most people really don't give a shit about what other people do in the privacy of their whispers or party chat (or their houses). Just like in real life, most people understand that it's no one else's business.

[Warren Castille]

In fairness, SE has stated that miqo'te are supposed to be something of a rarity and that no one in Eorzea is very familiar with Au Ra.

 

This was pretty stupid to do, given what they know about FFXI's demographics.

[Branson Thorne]

In fairness, SE has stated that miqo'te are supposed to be something of a rarity

And yet they threw in tons of them as NPCs.

[LiadansWhisper]

In fairness, SE has stated that miqo'te are supposed to be something of a rarity

And yet they threw in tons of them as NPCs.

 

I think that goes back to Warren's statement that it was a pretty stupid move on their part.

[Dat Oni]

In fairness, SE has stated that miqo'te are supposed to be something of a rarity and that no one in Eorzea is very familiar with Au Ra.

 

This was pretty stupid to do, given what they know about FFXI's demographics.

 

Make anything a rarity and everyone will want to play it. Nothing wrong with that, and hell, if you play it off as if the people you don't interact with don't exist in your personal canon, technically, you're just as rare as they said.

 

What I take issue with is when people get all confrontational when the devs stick to what they said so they can feel justified in playing it. It's weird, how, in trying to be unique or special, they try to make it so nothing can be. 

 

Play what you want and have fun with it, sheesh.

[Burd]

Hello everyone! I know that obviously this is a very Balmung and Gilgamesh-focused website since those are the main RP servers, however I was wondering what your Pros and Cons for Balmung would be? I am considering making an alt to transfer there but I just want to basically know a little of what to expect before I spend the money. Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

I ended up moving and deleting my RP characters from Balmung, leaving just an old legacy character. The main reason was a lack of diversity. All FFXIV Worlds are skewed against certain races, but Balmung takes the NA average and completely inverts it. Based on December Lodestone data, 32% of all characters >Lv20 are either Miqo'te or Au Ra females. That's one in three... among almost 30000 characters.

 

While I grant it's a fantasy game not fully tailored to Western sensibilities, and it's a flawed game that is nonetheless fun to play in many respects, the demographics of Balmung made no sense in the context of Eorzea's lore and were so boring to me that I tired of seeking out the kind of content I wanted.

 

Judging by your avatar, this is not a problem for you, but it is a point some may want to consider.

 

In any case, best of luck to you.

 

I'm putting the blame on Square for the Miqo'te population. If you're going to declare in the lore that a particular race is uncommon/rare, don't make it a playable race. You can't expect players not to roll them, especially when that race was designed to have such a high appeal to the target audience. You also have to account for the non-RPers who make up a good chunk of that population and are going to roll a cat girl/boy regardless of what the lore says. So there will be lots of them running around. It's unavoidable, so I really don't take issue with it.

[Sylastair]

Hello everyone! I know that obviously this is a very Balmung and Gilgamesh-focused website since those are the main RP servers, however I was wondering what your Pros and Cons for Balmung would be? I am considering making an alt to transfer there but I just want to basically know a little of what to expect before I spend the money. Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

I ended up moving and deleting my RP characters from Balmung, leaving just an old legacy character. The main reason was a lack of diversity. All FFXIV Worlds are skewed against certain races, but Balmung takes the NA average and completely inverts it. Based on December Lodestone data, 32% of all characters >Lv20 are either Miqo'te or Au Ra females. That's one in three... among almost 30000 characters.

 

While I grant it's a fantasy game not fully tailored to Western sensibilities, and it's a flawed game that is nonetheless fun to play in many respects, the demographics of Balmung made no sense in the context of Eorzea's lore and were so boring to me that I tired of seeking out the kind of content I wanted.

 

Judging by your avatar, this is not a problem for you, but it is a point some may want to consider.

 

In any case, best of luck to you.

 

I'm putting the blame on Square for the Miqo'te population. If you're going to declare in the lore that a particular race is uncommon/rare, don't make it a playable race. You can't expect players not to roll them, especially when that race was designed to have such a high appeal to the target audience. You also have to account for the non-RPers who make up a good chunk of that population and are going to roll a cat girl/boy regardless of what the lore says. So there will be lots of them running around. It's unavoidable, so I really don't take issue with it.

This brings up an interesting question though, while some may choose to leave for the sake of immersion, have others begun to ignore or 'forget' that piece of lore or justify it with headcannons as to why we see so many more than there should be? This question isn't really in line with this thread, but I think an interesting discussion nonetheless.

[FreelanceWizard]

This brings up an interesting question though, while some may choose to leave for the sake of immersion, have others begun to ignore or 'forget' that piece of lore or justify it with headcannons as to why we see so many more than there should be? This question isn't really in line with this thread, but I think an interesting discussion nonetheless.

 

I know I'm not helping with being on-topic and all, but it's worth noting that PCs are tiny percentage of the overall characters that exist in Eorzea. That two particular "rare" races may be over-represented in this set isn't really non-compliant with lore; it actually indicates that there's a selection bias there that makes PCs not representative of the population. Given that PCs are largely class-wielding doers of derring-do, I think it's safe to say they're already not representative of the population. I'd also note that you can have a rare event happen in a larger population without throwing off the overall statistics, and that a fair coin can flip heads five times in a row without being an unfair coin. There's your explanation; no headcanon is required.

 

To the original topic, I think most of the pros and cons have already been stated. I can't underscore enough, though, the difficulty of getting onto Balmung. Yes, you can blow $18 for a server transfer, but you'd best make sure you have all of your alts already created or you'll find yourself stuck should you ever want to play a different character. One con (or, I suppose to me, a pro) that I didn't see mentioned is that, because of the large RP population on Balmung, there's no single unified "community" of RP. While Balmung is well-represented on the RPC and, so I'm told, Tumblr, there's a pretty large set of RPers who don't use either of those things. This is a pro in that there's no "community standards" to attempt to enforce specific views on RP, and in that you can, with some searching, find whatever RP you like; it's a con if you would prefer a more tightly-knit RP community where stories interconnect much more.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

This brings up an interesting question though, while some may choose to leave for the sake of immersion, have others begun to ignore or 'forget' that piece of lore or justify it with headcannons as to why we see so many more than there should be? This question isn't really in line with this thread, but I think an interesting discussion nonetheless.

 

I just assume what we see in game is only a small fraction of what would actually be available. A city that could be ran through in a matter of minutes would be a pretty small city, after all.

 

So...sure, we see a lot of "rare" races in our playtime, but there's likely far, far more of the more "common" races to fill it out in the background.

[111]

This brings up an interesting question though, while some may choose to leave for the sake of immersion, have others begun to ignore or 'forget' that piece of lore or justify it with headcannons as to why we see so many more than there should be? This question isn't really in line with this thread, but I think an interesting discussion nonetheless.

 

I just assume what we see in game is only a small fraction of what would actually be available. A city that could be ran through in a matter of minutes would be a pretty small city, after all.

 

So...sure, we see a lot of "rare" races in our playtime, but there's likely far, far more of the more "common" races to fill it out in the background.

You can look at things like the ARR cinematic, which has what appears to be thousands of soldiers fighting.

 

The actual scale of things is much larger, but in order to make the world fit on a PS3, some sacrifices had to be made.

[Faye]

Cons:

 

- Occasional short login queues

- Housing is full/overly expensive

- Difficult to join without transferring

- Difficult to make alts here without transferring

- Community is large and established, so if you're coming here expecting to make a big name for yourself on the server with minimal effort, good luck.

- Big population means more people to hate

 

Pros:

 

- Less gold spam/bots than other servers

- Large, active, established RP community

- Plenty of linkshells and FC's to choose from

- Lots of community events and open RP

- Big population means more people to love

 

Mod edit: Disruptive/off-topic commentary removed. Please stay on topic, thank you!

[Kage]

I know that I'm not posting a list of pros and cons, other people have gone on to describe that enough.

 

Think of joining Balmung as joining a new place of work. Perhaps I was just -too privileged- when I went to high school but the comparisons are just laughable to me.

 

You are always going to gravitate towards a specific group of friends. You're going to be friendly with a very large group of people but you cannot just hang out with each and every single other person. What it is is personal dissatisfaction. You want -that- person or -that- group to be your close friend or your tight-knit family. Unfortunately, that isn't always going to be the case. It's human nature, not all of us will perfectly jive with one another.

 

Most people are not going to go on a personal smear vendetta campaign unless you've actually wronged them* (tumblr mobs aside and these have been in very specific cases). You do not harass a player. You do not act like a creeper. You don't do that? Good, you have no need to worry about having your name besmirched. No one really wants to pursue drama; it takes way too much energy to be that negative. Very few cases out of the multitudes of people there are on Balmung. It's just that because you have lots of people you will get lots of types.

[Maril]

/Modhat on

 

 

Please keep the tone decent in the thread. I am going to do some cleaning to remove off-topic and disruptive posts. 

 

/Modhat off

[Edda]

Pros:

 

- Less gold spam/bots than other servers

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned more often.

 

Remember back at launch when, if you left shout chat on, when you ported in to Ul'dah, your chat box would be inundated with 60km/s gold bot spam? Back then you had to manually blacklist them too, and there was no system in place to curtail chat spam. I remember making it my VOCATION to go out and kill bots in the field with my crafty tricks.

 

These days you see a pack of bots and think "Hm wow, Balmung must have been open for about 5 minutes at some point this past week" and then forget about it.

 

Funnily enough, this pro for us is also a pro for the gold farmers. They can basically charge whatever they want for gil on Balmung - seriously, go compare server prices if you find the time. It's hilarious.

[111]

Pros:

 

- Less gold spam/bots than other servers

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned more often.

 

Remember back at launch when, if you left shout chat on, when you ported in to Ul'dah, your chat box would be inundated with 60km/s gold bot spam? Back then you had to manually blacklist them too, and there was no system in place to curtail chat spam. I remember making it my VOCATION to go out and kill bots in the field with my crafty tricks.

 

These days you see a pack of bots and think "Hm wow, Balmung must have been open for about 5 minutes at some point this past week" and then forget about it.

 

Funnily enough, this pro for us is also a pro for the gold farmers. They can basically charge whatever they want for gil on Balmung - seriously, go compare server prices if you find the time. It's hilarious.

On the other hand prices are a lot lower here. Things that sell for 99gil here are 5-10x that on servers like Gilgamesh. 

 

So things seem to be better all around economy wise (unless you gather)

[Kage]

Pros:

 

- Less gold spam/bots than other servers

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned more often.

 

Remember back at launch when, if you left shout chat on, when you ported in to Ul'dah, your chat box would be inundated with 60km/s gold bot spam? Back then you had to manually blacklist them too, and there was no system in place to curtail chat spam. I remember making it my VOCATION to go out and kill bots in the field with my crafty tricks.

 

These days you see a pack of bots and think "Hm wow, Balmung must have been open for about 5 minutes at some point this past week" and then forget about it.

 

Funnily enough, this pro for us is also a pro for the gold farmers. They can basically charge whatever they want for gil on Balmung - seriously, go compare server prices if you find the time. It's hilarious.

On the other hand prices are a lot lower here. Things that sell for 99gil here are 5-10x that on servers like Gilgamesh. 

 

So things seem to be better all around economy wise (unless you gather)

 

Think Edda meant RMT gil. Like, people paying real money for gil?

 

Cause yeah Sounsyy has mentioned the Hyperion prices for stuff and how Balmung is much cheaper.

[Caspar]

Balmung is indeed way cheaper. Stuff doesn't get crafted as often, especially RP favorite glamor itens, and they end up being rare and quite a bit marked up on Hyp.

[Edda]

Yes, it is an odd situation to say the least.

 

Balmung's in-game item prices are relatively cheap, due to being a massive server with healthy activity in each section of the economy - RPers buy items that would be seen as more of a commodity on other servers.

 

But because it's such a massive server and now near-impossible to get into, RMT prices for Balmung are absolutely ridiculous compared to other servers.

 

But... since the in-game gil prices are cheap... why buy gil?

 

Housing.

 

Yep, that's it.

[Delilah Scythewood]

Yes, it is an odd situation to say the least.

 

Balmung's in-game item prices are relatively cheap, due to being a massive server with healthy activity in each section of the economy - RPers buy items that would be seen as more of a commodity on other servers.

 

But because it's such a massive server and now near-impossible to get into, RMT prices for Balmung are absolutely ridiculous compared to other servers.

 

But... since the in-game gil prices are cheap... why buy gil?

 

Housing.

 

Yep, that's it.

Considering there's sub-reddits for house buying and some people are willing to fork over 30 million+ for a small (not to mention what they'll fork over for a medium), it's very likely. Especially if they can't find or get a house in the area they want I'm sure they'll just spend the gil on other things.

 

Which can some times crash markets, then stuff gets relisted at differing prices that would otherwise be ridiculous, and so on and so forth.

 

We're both lucky to have the server economy we do and also very unfortunate.

[C'kayah Polaali]

Honestly, if the housing scarcity problem can be solved (Instanced housing? Dynamic creation of wards ala LOTRO?), the bottom would drop out of the RMT industry on Balmung. Like Edda and Lili both say, it's pretty much solely about housing right now. With very few exceptions, there's nothing else that's out of the range of your average person with a max level character.