FFXIV Stormblood: Please Get Off the Server. Now.
Stormblood launched officially on the 20th, though people who pre-ordered could get in as early as the 16th. I’m really happy I chose to jump ship from a highly populated server to a saner one last month because old gaming buddies weren’t shy about showing off their screenshots of 2k+ queues. Those screenshots brought back really bad memories of WoW’s launch where you’d wait pretty much all week just to log in and play before you were randomly disconnected. Yay, MMORPG launches.
If you’re on FFXIV and you haven’t taken advantage of those world balancing incentives, please do. Seriously. Grab your FC, your friends and just go. Don’t wait. Don’t come home from work and nestle in for a two-hour queue when you could be playing. You deserve better. We all deserve better. Let’s spread the love across the other worlds. I know how difficult it can be to get people to move, but once you do and you manage to talk other people into it, it’s kind of a snowball effect and it’s a beautiful thing.
Balmung has always been the bustling RP (roleplay) hub of FFXIV. It’s also been perpetually locked since launch. You can’t make a new character on Balmung unless you were somehow lucky and snuck in after maintenance. Or, if you had the cash to burn, you could transfer in. That’s no longer something you can do, and so if you want to play with your friends you need to gather them onto a different world altogether. This has always been the genre’s most off-putting trait. Playing with friends is great, but being spread out across different servers is not. When you don’t even have the option to roll a character on a friend’s server, it further sours the situation.
Taken by Archim Mawaro of the Mateus server.
It sucks when the only RP server is the locked one. Seeing this issue, some brave souls decided to make a go of it all over again on Mateus. Some people were concerned that it would kill Balmung, that it would divide the RPers and blah blah doom and gloom. No, no. Just no. What would kill Balmung is stagnation. No new blood coming in is a bad thing for any community. It inhibits growth in all areas. Your FC won’t garner new membership and you won’t have any new ideas coming through for plots. We all need fresh blood to keep things interesting.
The dev team is desperate enough for you to move that they’re giving out pretty great incentives if you go to a new world or a designated one. Some common excuses to not move are “but I have a house on my server!” Well, guess what? They are reimbursing you the full price of the estate, plus 3 million gil for non-recoverable items. The transfer itself is free, and if you make a new character on a brand new world they’re going to give you 1 million gil once you hit level 30. There are more bonuses outlined on the Lodestone, so if none of this convinced you to move yet, perhaps something else listed will.
I’ve only managed to get in about two hours of the MSQ (main story quest) in total so far, but I’m really enjoying the story. It has just the right amount of action and build-up so not too much is being given away yet. I’m really excited to check out Doma, because Ala Mhigo has been really lovely so far. It’s kind of like Thanalan, with the desert terrain but with interesting fauna and foliage to differentiate the two locations. I think the player base was probably much more excited about Doma, but my alt is half Ala Mhigan so I’m going to have a lot of fun RPing her in this expansion. There’s a lot of story and plot for me to chew on when it comes to her, and that’s got me all sorts of excited.
If you play an MMORPG, which one? And would you ever consider roleplaying in it?
