Contemplating changing servers

[HimeMint]

Hello citizens of Tonberry, me and my husband have been playing FFXIV since the game launched. Since launch we have played on the Siren server, which is a pretty quiet server, but now we're looking for a change of pace. We're really wanting to improve our skills with the Japanese language so we're contemplating moving to the JP Data center. I was wondering how much of Tonberry server is actually JP speaking and how much is ENG speaking, also what the acceptance is of English speakers in Japanese groups/parties/FC/LS.

[Myon88]

Feels like about a 50:50 split between the English and Japanese speaking players to me, though of course in content that's cross-datacenter we're back to being outnumbered 9:1 due to all the other JP servers in the pool. I don't interact much with the JP players over here so I'll let someone else chime in, but in the meantime you might find this recent document written by one of the local players useful.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...F6VYnJm8/edit#

[xiba]

I think that Tonberry itself is quite English dominated. If you ever run into someone, they're typically an English speaker, and anything in shout chat is generally in English (things like hunts - you'll notice a difference in how people look for parties when NM's spawn in Eureka due to it being cross-world). There's another server, Kujata which has a reasonable English playerbase, and there are also some English players scattered in small amounts across other servers like Aegis. I've found I don't really encounter JP players unless it's cross-world content going beyond Tonberry.

As for the acceptance of ENG speakers in JP groups, you'll notice PF's are typically labelled with either the auto-translate "Can you speak Japanese?" OR "jp only" at the end of it. It depends on the particular individual people you encounter in these scenarios, really, but for the most part, if you can just communicate with them, they won't mind. There's a few guides like the one Myon linked that'll help you out with communicating with them, and Google translate can actually be fairly decent for reading what they're saying (not so much for talking to them, I've tried it once and they said that they "don't understand Chinese" and asked if I was ok... oops).

[HimeMint]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write all this out, I really appreciate it. I'll check out the other worlds and see what possibilities I have. I'm not so worried about using translators (btw google translate can translate kanji as chinese lol, so it can be confusing) but I might consider Kujata.

[Kurando]

Also consider your ping, especially if you intend to do more difficult content extreme or savage. I was doing Suzaku Ex on an alt a few weeks back and kept missing half the directions for panel, and had trouble jumping between two colours next to each other so had to run all the way around sometimes.
It's not fun being challenged by ping as it kinda restricts some of the content you can do.

Tonberry was pretty nice though, but yeah there are plenty of JP only parties and players about and they'll know if you are using Google translate or some alternative.

[HimeMint]

Do you know the IP of the JP Data center so I can run a ping test?

[Eryna]

Do you know the IP of the JP Data center so I can run a ping test?

You can ping here:

JP
neolobby01.ffxiv.com [Elemental]
neolobby03.ffxiv.com [Gaia]
neolobby05.ffxiv.com [Mana]

NA
neolobby02.ffxiv.com [Aether]
neolobby04.ffxiv.com [Primal]

EU
neolobby06.ffxiv.com [Chaos]

Have fun playing on a JP server!