Balmung Transfer Restriction Megathread

[Sig]

Unfortunately, we are unable to openly discuss and and critique the concept of designating another "unofficial" RP server.  The thread on this forum does not contain an option for users to select that no alternative unofficial should be designated.  The member who posted the thread has refused via PM request to supplement the poll to include that option, and the moderation staff has closed all threads and prohibited the discussion of opposing another "unofficial" server designation.  Opening a new thread is the only remaining way to address a critical issue relevant to a poll that has been opened for a two-day period only.

 

If any member of the moderator staff believes this thread should be closed, I respectfully request that Nero and several other moderators make that decision as a collective, and with the understanding that you are censoring a valid viewpoint and demonstrating clear bias. 

 

Fragmenting the Balmung RP community across servers could be detrimental to the long-term health of FFXIV’s roleplay community, and all RP should be consolidated on Balmung.

 

Roleplayers depend on large, vibrant, and centralized hubs to provide the great number of RP opportunities, contacts, and types of roleplay.  Server selection should not be an artificial barrier that limits RP. 

 

Without a centralized hub, RPers struggle to find roleplay that suits their unique tastes and preferences, and the amount of roleplay in general drastically declines.  All prior attempts to establish an alternative RP server have resulted in little more than homogeneous 20-50 person RP communities that offer little in terms of public RP, open world RP, and diverse types of RP.  Please understand that those types of communities are severely limited in scope of RP, content, frequency of RP, and generally taper off after a few months, rendering everyone’s efforts wasted. 

 

RPers need /one/ large, diverse, and central RP hub (Balmung), or RP ends up more about scrounging up participants than the actual content.  Stagnation is the bane of roleplay communities.

 

It would be unfortunate to see great RP'ers expend tremendous time and effort trying to form yet another tiny enclave in the middle of nowhere, and watch that community remain small, homogenous, and eventually decline. RP'ers need to stick together for the sake of quality RP, man.  

 

We need to bring it in for a giant Balmung group hug.  No alternative unofficial RP should be designated, and RPers should take action to consolidate RP on Balmung while pressuring SE to lift the transfer restrictions.

[Kylin]

Most of your points have already been addressed ad nauseum...

 

We get it. People want everyone to stick together on Balmung and sing kumbaya. Great. Only one problem. Balmung is closed. Nobody gets in. No new characters, no transfers, no nothing. It will remain closed for a period anywhere between 2 months to several years. We have no idea. In the meantime, there are RPers who have nowhere to go.

 

What is your solution? Keep pressuring SE like we've been doing since 2010 with no results? Is that it???

[Sig]

Most of your points have already been addressed ad nauseum...

 

We get it. People want everyone to stick together on Balmung and sing kumbaya. Great. Only one problem. Balmung is closed. Nobody gets in. No new characters, no transfers, no nothing. It will remain closed for a period anywhere between 2 months to several years. We have no idea. In the meantime, there are RPers who have nowhere to go.

 

What is your solution? Keep pressuring SE like we've been doing since 2010 with no results? Is that it???

 

The solution is to put as much pressure on SE as possible to lift the server restriction or finally give us a official designated RP server.  Fragmenting our community is /not/ the solution to this problem.

[Nero]

Okay, everyone, play nice this time.

 

Rule violations in this thread from this point forward will earn you a warning. Anything further may include temporary suspension of posting rights and up to a temporary ban if the violation is egregious enough.

 

FYI: No post or thread has been removed because of the nature of the opinion (unless it's clearly something remove-worthy like...racism or something. Which hasn't happened yet). Posts or threads are removed for rule violations or for being off-topic in relation to the thread.

[Sig]

The voting poll should be supplemented (like the one on Tumblr) to include an option to not designate another unofficial RP server.  The OP of the poll (who apparently now holds the power to determine what procedures will be used to designate a new RP server [where was that vote?]) has refused a request to supplement the poll.  Members of the RPC community should have the right to select that option.

 

This should be a sign that the poll itself should not be viewed as a decision of the RPC community and is procedurally defective. 

 

Nero, if it is appropriate - please move this post to the voting poll thread.

 

Mod edit: No posting PMs without the express consent of both users.

[Kilieit]

Most of your points have already been addressed ad nauseum...

 

We get it. People want everyone to stick together on Balmung and sing kumbaya. Great. Only one problem. Balmung is closed. Nobody gets in. No new characters, no transfers, no nothing. It will remain closed for a period anywhere between 2 months to several years. We have no idea. In the meantime, there are RPers who have nowhere to go.

 

What is your solution? Keep pressuring SE like we've been doing since 2010 with no results? Is that it???

 

The solution is to put as much pressure on SE as possible to lift the server restriction or finally give us a official designated RP server.  Fragmenting our community is /not/ the solution to this problem.

 

We need to solve this problem as soon as possible because it is causing issues for roleplayers today. SE doesn't exactly have a great track record of listening to Balmung customers regarding server concerns (see: we still have no new apartments despite them saying they could easily be generated). We cannot afford to wait around for them to maybe or maybe not listen to something that some people on one hugely overpopulated server are saying.

 

You're suggesting we place all our efforts into something with close-to-zero guarantee of any payoff at all, let alone what we actually want; when we could be placing those efforts into something with a 50/50 chance of either being something kinda good for a few months, or something great in the long run.

 

You have far too much faith in Square Enix and far too little faith in the wider community. And this is from the person who spent 2000 words further back in the thread detailing all the pitfalls they thought the alternative community efforts might fall into.

[Arrelaine]

...you do realize we have to make another, secondary unofficial RP server now. Balmung is done. Kaput, locked. No new people are getting in, and depending on us and our capabilities to balance out our population, for a long, long time. We will get no new people, period. No new alts.

 

The majority of roleplayers understand we have to make a secondary server now. We might do it with much reluctance, but it has to be done now. SE is not going to cater to us, they didn't when we first asked for a designated RP server, they won't now.

[Cassandra]

Most of your points have already been addressed ad nauseum...

 

We get it. People want everyone to stick together on Balmung and sing kumbaya. Great. Only one problem. Balmung is closed. Nobody gets in. No new characters, no transfers, no nothing. It will remain closed for a period anywhere between 2 months to several years. We have no idea. In the meantime, there are RPers who have nowhere to go.

 

What is your solution? Keep pressuring SE like we've been doing since 2010 with no results? Is that it???

 

The solution is to put as much pressure on SE as possible to lift the server restriction or finally give us a official designated RP server.  Fragmenting our community is /not/ the solution to this problem.

 

And I can guarantee you will receive no response whatsoever. Despite Balmung's popularity, we do not hold majority opinion. Other servers are ecstatic because their servers won't feel the burden our massive population places on the whole datacenter. Furthermore, it only effects us and not the overwhelming playerbase at large. Simply put, Square Enix doesn't care what a handful of roleplayers think. Callous? Perhaps. But it's the truth. If you are determined the roleplay community must all congregate, then your only option is to choose a new server-- preferably one slighted for free transfer perks once that is announced and convince the entirety of Balmung's roleplayers to switch servers en masse.

 

I wish you well in that endeavour.

[Nero]

From a business standpoint, Square Enix's best option is to do nothing. In this day and age, it takes some truly monumental and consistent fuck-ups (see: Wildstar) to change things that don't affect the majority of the customer base.

 

Even if there was some kind of mass boycott or something, a few thousand (if even that many) wahoos playing pretend on the Internet is less than a drop in the bucket for Final Fantasy XIV. The likelihood that our suggestions have made a blip on the English CR's radars is miniscule.

 

I will continue beating the "RP-tagged server" drum for as long as it is necessary, but it pays to be realistic about things as well.

[Mercer]

I've had some questions that I haven't answered since the thread has been locked. I'll happily answer them now.

 

To be completely blunt, there are RPers that want to RP. They can not RP. There has been little information on where they can go to find RP while Balmung is locked and what there has been was hard to find. 

 

Through the discussion in this thread and the thread I started, I have seen a large amount of people wanting to help. They want to put something into action right now, advertise that they are here, have always been here and want to give these lost RPers a home.

 

To say that all RPers should stay on Balmung is a nice theory, but the reality is that is no longer an option. And that's the keyword here, options. There has always been other servers where RP has lived, but it's been drowned out by Balmung for a very long time. This is an incredible opportunity for these servers to stand up and get the attention they deserve.

 

Will the new RP community survive after Balmung has reopened? I don't know. Will Balmung reopen? I don't know that either. What I do know that there are people right now that can't play the game how they like so I want to give them new avenues to continue to play. That is the purpose of the threads I've started, not for people to sit on their hands and wait for the opportunity to rejoin, but to find them the opportunity right now, right this minute to play the game how they want with an informed decision.

[Dravus]

Balmung isn't working for everybody. I intend to stay, mostly due to the presence of friends that I have made whilst here but there's a myriad of reasons that have been put forward by other players as to why they wish to take their leave.

 

That needs to be respected. If someone in Europe, for instance, cannot play the game smoothly any longer due to a sudden increase in latency then they have every right to depart if they feel if it is the best option available to them. Others may simply tire of how bloated Balmung has become. Then, of course, there's players who simply cannot get on the server at all due to the current restrictions.

 

It's pretty selfish for people to try and sabotage efforts to create alternative options to what has become quite the behemoth. They might not be successful in the end but not trying at all would be foolish. There's pockets of role-players on other servers already. Small, yes, but that doesn't mean they can't expand - and even if they do not their mere existence is proof enough that not everybody wants to be on Balmung.

 

Ultimately, though, character creation has been restricted on this server for a long time and now, more recently, the restriction has advanced to preventing transfers to Balmung altogether. Which is a pretty clear indication as to what the developers stance is on the matter.

 

Balmung is also an unofficial role-playing realm. It isn't a realm devoted solely to role-play - and in the unlikely event that a server is created for that purpose then it's almost certainly going to be a new server altogether which means that the community will still be split by those who want to stay and those who wish to leave.

 

There's also plenty of people - myself included - who are invested in the game as a whole and do not wish to see PvE and PvP focused players discouraged from playing on Balmung. I would leave pretty quickly if they decided to depart because role-play alone isn't enough to keep me on a specific server.

[Kage]

The only way to consolidate the community to one server is to have everyone choose a low population server such as Mateus for RP and then all of the communities on Balmung+others go to the designated server. That is honestly the only way because I can say with 99.9% belief that Square Enix will not a) create a new server for Aether and b) will not ever put resources into supporting Balmung or Gilgamesh.

 

This is based on the active populations and the restrictions they've set on top of their decision to add worlds for Chaos. Chaos has a fairly even distribution across all of their worlds. Aether is not because of Balmung and Gilgamesh. Gaia has Bahamut that's like a mini Gilgamesh. Mana has Chocobo, Mandragora, and Shinryu. Tonberry isn't Elemental's very big problem child yet and neither is Leviathan because the rest of their data center is fairly even and not nearing the soft limit.

 

You're better off deciding whether or not Balmung being locked indefinitely (until it sees at least 4k leave) or a low-population server being designated (by Roleplayers and/or Square Enix) as the new RP world is going to make you leave or not. Cause in my opinion, that's where it's headed. Those six servers seem closed until their populations drop down to maybe 7-8k.

[Max]

It's not like SE closed Balmung for shits and giggles. If the server's reach critical population (which affects the gameplay for everyone already on the server, potentially the whole datacenter come Stormblood), then there's really nothing we should do in terms of pressuring SE to unlock it.

 

I totally get that we want new RPers, friends, and whoever else to come. I think it REALLY sucks. But if the server's a balloon filled with water ready to burst, then rallying petitions to fill it with more water is kind of, to me, inconsiderate?

 

And c'mon, let's be real. RPers aren't the only ones on Balmung. Imagine the backlash we'd receive (even unjustified) if they rescinded the anti-transfers due to all the moaning and the datacenter becomes crash city when the new expansion drops.

[Momo]

From a business standpoint, Square Enix's best option is to do nothing. In this day and age, it takes some truly monumental and consistent fuck-ups (see: Wildstar) to change things that don't affect the majority of the customer base.

 

Even if there was some kind of mass boycott or something, a few thousand (if even that many) wahoos playing pretend on the Internet is less than a drop in the bucket for Final Fantasy XIV. The likelihood that our suggestions have made a blip on the English CR's radars is miniscule.

 

I will continue beating the "RP-tagged server" drum for as long as it is necessary, but it pays to be realistic about things as well.

 

This is also my stance, and I am taking a two-pronged plan to this situation: Firstly, increase and continue visibility for RP community by submitting to the OF and continuous submission of questions for future interviews and live letters, BUT Secondly! Also work together with current community to devise a plan for the immediate future and/or eventuality that this server never opens and no RP server is ever designated, so that future RPers have a reason to play and a sure place to go to begin their character's journey.

 

There is no one answer, and there need not be.

[Nodem]

From a business standpoint, Square Enix's best option is to do nothing. In this day and age, it takes some truly monumental and consistent fuck-ups (see: Wildstar) to change things that don't affect the majority of the customer base.

 

Even if there was some kind of mass boycott or something, a few thousand (if even that many) wahoos playing pretend on the Internet is less than a drop in the bucket for Final Fantasy XIV. The likelihood that our suggestions have made a blip on the English CR's radars is miniscule.

 

I will continue beating the "RP-tagged server" drum for as long as it is necessary, but it pays to be realistic about things as well.

 

Just to bring this graph here...

 

SE wants the servers to look like the EU ones in this graph, and that's why they are getting new worlds. Clearly NA and JP servers are not that way, so we may see locks for a long while, and/or worse case scenario, a server split in which you don't get the option of where you are going. They've done it in the past.

 

While I'd love to see an official RP server, we should know by now it's highly unlikely, or that we'll see it many years from now. (See: RP tag) We need to move now as was mentioned before, because we only have this option to get new RP'ers into the game.

 

Also we, roleplayers, really are a small group when compared to the WHOLE of FFXIV. So SE will look at the entire business, and not just us. We can't expect them to fix what WE consider important if it will hurt the WHOLE.

[Kage]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players. I would love to make sure this is not a world we go to.

[Arrelaine]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

[Kage]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

 

Indeed. I don't want to be on the timeline that happens. I will actively try to make sure it doesn't.

[Mercer]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

 

Indeed. I don't want to be on the timeline that happens. I will actively try to make sure it doesn't.

 

Exactly, the fact is that Balmung could be broken in half and still have healthy communities in both halves is concerning.

[Val]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

 

Indeed. I don't want to be on the timeline that happens. I will actively try to make sure it doesn't.

 

Thirded. People can stomp and get mad all they want, but as stated earlier by many great people, RPers are not a majority in the remote slightest and SE needs to think about their game as a whole. They have no reason to consider making special things for us. The fact that they even remotely add some small things is a kindness. Hell, if I remember correctly, Yoshi didn't even know RP was a thing until someone eventually told him "Hey this is what some of the Western players do."

 

While an RP-only server would be great, or at least one labelled as such, I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Instead of arguing/yelling/fighting with each other or assuming that screaming at the company is going to somehow make them bow down to you or your demands, it's best to just work together to make the transition as effortless as possible. I feel like to expect otherwise is a little insular.

[Cassandra]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

 

This is a doom and gloom perspective. They are not going to essentially pick people at random and force them off Balmung. It's practically guaranteed to be a financial loss as a good chunk of those players will quit. If my friends and I were all split apart with no way of transferring to one server in particularly, I'd unsub immediately. All they will do is keep Balmung locked indefinitely.

[Kage]

I think it is actually a very low possibility and even lower likelihood of them splitting worlds but they do leave that option open in their Worlds Transfer page. As you said though, it is more likely that Balmung will just stay closed until it gets closer to the soft limits.

[Val]

A forced split of Balmung would be a horrible fucking outcome for players.

And if we keep refusing to balance ourselves out, it will happen. At that point, they probably won't even give incentives, maybe reimbursements on housing, but they'll just dump us all in a server.

 

This is a doom and gloom perspective. They are not going to essentially pick people at random and force them off Balmung. It's practically guaranteed to be a financial loss as a good chunk of those players will quit. If my friends and I were all split apart with no way of transferring to one server in particularly, I'd unsub immediately. All they will do is keep Balmung locked indefinitely.

 

Pretty much. It's a win-win for SE. People will threaten to quit and just not. Their forum posts will be ignored and they'll eventually shut up. The server will stay locked. The ones that do quit? They're solving the issue anyway. Others that willingly transfer also help, so one way or another SE gets what they want and people will just have to accept that.

[ShoggMommy]

I think they're trying to avoid having to split the worlds so thus closing. Though if there's a clause it's a possibility. But for the time being we should still try to do our best to help others find a place they can call home.

[Virella]

We convinced them to add the RP tag. That was nothing compared to the uproar being caused now. They may just listen.