Pools Closed (Asura Is Full!)

We need you to clear the cellar of Diabolos!

(no wait that was a Lamp that Cid randomly had in his office)

They’ll lock it down. Fujito said as much during the Q&A when asked about future locking servers, as well as having no plans/“unable” to make anything cross-server to address consequences of locking servers. Also he said they’re not looking to create incentives for people to leave larger servers. So it’ll just be a game of lock-lock-lock.

SE is completely dropping the ball and not taking advantage of the growing popularity of XI.

SE is working with what they have and on track to create ~6 mid-population servers. The locks are necessary to prevent players self-building another super server.

The what now? The only way we can gauge this is with the estimates from this site's Database. According to it, we currently have 83,000~ active characters, compare that to a year ago when this post was made. We are down ~30,000 active characters from one year ago, roughly 25%. SE absolutely has dropped the ball, and almost never capitalizes on population spikes, but right now is not one of those times.

May is always a good month for them, especially if they hand out freebies like those bonanza kupons. I wonder if that guy still tracks the server pops regularly, 85k seems high but that's not based on any facts just a hunch.

It's not based on a hunch, it's based on this site's data.

83,817 active characters, according to ffxiah.

yeah I meant my opinion was a hunch. active characters just means an AH transaction within 30 days, right?

Its still an estimate because it doesnt access unique POLIDS, so AH mules will be counted.

But its still by far the best estimate available to the public.

I will say that the recent XIV patch with the final XI alliance raid seems to be getting even more people to check out XI, at least on Phoenix. Assist Channel here has been a lot more abuzz since last Tuesday and I've been seeing more legitimate new adventurers running around. Whether they will stick around past free trial / initial month is another story, but it is neat to see.