Pools Closed (Asura Is Full!)

When they announce a server closure 5 days from now, in theory, doesn't this incentivize SE heavily, as RMT likely will create dozens of stash accounts in the interim and store them away to be able to continue their operations later on when the server is locked down? I'd imagine the server closure only partially slows down RMT activity (the big thing being cross-server item manipulation), but they can level new characters up on the locked servers and sell them when they're 99-ready. No?

Have no metric to indicate that the total number of "new" players is actually increasing at that type of clip

Asura clocked in at its peak at around 4k
bahamut 3k
odin 3k

all of that could be contributed to pho IMO.

are there new players? yes. but there is no indication that the game is exploding in population, it is a much safer assumption that people are just moving around.

There's an incentive to make dozens of characters right now, and stock billions on a server about to close, yes

Prices double when the supply is cut off entirely

Also; incentive to start piling accounts and money up on Fenrir as it becomes the next one to close. (or shiva, maybe)

Not really sure what you mean to ask here. Yes, there are going to be hundreds of accounts made within the next 5 days. Not just by RMT, people on Phoenix who have been toying with the idea of a mule are going to likely pull the trigger. Bonus since they did it during the discount campaign.

SE has a financial incentive to close servers to get those spikes, yes. It's also in their interest to allow some degree of account hoarding, because having the option of secondary markets to get a mule there can improve retention for people who want to get a friend into the game or make a new account after the fact.

Personally, I'd assume a lot of the people moving around are doing so because they wanted another mule, wanted to play with a friend, or got an account banned and had to replace it. Being able to freely create new characters takes away a lot of the incentive to transfer out, especially with how quickly an established group can boost their friend up to a working level these days. So, I think allowing new characters works against reducing population in multiple ways here.

It’s a good thing for sure.

Phoenix is an interesting case opposed from the other 3 in that it’s where a majority of new players have flocked to during this player boom. And for lack of a better term, new players are fragile in that they haven’t completely been hooked yet , so they’re easier to lose. That’s my concern.

In fairness the devs likely didn’t expect this kind of reception for XI, so I understand how they might be put on the back foot. But surely someone must’ve known to some degree that the XIV x XI crossover would create some sort of player increase? Regardless… the problem now is how this is being handled by SE. The solution can’t be to continually lock servers, at some point SE will need to actually put resources into XI to support the dev team properly and upgrade the servers, or they risk losing the moment.

It's the battle of the streamers for FFXI's next top trashcan.

Ejin vs Velner vs Heghmoh

All so close any one could be the winnar!

For what has to be the 30th time, there is no upgrade. Better single-thread performance doesn't exist in the commercial space. They cannot make better servers.

Recoding the servers to be multithreaded isn't happening.

Reducing the compute costs substantially enough to help isn't happening.

If they are currently resource constrained, that's it. The amount of money that'd have to be thrown at it exceeds FFXI's potential income.

The number of "Hi I am an new to ffxi, how do I..." messages we are seeing in the windower discord has gone up dramatically

Ragnarok doesn't kill Ultima/Omega, and I've gotten flamed for asking people to group up saying I need to "boycott Limbus harder"

Would not recommend coming to Ragnarok unless you love Shards and nothing else.

whoa whoa whoa, ragnarok has many great things about it please check it out before thinking about fenrir

Or making additional accounts to multibox.
That's at least the case in my ls on Sylph. A bunch of the older members lately have been adding their second/third accounts to the ls that they freshly made and even some of the newer people who joined are doing it too.

yeah it could be people getting banned, but i would still not view that as a net new player

basically a move with even more SE extra steps

No no no, Ragnarok is trash, Fenrir is much better.

ok but like shiva? i hear that place is really happening

Eclipse Bite > Double Slaps

Shiva? You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Carbuncle, on the other hand...

i stopped tracking data because i had to change some of my processes and i got emo when SE closed odin but..

shiva is probably next if i had to guess?

pho was becoming pretty obvious after odin

Betting money just says fenrir. Cause sheep are stupid and fenrir is 200 higher than shiva and 600 higher than rag

Whichever streamer shills hardest wins (or loses, if we're being honest)

Let's go knife fight to the death to make YOUR server next closed, stay off mine!

So I can see why they're doing this and the rationale makes sense, but it feels risky or potentially short-sighted to me. Asura, Bahamut, and Odin all grew over quite a few years to the state they were in before "needing" closure. Maybe a bit faster for the latter two once SE decided closures were on the table, but they were already established as Asura-lites with less of a PUG culture. In a sense they'd be able to sustain themselves as they've proven that many of the players there are long-timers or lifers.

That is not the case for Phoenix. I play both XI and XIV (much more on the XIV side) and this influx is 100% the result of the XI crossover in XIV ending with the characters doing the equivalent of staring at the player through the camera and saying "you should go play XI". Combine that with the discount campaigns and the fact that XIV's next batch of meaningful casual content is still (was still, at the time this started) a couple of months out with their next expansion in January 2027, well, there's a lot of bored FF casual fans that have incentive and curiosity to go see XI.

I imagine some will stick around after finding out the game is actually for them in some capacity, but I expect most are going to drop off shortly after the credits for RoV roll (not even doing all of TVR) so they can cross off "I played XI's stories and experienced the game" off of their FF bucket list. At that point XIV will have its content releases too.

My concern is that Phoenix will be in a state where it remains locked but at a meaningfully lower population than the other currently locked servers with SE keeping it that way to the point where it can't sustain itself well.

It's also just going to happen to the next one down. MMO players want to play where others are. There are a few meaningful reasons to want to play XI on a small server (doing an Empyrean, monopolizing cleave camps, no wait time on instances) but in the past that was handled by transfer discount campaign tourism knowing you could just go back to Asura or Bahamut after you took advantage of a small server and gave SE some money for the trouble. Without that prospect I imagine most players are going to just want to be in the largest server they can find forever.

At this point, the whole locking servers has gotten dumb. This is the 4th or 5th server now?? Its more likely they will lock down another 1 or 2 servers before opening the ones that are on lock down.

They have better access to the metrics than the estimates that anyone here can produce. The fix is rather simple:
Set a soft cap of ~9k active characters or whatever. When this threshold is met, the only way to access that server is via a gold world pass. Caveat: the price is jacked up to some large value like 10 million gil. inb4: "10 million gil aint ***, I have 2 chars with capped gil". Cool, so do I, but would you spend 10 million gil to bring someone to your server? I wouldnt. Thats also 10 million gil removed from the system. And before anyone talks about how 10 mil is chump change, lets revisit that discussion about how a +2 JSE neck isnt worth it. Clearly 10 mil is not chump change to a lot of people here, and that value has to be low enough that the non-hardcores have access to it.

Set a hard cap of ~10k active characters. When this threshold is met, access to the server is temporarily locked down even to gold world pass holders until players get banned leave.

They could also scale the price of GWP based on how many players are active on the server over the soft cap. This one might be tricky to implement in near-real time though.



How much of the server population increase/decrease is just server transfers going to use the black market? How feasible would it be to make a cross server accessible buy-only auction house tied to a zone/area where access is granted after purchasing a 48 hour token, similar to buying a world transfer? Even if you POS in to the area, attempting to interact with the NPC's will just get you booted from the zone (I'd say auto-ban but its possible someone could have logged in there and forgot to leave).

Also the numbers back in November had Phoenix and Fenrir almost identical, with a very slight lead to Phoenix.

I dont know when the XI/XIV crossover event happened in XIV (looks like it was in May?), but I dont this population influx had as much of an impact as you think. You can use wayback machine's 2026 snapshots of Feb, Mar and April to watch Phoenix's population pull away from Fenrir over this time. New people just went to the most populated available server. I dont believe that this is organic either. These new people already knew where to get this population information or someone was directing them to Phoenix. ~4000 XIV players didnt just "go try FFXI" and all land on the same server.


Went through the old posts around late 2025 (pages 12-14), everything the smart people predicted came to pass.

At that time, Asura and Bahamut were closed, Odin was the next of the big three, and those other four servers were nearly identical in population as part of the next tier. What happened:
Odin got locked down and Phoenix was the winner loser. Not only did the smaller servers not grow, they shrunk since then.


Thanks Claude, you did better with that chart than I could have in a fraction of the time.

This is what I've been saying and what I'm very worried about. It's shortsighted decision making with long-term negatives.

Another aspect of this too is we have people waiting to see their friends on the lock servers. I have heard of multiple cases where people are moving off Bahamut to play with friends that came over from FFXIV, but can’t get on the lock server. SE at this point should reopen Bahamut.

I’d advocate for server merging 3-4 of the smallest servers and then increasing server capacities or something overall.

Anything but fix the core issues or spend money on ffxi.

I still don't understand the alleged congestion. I play primarily during NA evening prime time and weekends. Odyssey queues are a couple minutes tops. Ambu is basically instant entry. I've done back to back Sortie entries with a mere one minute wait. Even Limbus right at Sunday reset has been fairly empty. I haven't experienced a long wait to enter an instance in a couple years (outside of the Vanabout Ambuscade objective debacle) to be honest. All of these servers used to have several thousand characters online simultaneously in the 75 era, but now 2.5k is too full?

Asura from a concurrent player perspective was getting bad when they did the mog kupon/free campaign last year.

I can't comment on congestion but I do agree that this is not sustainable and I think overall it's a terrible user experience. I can't begin to understand why they are approaching any of this this way.

it would have been smarter to just shut down asura and tell people to migrate to other servers, close bahamut after 500, close the rest after 1000 transfers.

"congestion" isn't queue

it's 2500 people flooding the server with gearswap pings a quarter million times per second

5000 players in 2007 wasn't sending a quintillion packets per cycle like players now.

I've also noticed some very bizarre problems with eventual-consistency on Asura. I've invited someone into a party and that new member never shows up in the party list, for everyone in the party. Some party members show 5 members, Some party members see 6 members.

Another strange occurrence is that the most recently acquired items (through auction house or trade) will appear in your inventory, just fine....until you zone. In this next zone, your most recent acquisition ...appears like it never happened. This c an be especially jarring if you just bought a Hoxne Amp from AH, zone elsewhere and it's not visible in your inventory to equip. Of course, when you move to the next (3rd) zone, your inventory loads just fine, completely.

A third issue which needs no explanation is that the frequent failing of the Lobby Server, just trying to get onto Asura at random times throughout the day.

Finally time for me to start learning exactly how this lockdown works. Just confirming:
- I have an account with one character slot taken, and that character's on Asura.
- If I buy a second character slot and create a Phoenix character today before it closes, I would be able to move the "main" onto Phoenix anytime I want, correct? (Paying for the transfer, obviously.)
- Similarly, if I buy a third slot and make another Asuran before moving the first character (which I can do because the first character's on Asura), I'd then be able to move back also, correct? (again, paying for the transfer)
- ...and I can immediately deactivate slots 2 and 3 until they're actually relevant for moving, right?

World Transfer is suspended regardless of the presence of another character on that server. New characters may be created if you already possess a character on the locked server