Anybody Think Its Time For Another Server Merger?

seriously. trying to buy this or that is always frustrating because of stock issues. and just overall low population. no runs ect. considering moving to a more populated server, serusly love Bismarck but its just dead AF now.

Server mergers could be interesting, in many cases it would help overall. I think it could piss off a lot of people though (who lose their character names, for example). Not sure how they handle delivery box issues when doing that as well.

I think it might not help as much as many think because two populations where nobody talks to each other = twice as many people not talking to each other. Gotta socialize, be a leader, make a linkshell, yell, and put stuff together. Make posts on ffxiah, reddit, and other places trying to recruit people if you want to see things happening.

On my server, also a tiny population one, we pretty much always just networked for crafting stuff. You need to know somebody in most cases because nobody's going to stock the AH with items that sit for months before selling, it's just not economical. If you know someone who can make the item though, it's a lot easier for both parties.

I don't bother crafting anything at this point unless someone asks me for it, because it's annoying to have 4 AHs full of hundreds of millions of gil worth of items that have to be re-listed every 10 days because nobody wants to buy them.

The best merges that ever happened were the ones players created themselves, Bahamut and Asura were both created by players moving there in an organized manner.

Bahamut is an old school server with a higher pop, it's very group based and you're expected to join a linkshell. Asura is a modern community server with a big population, lots of solo players, mercs selling everything possible and well geared pugs.

Bahamut is more inline with every other server and to what XI is supposed to be, just with a bigger population. Asura is a huge culture shock for people from other servers, but people who like what it offers it will really like it.

another idea that would fix a lot of issues is unifying the AH between all servers? that way crafters from the popular servers get more customers and people on dead servers can have inventory.
also. after being on a bunch of private servers. the more AH slots defiantly spoiled me on trying to sell items.

i actually tried going to asura years ago myself. and it was a TERRABLE experience.
the general public was just RUDE AF. something as simple as cleveing with a friend in constantly had BLUs run to my pulls and AOE them repeatedly and it wasn't just a 1 off occurrence. asking for help with anything was never successful. never found any helpful LSes. after a week or 2 of that garbage i went to oden and had a MUCH better time. but after a while wanted to farm up more REMA and decided going back home to Bismarck wasn't a bad idea. and indeed it wasn't. at the time. 1.2k-800 was online regularly. now. i would be lucky to see more than 400 on the server at 1 time.

One of the problems seems to be that you want a small server mentality with more people, and that's not how it works. If you're in a spot cleaving and people want that spot, they are not just going to leave and logoff. If you have that mentality on a high pop server, you're not going to do anything cause someone else will come after that person leaves. Similarly, if you want help they are not going to drop everything to help you when you would not do the same for them.

Asura isn't rude, it's just high pop and with a lot of solo players.

Try Bahamut, I think it's more inline with what you seem to want.

As for server slots, there are up and downsides. When people have more AH slots, they tend to list items higher and it causes more inflation (the fear of things being returned with limited slots makes people underlist).

It suck’s when you just can’t buy stuff at AH, but yeah networking is important. The game is slowly moving away from crafting, it’s clear and maybe also an unattended consequence of sortie where half the population spend their entire game time there where Gil has no value. Anyway, I am on a Phoenix (don’t join me my 1+ hour of game time is book) but our AH is consistently full, not a lot of shouts, and difficult to fill sometimes (we randomly shouts for cor/drk and cant get it fill.. go figure) but there’s still TK, a LS that is the opposite of Asura bad fame, take new comers sometime 2 full alliances for alliances event dyna/omen/vagary (obviously not sortie or ody but that SE fault), not an officer there but I enjoy that LS because it’s not elitist.

I can speak about Asura, I’ve been there, it has the broadest highly gear population in proportion of any server. The presence of nyame 25+ was widespread (1 year+ ago I can’t imagine right now), to the point that yes they easily can be picky.

The side merc economy is huge, lots of annoying shouts but also lots of benefits, few example 4M/8k+ dyna RP where you just go afk, pay some 4m and wake up in the morning with your neck RP, an amazing time saver for people that can’t do it all, so 12 M and neck was cap!!
Another example is you go to reisenjima there a bazaar dude buy 1M item and get 1-50, 3 m 1-99 all automated, so great when you like I want this SJ and so forth

Not everything is bad there, granted like it’s so big zone had 400 ppl sometimes, more than your server, lots of ying and yang.

Bahamut doesn’t sounds bad, maybe one day I’ll check it out, people should move more between server, it’s a game enjoy it, you will be burn, used, hustle and so forth but it’s like traveling, new world new people new customs…

At the end of the day, went back to my server and kept throttling along there, and did not regret the experience, try it.

Edit: I forget, I couldn’t stop myself of take a selfie of Gav with “whereisdi” … I am the goat

No

Definitely not. In fact, I'd even have them reopen servers to deal with all the influx of XIV players who are DEFINITELY coming any day now.


Yes, please don't join us. Phoenix is a hellscape, you'd hate it here.

With people being free to go to whatever server they want, why would we want this? If they want a more populated server they can just go to Asura.

it would be preferable to make server transfer free every 3 months. Would even help migrate people out of Asura for a while.

I was asking for this 10 years ago. SE will never do it unless it's absolutely necessary. It makes them more money to keep it the way it is, because players pay for transfers to sell equipment/items from Asura for a lot more on other smaller servers with a sheer lack of high quality crafters.

If there ever comes a day when players stop paying for the service, and server numbers become so low it becomes unplayable, only then would it be considered.

Now what about a central AH for the remaining servers :s

My idea has always been, take about 3-4 of the lowest population servers, and give notice they will be taken offline. And instead of merging those servers into others, you the individual player the choice of which one to go to for free, but you also lock out the higher population ones. On paper, it's a sound idea, but could also go sideways if too many people all choose the same server, unless you put a cap on the number of transfers allowed per server.

The AH isn't designed that way. It was originally coded in the PS2 era, and they can't even add extra slots to sell things on it, nevermind going as far as linking it across servers.

A universal AH solves most of the problems. It's the second best answer. But there's too much money made by server jumpers paying to fix the problem.

Never happen. Before considering the nightmare it would be for them to code.

They stopped doing merges because they saw it lead to more people quitting, merges are awful for a game like XI.

I went through 2 merges and I saw people who I thought would never quit all do so in the months after. Name changes, sudden increased wait times etc.

I agree, there is definitely some damage that comes from a merge. Although, when I lost my original home server of Hades (merged in to Cerberus), the positives became clear within a few weeks. My Dynamis linkshell needed a boost, and we recruited Cerberus players to join our Hades group, and we had a really great run because of it. Had we not merged, it would have gotten tougher to keep numbers up to clear and farm it efficiently.

I think some servers are terribly empty.

But there is a catch. Most server I played during the years were empty during WESTERN time. Every single server I visoted always had a jump in population during the time of japaneses playtime.

And probably thats one factor to keep things like that. Maybe we could merge 2 or even 3 servers if we were only considering western players. But given how the game is being very limited on instances given to the players for the current endgame, this could potentially affect negatively that part of population.

Maybe the best thing for western players is to try to pick a new hub thats not Assura, and make it the second home of non-japanese speaker players.

We would welcome them on Cerberus, but it requires a coordinated effort, much like how Asura players did years ago by enticing many players over there. And that would have to be done without resistance, which I highly doubt, because bigger servers want to retain their players.

Asura is the exact opposite.
There are around 5 hours (my prime time, obviously) where the server is a ghost town.
US players are asleep, GMT players are at work and the few JP players left on the server tend to play with other JP, unless desperate.
The US players i get to play with during those hours are the ones that work the nights.
In an ideal world SE would pull out a poll asking player's playtime (NA players) and then share the results so the community can get organized and decide if/where to move.

Or
Hear me out
You DONT merge servers and let people server transfer to the server they want to be on.
If you want to leave your 4k pop server to play on an 8k+ server that isnt Asura, go to Odin or Bahamut. If youre unhappy or bored on 4k Bismarck, you literally have the power to leave at any time.

I never said i agree to merging servers.
There is no point in jumping randomly from server to server.
One could have 10k players but only 1k play when you play.
Or you go to a server with 2k players and 1.5k play during your prime time.
This is something you can't know until you move.

Or
Hear me out
Say the poll shows there are 3k players playing from 5 to 9pm EDT and shows the % of those players for every single server.
That would make the choice of where to jump to a lot easier.

I think people REALLY overestimate the money they're making on server transfers vs subs.

How many people have you met in-game? For me, it's probably a few hundred. Of those, I think fewer than 20 have EVER paid for a server transfer, and fewer than 5 have done it more than once.

Meanwhile, all of them are/were paying more than the server transfer fee, in some cases 3-5x the transfer fee, PER MONTH.

They make probably hundreds or thousands of times more money from sub fees and wardrobes compared to what they make in server transfers. Unless the RMT whales are transferring hundreds of accounts every 3 days and I'm just not aware of it, idk.

Isn't that already what Bahamut is?

Asura = the biggest, with all the caveats we all know about

Bahamut and Odin = Similar population of about 2/3 the size of Asura, but as I understand it doesn't really have the same distinct "Asura vibe". Bahamut has more English speaking players, Odin is much more heavily Japanese. I've had the interesting experience of observing several XIV people who've been playing some XI for the past few months, and they chose Bahamut. Seems like a reasonable choice to me.

IDK, i didt play in Bahamut for a long time.

Odin was the last one I played (nearly 2 years ago) and my impression was that it was majoritarily a japanese server.

This could solve the dev issues. Making sure all servers are balanced but some folks said no and always blamed Asura for their own mistakes. Sure, we like to see more players around and keep the AH restocked but now it's too late for the merges. Devs just don't know what to do with between a popular server and small/dead servers.

They know exactly what to do, is the problem.

Ignore it, let you pay to fix it.

If you are unhappy, you are free to pay them $20 and then another $20 and then another $20

Pretty clear they don't like to lose a single dollar of income, regardless of how transfers stack up to subs.

Look how stingy they are with their FFXIV/FFXI cross-recruitment: you save half a month of sub for one month by playing both. They also made as many restrictions as they could to avoid potentially discounting people who were already paying for both. Like it or not, that's their management style.

And no, no server merge. If people aren't willing to pay $18 to transfer then they don't want a larger population that badly. I feel like a lot of the desire for merging is coming from wanting to force acquaintances that don't want to transfer to come with you.

Eiryl is right. I have seen some players paid to transfer to Asura just to buy stuff from the AH then paid again back to their servers. That's silly.

Really is. Often done to get things cheaper and is hence effecively RMT too. Easier and cheaper to buy gil, but that would be "morally wrong" compared to paying 5x as much to SE to get things cheaper.