DC Travel and its decimation of non-Aether NA PF

Just as the title says, DC travel -- while a great feature, particularly for the social aspects of the game -- has effectively decimated Party Finder everywhere but Aether in NA.

PFs on non-Aether NA DCs take ages to fill (if ever, in some cases), and those who may not have wanted to travel are now forced to do so in order to have reasonable access to certain content. On the flip side, when you travel, you lose access to all content specific to your home world/DC (retainers, supplies, communications, island, etc), which is hella inconvenient and irritating if you didn't want to travel to begin with. Mostly everyone I've had discussion with about this has expressed some level of frustration about the situation, but also the resignation of not being sure anything will ever be done to address it.

I'm not suggesting they completely shut down DC travel, nothing that drastic, but personally I think it would be nice to see some kind of adjustment to help rebalance the situation. Perhaps some kind of benefit to running duties in your own DC, or maybe restricting PF usage so current (non-echo) content can only be run on your own DC. I don't know, something.

I'm curious what others are feeling about the current state of PF and, for those who are also frustrated, what would you suggest to address the problem?

Its crazy really. I was in a PF the other day where they were happy that we were accepting of them from coming from other datacenters because apparently there is a lot of hate from people traveling to aether just to raid. At peak hours each instance can see upward to 50+ groups in pf.

Only time Mao has troubles is when others come from other worlds to join in hunts trains. When hunts trains has 200+ peoples, is lucky to gets single hit in on critter before its explodes. Otherwise, Mao nots mind at all because is help peoples from low pop worlds find groups to play with.

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Originally Posted by littlehobbit13

Just as the title says, DC travel -- while a great feature, particularly for the social aspects of the game -- has effectively decimated Party Finder everywhere but Aether in NA.

PFs on non-Aether NA DCs take ages to fill (if ever, in some cases), and those who may not have wanted to travel are now forced to do so in order to have reasonable access to certain content. On the flip side, when you travel, you lose access to all content specific to your home world/DC (retainers, supplies, communications, island, etc), which is hella inconvenient and irritating if you didn't want to travel to begin with. Mostly everyone I've had discussion with about this has expressed some level of frustration about the situation, but also the resignation of not being sure anything will ever be done to address it.

I'm not suggesting they completely shut down DC travel, nothing that drastic, but personally I think it would be nice to see some kind of adjustment to help rebalance the situation. Perhaps some kind of benefit to running duties in your own DC, or maybe restricting PF usage so current (non-echo) content can only be run on your own DC. I don't know, something.

I'm curious what others are feeling about the current state of PF and, for those who are also frustrated, what would you suggest to address the problem?

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There's another issue DC travel causes and that's the the numerous players from Dynamis flooding other DCs' DF. A lot of us used to be insulated from the worst of Crystal and Dynamis but now they're unleashed everywhere.

Sometimes I see parties on Aether that are almost entirely people from Crystal or almost entirely from Primal and it makes you wonder what the point was in switching.

I don't think we should be unable to DC travel, but a cross-DC Party Finder and a cross-DC matching system could be designed. What it would have to do is automatically choose which data center to switch everyone to before entering the duty. It could just go to the party leader's one for pre-formed parties.

Hot take: DC travel was a mistake. But we're here now so I wouldn't revert it back.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Sometimes I see parties on Aether that are almost entirely people from Crystal or almost entirely from Primal and it makes you wonder what the point was in switching.

I don't think we should be unable to DC travel, but a cross-DC Party Finder and a cross-DC matching system could be designed. What it would have to do is automatically choose which data center to switch everyone to before entering the duty. It could just go to the party leader's one for pre-formed parties.

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Basically blame it on the housing issues, and people's need for personalized space. We all want Large/Med housing, and creating new Datacenters just for housing really wasn't the answer.

So now we all live in the suburbs and travel to the city every day.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Sometimes I see parties on Aether that are almost entirely people from Crystal or almost entirely from Primal and it makes you wonder what the point was in switching.

I don't think we should be unable to DC travel, but a cross-DC Party Finder and a cross-DC matching system could be designed. What it would have to do is automatically choose which data center to switch everyone to before entering the duty. It could just go to the party leader's one for pre-formed parties.

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This is what they need. This solves all the issues of Primal/Crystal/Dynamis people being basically forced off of their chosen worlds, without actually removing DC travel.

DC travel seems to have caused more problems than anything. Party finder is a nightmare now, the new servers are dead, etc.

I consider DC travel to be a failed experiment with a net-negative effect on the game. I loathe everything about it, from the logistics of using it to the way it has destroyed our PF (on Crystal) and harmed FC chat.

What was the purpose of it to begin with? I always thought it was supposed to be about allowing people to play with their friends. Well, just make it so you can’t initiate DF or PF, or create a party on another DC. If you’re really visiting friends this is a non-issue because they can invite you and set everything up.