[Kolossus]

All of FFXI's servers are based overseas, none of them are in the US, afaik. Things seem to work out very well. I hardly ever experience any lag due to the distance of the server I am connecting to, only lag produced from playing on a PS2, which strains to keep up with FFXI.

I think that having it so everyone from every region is a good idea, to promote mixing, socializing, and as was stated, keeping current guilds being formed together. If they aren't region based, you will most likely always find people from your timezone on, and there are people all over the world that work/live by different schedules, so a west coast NA player might be on the same schedule as a JP player, and an EU player. It's good to make international friends! ^^