Final Fantasy XIV's New Omega Server Fills Up, Incentives Worked

Final Fantasy XIV announced Server Transfer Incentives with the launch of Stormblood, to help try to help spread the population across the servers. Using unofficial census data from Japanese blog Lucky Bancho, the average amount of players on a standard Final Fantasy XIV is about (and this is an eyeball number), somewhere in the range of 7,000 players per server. This does not, however, make exceptions for players playing multiple characters. The last census was taken on 06/06/2017.

However, Gilgamesh and Balmung, as well as almost all EU servers, have incredibly high player counts - all European servers have player counts of more than 10,000, which can lead to long queue times for people to log on during prime time hours, especially during the launch of an expansion. To this end, Square Enix announced the new European worlds, Omega and Louisoix, to help combat congestion.

Well, Square Enix allowing free world transfers and incentives appears to have worked greatly, as Omega is closed for transfers. This is shows that, given enough incentive, people will definitely spread themselves out and re-distribute themselves across new worlds. Plus, having shorter queue times to log in is great.

About Lucky Bancho's Census Gathering Techniques

Lucky Bancho reads minion data off of the Lodestone, Square Enix's public list of all player-made characters. Players who have advanced to a certain point in the Main Story of FFXIV will receive special rewards, and since all minion data is public, Lucky Bancho uses the amount of characters who have those minions to determine the amount of active players per server. This is not completely accurate, as players on the Free Trial, and players who have not progressed to that point in the story, are left out of the census. The fourth column in the chart below shows the amount of "active players" per server using minion tracking. The other columns are misc. data, such as people who have cleared raids and other content.