Hey there - there’s been a lot of threads about queue times and I keep seeing (thankfully!) @Seawolf and @Roxx in particular trying to understand the thoughts of the community and why you see such a strong difference between high-pop servers with 18k+ queues and low-pop servers where you can join instantly (pretty much). To hopefully give you an insight and communicate in a more civil manner than it is the case in some threads, i’ll try to explain my + my friend’s reasons why we don’t just move away from (in our case) Asta - and a possible way to help us out in the end (stay tuned 
).
I am seeing a lot of reasons why people want to join specific servers. First off there’s streamers like in every game - we’ll leave this out for now, since that is not of too much importance for us. As “background” information: There have been some inofficial synchronizing in larger communities where we want to start when the servers hit live. For germany that was Asta, so we thought early on we’d go for it, too. [Reason for starting on a server: Predetermination] It should be obvious, that because of those “agreements” the community would not distribute evenly above all servers.
For us as players however, it makes it easier to align - We have a lot of people you don’t have too much contact with where you find out they’re playing the same server as you. That’s a +1 for convenience of being able to play there with everyone mid-term. However, since the queue times keep peaking (I’m currently waiting in the queue since 3.5h and now i’m on position 2943), the discussion got raised to start on another server that is not as populated - and we decided against it. The obvious fact is the founder’s package; luckily, most of us did not use it yet, so it’d not be too big of a deal. The main points were four aspects:
- The progress on the characters are directly lost. We are having a few level ~30-40 that do not want to switch to another server to directly start over again; but rather explore the game further. It takes an overseeable amount of time to get there, but it’s still time where you are bored because you do the same stuff again that you just did. If we do it at some point (and we probably will have to), we’d like not to use the early days of the game by just going over and over within the first few levels. [Point 1: Character progress loss]
- Coordination of everyone to go to the new server is annoying - going plain on this one; we’ll figure it out anyway eventually, so no big deal. [Point 2: Annoyance, Effort]
- If we swap servers now - why wouldn’t we have the same queue sizes when the game goes live for everyone (since there is a larger number of people to be expected to join)? [Point 3: We do not know that it will get better]
- If we swap servers now - how do we know we are not stuck on dead servers soon? [Point 4: We don’t know that it will not get worse]
Now let’s get to the suggestion, since this post is getting longer than I thought it would:
I understand that there are technical limitations to servers. I also understand, that the difference in spreading of players over the servers are a pain for AGS - simply putting up new servers on its own is no fix for it. Also, if you close existing servers for character creation there might noone be able to join their friends that starts later on, also not being what you want from an MMO. For us the quick-fix would be character-transfers into different servers (and I don’t quite understand why that isn’t available yet, so maybe you can enlighten me). I have played various MMOs where server transfers where a tougher point than the community imagined; and some where it was kind of a disaster 
. But being able to move my character we’d immediately be off of Asta to a low-pop server and once those are dieing away you could easily repopulate larger ones. Of course there has to be a limitation to character transfer tokens (to avoid too much cross-world-trading exploiting etc. Even starting with one or two for the moment would be enough. That way the community could evenly distribute over the servers (and probably would, since it is no fun waiting 4h in a queue).
Quick Update: Now that I finished thinking and writing, I moved up around 800 places in queue 