New to FFXIV With Questions About Servers & Activity

[QuietKnight]

Hi, I'm new to FFXIV, and I've some questions about activity and servers, but first some context and information.

 

I, personally, have been roleplaying for many years now, and have done so on a variety of formats. In MMOs, I've roleplayed on WoW for about four years or so, however I'm branching out and looking for an alternative. I've devised a basic class / race combination from looking over parts of the lore (in essence, an Elezen Dragoon of Ishgard), and I'm looking to get started!

 

But, I'm also from Australia and my timezone is wack (UTC+10) so I wanted to see if there was any information about the various demographics of the roleplay servers, and when they were acceptably active? Are there any groups that are composed of Australian, oceanic roleplayers, or people active at midnight / the wee hours of the morning? I formerly roleplayed on Wyrmrest Accord and Moon Guard on WoW, and found that they were of acceptable activity during Australian evenings / afternoons, and I've read that the server 'Balmug' has a lot of players, but I just wanted to be quite certain if it was viable to actually RP considering timezone differences.

 

Thanks!

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Hello!

 

While the larger RPer-populated servers like Balmung and Mateus (both are Crystal Datacenter) should still have a pretty decent number of people online, things like events might be a little more tricky depending on how they fit into your schedule. I have known a few Australian players who managed ot make it work and found the RP they were looking for!

 

One thing to note though is that connecting to the North American datacenter may not give you the most pleasurable gaming experience. Certainly better now that it's on the west coast of the USA instead of the east like pre-Stormblood, but the Japanese DCs would probably have the lowest latency, which aren't quite as RP heavy. I'd recommend making a character on a Crystal server to poke around Balmung and Mateus to see what's available. The RPC also has some imported calendar feeds to list events. (The full calendar pages show a lot more information than the sidebar, which just grabs the most recent upcoming ones.)

[QuietKnight]

5 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

Hello!

 

While the larger RPer-populated servers like Balmung and Mateus (both are Crystal Datacenter) should still have a pretty decent number of people online, things like events might be a little more tricky depending on how they fit into your schedule. I have known a few Australian players who managed ot make it work and found the RP they were looking for!

 

One thing to note though is that connecting to the North American datacenter may not give you the most pleasurable gaming experience. Certainly better now that it's on the west coast of the USA instead of the east like pre-Stormblood, but the Japanese DCs would probably have the lowest latency, which aren't quite as RP heavy. I'd recommend making a character on a Crystal server to poke around Balmung and Mateus to see what's available. The RPC also has some imported calendar feeds to list events. (The full calendar pages show a lot more information than the sidebar, which just grabs the most recent upcoming ones.)

 

I'm unfortunately aware of the lag, but I've had to deal with 200+ ping in tonnes of other games before. I doubt I'll even notice it. I played on Wyrmrest Accord and Moon Guard on WoW, both North American servers for a time, and am also unfortunately aware that events are going to be very difficult to attend or create.

 

Regardless, knowing that the servers should have people active during my hours is very good, and makes me a lot less apprehensive about levelling a character (I managed to actually create one on Balmug, I've heard that's a non-trivial task.)

[Skae]

It used to be hard to impossible to create a character on Balmung, but nowadays it is probably not much more difficult to do so on Balmung than on any other well-populated server.

That means it will likely be closed for character creation during peak hours (evenings NA time), but during off-peak hours it will usually be possible to create a character.

 

With the establishment of additional RP servers (Mateus and Omega) as well as the incentives from SE to move away from overpopulated servers, Balmung is no longer quite as overcrowded as it used to be.

 

Balmung used to be THE roleplaying server, with roleplayers from all timezones playing there.  While some people have moved away I expect you can still find some RP there during all hours even if events will mostly happen during NA evenings.   Those who did move mostly did so either to Mateus, or to Omega for the European players.

Since Balmung and Mateus are in the same datacenter you can also use the world visit system to jump between them to attend events if needed.