Restrictions on housing and servers will be lifted on Feb 20

[Skae]

There is a maintenance on Feb 20.
Once that is finished the moratorium on individuals buying houses will be lifted, and all currently Congested servers will no longer be congested.

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/516c7b25603c44092d792b2a14c2313fb8a9f11b

Time to start preparing for the rush.....

[Gegenji]

I saw this on Discord!
I knew that the housing was going to open up sooner or later (which I'm pretty glad for, there's actually a lot of empty plots in my ward - my neighbors all moved away!)... but I didn't know they were going to open up the Congested servers too...

I'm actually looking forward to the influx of potentially new RPers onto Balmung.

[Aoi Fukiku]

I'm happy they are lifting it. I see it as a possible:

1. SE discovered not enough people weren't leaving and that we were never going to leave but the economy was crashing and they just weren't going to win
2. People on the forums cried loud enough after Gilgamesh got reopened
3. They updated something backend to handle the load

There could be other reasons, these are just the ones that come to mind and I'm fairly certain number 1 has some merit since only like 5,000 people transferred off and we still sit around 20k.

Either way, I welcome the new RPers and low level items on the market!

[Unnamed Mercenary]

My only hope is that things stay open. It'll probably be fine if say, people are making/transferring alts or their friends are joining them on their servers. If we see some sort of massive migration into Balmung, it'll probably crash and/or get locked again shortly after.

Chances are, it's more that the high-end raider population's unsubbed for a bit because they've cleared all the content they want and are geared up well enough until the next patch would come out.

[Skae]

If there is a massive migration to Balmung they will slap back the Congested label sooner rather than later.

Note that they explicitly warn that this can happen if too many people move to a particular server.

 

[Nero]

I'm glad it worked; I had my doubts that the incentives were enough for people on Balmung to transfer.

That said, I can't help but feel that their solution basically ignored the underlying issue of Balmung's congestion. I suppose there's not much to do if they're happy with occasionally re-applying the Congested label, but it'll be something quite annoying for players.

[Skae]

2 hours ago, Nero said:

I'm glad it worked; I had my doubts that the incentives were enough for people on Balmung to transfer.

That said, I can't help but feel that their solution basically ignored the underlying issue of Balmung's congestion. I suppose there's not much to do if they're happy with occasionally re-applying the Congested label, but it'll be something quite annoying for players.

The underlying issue of Balmung's congestion was two-fold:

1) For a long time it was de facto the only RP server - hence all roleplayers went there.

2) Many people (RPers and non-RPers) wanted to play on whichever was the busiest server just because they liked having lots of other people around, or because they wanted the best chance of getting into a raid group.

Right now we have three RP servers - Balmung, Mateus, and Omega.   Establishing Mateus and Omega as viable RP servers would probably not have been possible without Balmung's lockdown - not enough people would have gone there to achieve a critical mass, but with Balmung closed many people had to go elsewhere.  Hopefully not everyone will rush back to Balmung now.

With cross-server DF and PF at least some of the reasons for going to the biggest servers have disappeared.

 

Not much SE could have done to fix these issues since they are really just people being people.

 

[Zanther]

Is nice. I know a few people who've been trying to get on. I've also have a char I was going to bring over but the week I was going to was the week they snuck the lockout on us lol.

Will be nice to see some new blood enter in though, with hopefully some of it on the rp side

[Teadrinker]

This is nice. I've had a few people mention to me about picking up FF so we can play and I had to tell them "Yeah, you can't play on my server though." And they just look at me funny. The server thing really is archaic for a lot of people.

[Verranicus]

People seem to be under the impression that they'll be allowing new characters and not just transfers, which I highly doubt. Don't get your hopes up.

[Tregarde]

Oh, of course, they open Bal after I've already started making friends and laying down plans in Mateus. After I had already resigned myself to never being able to play with the friends I have who are already on Bal.

Damn you, SE! Damn you to the Seven Hells!  ~shakes fist in the air~

 

Oh, but we'll show them. Yes, we will. We'll make Mateus so awesome people will forget about Balmung!  There will be nothing but crickets and tubleweeds to RP with! MUAHAHAHA!

 

By the way... can anyone spare a few million so I can afford a house when they're open?  =P

[Unnamed Mercenary]

2 hours ago, Tregarde said:

By the way... can anyone spare a few million so I can afford a house when they're open?  =P

 

Only on Balmung, I'm afraid.
true story. I'm giving my roommate like 4-5 million so he can buy a house.

[Skae]

4 hours ago, Verranicus said:

People seem to be under the impression that they'll be allowing new characters and not just transfers, which I highly doubt. Don't get your hopes up.

Sort of.  New character creation will be unlocked, but the standard blocking of character creation during periods of high activity will still be there, just like on all other servers.

We will just have to wait and see how often character creation will be open.  Perhaps it will be open most of the time, and perhaps it will be like before the congestion lockdown when character creation on Balmung was only possible for a few moments right after a maintenance.

[Valence]

I guess it's time to go grab the popcorn for a Shirogane release 2.0 redux all over again.

[Xihsa'li Tayuun]

*Evil laughter can be heard form behind a nearby carpenter's workstation.* Yeeeesss... yeeesss..... make all the furniture to sell to new homes....! (  +   v, +)

[Graff Lacroix]

And now, Balmung's been closed since at least 10:00 EST yesterday, and people are getting banned for exploiting a transfer glitch. I was going to make an alt there, but no big deal.

It's just the server almost everyone is on.

Who didn't see this coming? Besides the devs, I mean.
 

 

[Silmanos]

Balmung is actually still unlocked. Transfers are still going through and I have a FC member who made an alt on the server as of 6 AM EST so character creation is also unlocking properly at slow times on the server so I don't know where you are getting that the server is closed again. In addition people were getting banned for exploiting the transfer glitch before the server was opened. These are people who've been transferring to the server before SE removed it from the congested list by forcibly entering Balmung's information by inspecting the elements on the mogstation. Granted SE's security is terrible if something so simple made it around the block it is still something these people should have known better than to do.

[Aoi Fukiku]

Agreed with Silmanos. The server is NOT CLOSED. Not yet anyway. If it was then transfers would be closed as well. You can make characters just like before at early morning hours before people start logging on just like I had to back in 2014 when I woke up for 3 weeks straight around 4am every day to make my first character on Balmung.

 

Also, as Silmanos stated, people abused an exploit in the inspect element on the Mogstation to bypass the restriction and transfer to Balmung. Those people will more then likely be perma banned as they received a 9 day ban which if you ever look at the results, never have been overturned and end up being permanent. So, I'm sure in about 9 days there will be a few more plots opening up of people who bought houses before they got banned. So, keep a eye out.

[Ellavione Bourdeaux]

To echo what others have said. Balmung is still open for new characters and transfers. I think yesterday was the result of everyone rushing to the server to do this, that or the other after the restrictions were removed. The server can however be temporarily restricted due to the number of players logged in at a given time. . . But that's old news. :-)

 

I did notice a new restriction. It seems you are only allowed to great 3 new characters a day. I hit a "new character limit" this morning when attempting to make my 4th alt. So keep that in mind

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Friend of mine added alts around 6AM PST this morning. People will just need to try during the "sweet spot" of NA inactivity, which is like 2AM-6AM PST / 5AM - 9AM EST. ...and then remember to log out because the more people idle/afk in a work, the more they contribute to server locks.

[Stormfalcon]

Managed to create a character on Balmung between 8 and 9AM PST, so some of us are getting through!

[DeletedUser]

Yep, I was able to make an alt at around 3 pm GMT (10 am EST) so definitely not closed!

[Perth]

3 hours ago, Graff Lacroix said:

And now, Balmung's been closed since at least 10:00 EST yesterday, and people are getting banned for exploiting a transfer glitch. I was going to make an alt there, but no big deal.

It's just the server almost everyone is on.

Who didn't see this coming? Besides the devs, I mean.
 

 

I'm not aware of any transfer glitches. Could you go into more detail? Could it be that you might not meet some of the requirements for transferring like the character needing to be three days old? If that may be the case, check em out and hang in tight

Edited February 21, 2018 by Veronisca

[Oroban]

2 hours ago, Veronisca said:

I'm not aware of any transfer glitches. Could you go into more detail? Could it be that you might not meet some of the requirements for transferring like the character needing to be three days old? If that may be the case, check em out and hang in tight

There was an issue with mogstation where the option to transfer to Balmung wasn't actually removed from the shop's functionality, just all of the menus and your ability to select it. I don't know the particulars, but it boiled down to people exploiting the website to get access to the hidden option and transferring despite the server being locked. (afaik it's still open right now, at least for qualifying transfers) They all got permabanned, I think.

[Aoi Fukiku]

47 minutes ago, Oroban said:

There was an issue with mogstation where the option to transfer to Balmung wasn't actually removed from the shop's functionality, just all of the menus and your ability to select it. I don't know the particulars, but it boiled down to people exploiting the website to get access to the hidden option and transferring despite the server being locked. (afaik it's still open right now, at least for qualifying transfers) They all got permabanned, I think.

They did (9 day bans have always turned in to perm)
 

What happened was players who wanted to use the exploit would use the inspect element function on the Mogstation by changing the codes and whatnot. I won't get in to too much detail but just know SE saw it and even though it was a big loophole they failed to fix, players had to MANUALLY try to do this exploit for it to work; thus, doing it on purpose and not by accident by any means.