Well after reading such colorful commentary I guess I will toss my opinion in the pot of new servers. Yes I have now "test-drove" every single availible server in my transfer list and have developed a lot of personal opinions reguarding each; which I will not be listing here. Servers don't influence "nice","mean","greedy" or as I like to call the "God" complex. It's people, the individual on the server. So I had to poke around and get the %'s. Every server has those personalities so it's luck of the draw where the type of people you want to play with are located. I was torn for a time on which server I should choose. A blind recomendation would be either Shiva, or Ragnarok. They both seemed to me to be "warmer" to new people overall (now ofcourse there are "*** hats" on both as it was mentioned earlier) Shiva seemed to be smaller than ragnarok but quiet and peaceful. Now keep in mind this is from personal view not fact but I chose those servers. To be honest it was the posters to my thread that had the most influence, Anye played a large part in my opinion of Ragnarok - She was very kind to me on her posts and showed more concern for me personally than for making her server look better: Meaning for someone like that to be happy in their server more or less lends to the fact that server would have the greater balance of what I was looking for over what I was avoiding. I of course visited Ragnarok and found it to be much of what I expected - it's smaller than odin by far ~ but active enough, the people I met were more or less very kind and many more remembered reading my posts and wished me tidings of better health. I was looking for a place to be a wall flower while dealing with RL health issues, Ragnarok isn't really a place for wall flowers but I found it to be an all around "good" server. Shiva I found to be small and very friendly - Though it seemed there were quite a few more god complex types there than I would have expected. (This isn't so much a bad thing, they do tend to get things done and will lend their assistance to LS's and etc if it is of benefit to themselves which all in all is good even though in their opinion everyone is riding on the coat tails of their personal success; still people succeed with their help and the zeal of their personal strive for all around ffxi godhood) Those are my findings, there are many good servers but those two stood out the most as far as places I personally could find myself comfortable. I suggest visiting for yourself, You may find you share my views, you may find you do not.
Either way I wish you all the best on your search. As for anyone else posting an opinion, give some information, 15 seconds of attention for saying something random and unhelpful does no one any good at all. Try giving a true insight to your server, bad/good w/e I only hoped my slight insights helped some for the 10k posts you will get from people who are trying to say "this is my name I had nothing to say somebody check me!" Sorry I can't replace the insight of those 10k people who are going to do that
Mari~
P.S. 10k is a sarcastic exageration to point out the large volume of BS give me some attention posts to many of these forums.