I've just started playing recently, got a level 32 white mage on the go, but I'm starting to become a bit tired of struggling to find people that speak English on the EU server that I'm on (Cerberus).

I'm considering re-rolling on a different server before I get any deeper with the character. I intiially wanted to join Odin (EU) because I hear that's got the largest population of English speakers in the EU, but the game will never, ever let me create a character over there. It's always closed to new toons.

I'm now thinking og trying out a US data center instead, and was wondering if any of you guys have any opinions on this sort of thing? Do any of you having any experience with using a 'foreign' data center? Does it have a significant impact on gameplay such as additional lag, desyncing, rubber-banding etc etc?

It's safe to say that it likely wouldn't be optimal, but I'm curious as to the potential extent before I start investing more time trying, only to change my mind again.

I understand Ultros is pretty much the home of the Giant Bomb Company, so that might be cool. However that server is currently not accepting new characters either, as of writing this. I'd be prepared to keep trying though, if the overseas lag isn't going go too unbearable...?

I just want to find a home!

@tehpickle: The EU and US data centres are located in the same place anyway (somewhere in the US) so you won't experience any negative network performance by swapping between them. I'm from the UK and have played on Ultros since launch without any problems so you'll be fine.

@chumley_marchbanks: That's very reassuring, thank you. I Had no idea they were in the same place!

I guess now the only question is how to get into Ultros? Do you have any idea how long these new character creation restrictions tend to last? Should I be trying to do it at certain times of the day? Is there any point to me just refreshing the server list every three minutes and keeping my fingers crossed?

No, they don't work like that. When they're full they're not actually "full", they're simply locked down by SE for a period of time. You can check here once or twice a day:

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/80cd4583bf743600105b947d6906d0909189e479

I'm on Cerberus too and there's a fair bit of french going about, which isn't too bad since it adds a nice flavour, but mostly in my FC people are speaking English.

Looks like you're free to create characters on every server right now for the EU and NA, so might be a good time if you're thinking of switching. It costs £10 to do it though, so if you want to save money there's nothing stopping you from creating a new character on Ultros or Odin rather than transferring. Depends how much you value your time I suppose.