What Server should I go to? Look here!

[Trumpy]

But still for an example a lot of my LS uses ffxiah to find bazaars and they play vanilla ffxi (no windower).

[Cyleena]

I wouldn't really recommend asura for endgame tbh. Most of the good groups aren't looking for new members and I don't see a ton getting done in shouts anymore.

I agree not many "good" end game groups are looking for members if any at all on Asura. You can low man just about anything and with a solid group of players most people do not go looking for others. I Know many servers though that the end game stuff is not getting done at all even in shouts cause of lack of players/motivation (some LS's still do dynamis as events, like farming currency etc on other servers but are not able to do the "tougher" content like Vagary). That being said there is still a few servers with the population like Odin, Bismark, etc that still have people available to get end game content done but even then I have heard of people that left those servers because unless you in a "good" group they not getting stuff done there either though after the next update with trusts in Vagary things might be getting easier though I do not see someone really doing well with trusts on t4, t5 but who knows.

[Damane]

I agree not many "good" end game groups are looking for members if any at all on Asura. You can low man just about anything and with a solid group of players most people do not go looking for others. I Know many servers though that the end game stuff is not getting done at all even in shouts cause of lack of players/motivation (some LS's still do dynamis as events, like farming currency etc on other servers but are not able to do the "tougher" content like Vagary). That being said there is still a few servers with the population like Odin, Bismark, etc that still have people available to get end game content done but even then I have heard of people that left those servers because unless you in a "good" group they not getting stuff done there either though after the next update with trusts in Vagary things might be getting easier though I do not see someone really doing well with trusts on t4, t5 but who knows.

the biggest problem for this phenomen is that SE rather punishes larger play groups and rewards more smaller play groups. Best example is the HP scaleing in Delve, Escha etc. without any compensation for the increased "Difficulty" thus makeing it less apealing to bring more people to those battles. HP scaleing doesnt balance stuff when you dont cut out on Mob TP spam and enhance the reward pool/points gotten...

the idea by itself to enhance the HP pool of mobs the more people are there is good, but they totally forgot to adjust the TP gain rate of those NMs, it just throws everything of the board again coupled with getting "less" reward because you are more people then needed.

[urat]

the biggest problem for this phenomen is that SE rather punishes larger play groups and rewards more smaller play groups. Best example is the HP scaleing in Delve, Escha etc. without any compensation for the increased "Difficulty" thus makeing it less apealing to bring more people to those battles. HP scaleing doesnt balance stuff when you dont cut out on Mob TP spam and enhance the reward pool/points gotten...

the idea by itself to enhance the HP pool of mobs the more people are there is good, but they totally forgot to adjust the TP gain rate of those NMs, it just throws everything of the board again coupled with getting "less" reward because you are more people then needed.

I think delve is a bad example. Most Delve runs and Unity runs still net faster kill speeds for the groups Ive run that did 18 man runs vs 6 mans.

And very very few people I run with are there for drops or the win, we generally just farm plasm off the tree or tojil, and we do indeed net faster kill times at 18 people, so it does encourage us to cap the alliance.

Unity as well doles out rewards by the person, so once again the only downside to more people is the mob scales hp, but for a lot of the fights thats not an issue, neither is tp spam often.

Escha on the other hand was poorly done. I have no fucking clue why SE hasn't given us a way to obtain escah rewards on our own in the style of LITERALLY all other content they've made this year...

Skirmish: can buy gear with wings you get in your own pool
Delve: can buy all rewards with plasm
Unity: Everyone gets their own drops, GOOD!

Escha: Go fuck yourself, back to lotting again! Also mobs hp scales so go double fuck yourself.

[Trumpy]

Hmm Curious if a trust death would prevent those body/legs NMs from popping in vagary. We all know those trust like to die easy.

[BerenTebogo]

Hmm Curious if a trust death would prevent those body/legs NMs from popping in vagary. We all know those trust like to die easy.

Pet death doesn't, wouldn't think trust death would.

[FaeQueenCory]

the biggest problem for this phenomen is that SE rather punishes larger play groups and rewards more smaller play groups. Best example is the HP scaleing in Delve, Escha etc. without any compensation for the increased "Difficulty" thus makeing it less apealing to bring more people to those battles. HP scaleing doesnt balance stuff when you dont cut out on Mob TP spam and enhance the reward pool/points gotten...

the idea by itself to enhance the HP pool of mobs the more people are there is good, but they totally forgot to adjust the TP gain rate of those NMs, it just throws everything of the board again coupled with getting "less" reward because you are more people then needed.

That's always been a design flaw SE has had with every FF ever.
This boss needs to be hard? Give it more HP.
This boss is too hard? Take away HP.

I dunno why HP = difficulty to SE, but it does.

Given how Trusts will be added to Vagary, and they're wanting to make it "easier to obtain Vagary items"....
I'm pretty sure Vagary is getting the "nerf" with scaling HP too.
(Since we already know that Trusts aren't being allowed in alliance content.)
Which, IMO, is good for stuff like that.
Because it's basically the inverse of what you pointed out with Delve: the treasure pool doesn't increase with more people.
Which has always been my "complaint" with Vagary: 90% of the time you walk away with nothing or maybe an etching or few.
Which is kinda demoralizing.
Though I can't decide which is a larger psychological deterrent, no reward for completing something "hard" or the trolling rewards of Incursion/Unity.
I'd side on none, since at least refractive crystals and trash are still something. (Capes for Incursion too.)

[Fwahm]

The more players = more HP paradigm would be mostly accurate, but the only problem is that adding more players attacking the mob gives it more TP. If they somehow changed that (make more mobs like delve where they TP at specific intervals instead of using TP they get, or maybe give them less/negative Store TP with more players), difficulty would be fairly even between 6 and 18.

The defensive abilities of players don't go up with more players (unless you start using buffs on defense), so if stuff like attack varied with group size, you'd either get unavoidable oneshots at 12+ players or piddling, ignorable hits at 6-.

[IssacFrost]

I'd like to point out I play in Odin. And I barely see people. And the majority of people I see don't speak English. Wait what? Doesn't this have an asiatic version or something? Why in every NA game this people play our language games and can't 'speak' English... WTF?! I'm sure they are lying too because I know many Japanese people who speak good English. So why are they playing on NA Servers? O_O

[Fwahm]

Because they're not? There's no such thing as an NA FFXI server.

[NotGreyheim]

I'd like to point out I play in Odin. And I barely see people. And the majority of people I see don't speak English. Wait what? Doesn't this have an asiatic version or something? Why in every NA game this people play our language games and can't 'speak' English... WTF?! I'm sure they are lying too because I know many Japanese people who speak good English. So why are they playing on NA Servers? O_O

You have 0 right to complain about anyone else's inability to speak (or type) the English language.

[Shadowlina]

Although Slyph is quiet, and most shouts are run by JPs. Let me point out that just because the servers empty doesn't mean its a bad server. Lots of EU timed americans and EU players here. My shell will pearl just about anyone if you want a pearl really (but most of them believe in bst onry, but its a LS.) I mean Dynamis is never competed, never any real bad queues to do anything. JPs are often or not willing to take an English player if they have done the event, or they have been with them before and have proven their worth. (I'm highly frequently invited to play with the late night Japanese).
And lots of people here have nothing better than to help everyone else anyways.

[Lexouritis]

1333 People online at the moment on Bahamut at JP Prime time.

[Bukadan]

it doesnt matter how many people there are. find 2-3 good players friends and youll never need another person do any event as long as theyre worth playing with. if they arent then if you joined up with them in a shout group on a "populated server" youll still end up failing anyways. what is the difference? that you have a slight chance at all? if you cant seen to be able to "find" a few players who are skilled and nice to play with, then make yourself more desirable and not follow weird strict beliefs when it comes to things like "i dont play mage jobs", "thats not how x job was meant to be played", or being deceitful and joining a group as a job like say (as a single example, far from the only one) rdm/sch/geo when your supposed to stun and not actually know anything about how to do your role. population hasnt been an issue for most of the self sufficient people ive met, and if it was it was purely because theyre ignorant because they dont play enough to actually have enough information to say that population is the main issue.

[urat]

it doesnt matter how many people there are. find 2-3 good players friends and youll never need another person do any event as long as theyre worth playing with. if they arent then if you joined up with them in a shout group on a "populated server" youll still end up failing anyways. what is the difference? that you have a slight chance at all? if you cant seen to be able to "find" a few players who are skilled and nice to play with, then make yourself more desirable and not follow weird strict beliefs when it comes to things like "i dont play mage jobs", "thats not how x job was meant to be played", or being deceitful and joining a group as a job like say (as a single example, far from the only one) rdm/sch/geo when your supposed to stun and not actually know anything about how to do your role. population hasnt been an issue for most of the self sufficient people ive met, and if it was it was purely because theyre ignorant because they dont play enough to actually have enough information to say that population is the main issue.

Your missing the point.

Having friends doesnt fix the economy, make your bazaar items sell, or deal with the low supply on AH.

High population servers have way more items moving on the AH, which means its significantly easier to skill up a given craft when theres 8 stacks of mats on the AH instead of 1 or 2.

Getting 1-2 close friends doesnt deal with "well Id like to skill all my crafts up to cap. Too bad the auction house is empty and Id have to go manually farm all my mats up"

[Draylo]

1333 People online at the moment on Bahamut at JP Prime time.

Damn, did the free campaign start?

[NynJa]

196 people on Carbuncle right now, dont come to Carbuncle.

[Sechs]

196? Wow...

Asura on thursday had about 900 people online.
Not sure about today since the free login campaign started.

[Kyreth]

I'd like to point out I play in Odin. And I barely see people. And the majority of people I see don't speak English. Wait what? Doesn't this have an asiatic version or something? Why in every NA game this people play our language games and can't 'speak' English... WTF?! I'm sure they are lying too because I know many Japanese people who speak good English. So why are they playing on NA Servers? O_O

Because there are no NA/JP/EU servers. Originally, they were all actually JP only until Square started making the NA client (and later, other versions though we're back to English and Japanese only). We're actually the Johnny-come-lately population, and for years people considered FFXI to have the "JP button" of preference even after we started back in 2004 or so.

[Kyreth]

And Ragnarok's surprisingly comfy these days. Population isn't huge, but it isn't dead and our LS is doing rather nicely (actually growing, new players even along with some truly ancient returners), and I know other ones are as well. Newbiewise, Monarchy isn't bad, InternationalGlobe definitely isn't (of course, I'm biased) and there's a nice mix of NA/EU/JP players.