Dynamis honestly felt like the worst data center for a new player to start on.

Disregard this.

My advice: just leave it behind.

When you're ready to leave house and guild behind, you're already at that point. Just stop caring, and leave it behind - it's only bits and pixels anyway. Constantly reflecting about a decision you already made is not helpful, just a self-inflicted death of 1000 cuts.

It'll help if we look at the reasons why each are locked up.

Aether is the "raiding" data center. Raiding is a massively popular part of the game, with over 30% of max level players clearing them alone, and that doesn't even account for those who don't clear the tier but still prog.

Crystal is the "RP" data center. RP is a massively popular part of the game, with venues listed on every data center, RP being a popular thing in MMORPGs generally, all to the point of the developers acknowledging it is a massive part of the game and regularly releasing new furniture, emotes, deliberately targeted glams, gpose updates and other misc features like when they added bard music.

Primal is supposedly the "PvP" data center. But I... suspect PvP is not a massively popular part of the game. So that's pretty much why it's not enough to make Primal as locked down as the others. If anything I'd see Primal as a mixture of raiding and RP, and something of an overflow from the others.

If you only care about que time and not hard into raiding or RP, I can confidently say that you can still pick Aether or Crystal. If you don't care about RP you'll quickly learn what areas to avoid on Crystal and the only weird thing about Aether to me is that there seems to me more FC recruitment spam than other data centers. But I do have to admit, both Data Centers seem to have an noticeable increase in que times during off hours over the past couple of months. Hopefully it picks back up with all the changes coming in the next patch.

If Primal is not dead, then to be honest I don't really see a reason why you should wait for Aether or Crystal, unless there's a specific reason you want to actually be on either of those DCs

For Crystal at least, roulettes tend to pop fairly quickly. But lately, good luck if you’re trying to queue for something specific outside of peak hours. One of my Mog challenges (the one that isn’t the same for everyone) was a Hard mode dungeon that took 22 minutes to pop, and you can’t just unsync those if you want the Moogle tomes. Also notice some MSQ trials take quite a bit lately. Luckily I have 7.4 glam dresser prep to occupy me for the long dps queues!

Primal has had a noticeable population drop over the last year but it's no where near as dead/low pop as dynamis if you want to leave right away. Que times are still pretty fast for most things for non raiders when doing roulettes and dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Aether is the "raiding" data center. Raiding is a massively popular part of the game, with over 30% of max level players clearing them alone, and that doesn't even account for those who don't clear the tier but still prog.

Crystal is the "RP" data center. RP is a massively popular part of the game, with venues listed on every data center, RP being a popular thing in MMORPGs generally, all to the point of the developers acknowledging it is a massive part of the game and regularly releasing new furniture, emotes, deliberately targeted glams, gpose updates and other misc features like when they added bard music.

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I do my raiding on Crystal, and I've never seen RP here outside of venue spam in shout chat.

The people who keep repeating "Datacenter X is for Y" are part of the problem, just like people who keep saying, "DC travel to not-Dynamis to do Z" help ensure that Dynamis never actually grows.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

And I was too dense/stubborn to accept that.

Anyway, I started on Maduin almost 3 years ago (December 6th, 2022), and it feels like I've been trapped on the "wrong" data center this entire time and its not ever going to get better, its been nothing but dead queues and venue spam 24/7. Nobody else actually seems to play over here, it's just people rolling alts to buy houses and then AFK in them or farm gil via shell FCs.

I own two Medium houses myself, personal and FC, but it feels pointless to have them when I rarely see them because I'm always forced to data center travel for content anyway, and when there's no one to share those spaces with because again, no one to make active friends or FCmates with over here. I don't roleplay myself, and trying to build/rank up submarines is an absolute bore, so I have even less reason to care about having houses or being on a world that has any available.

I eventually gave up and offered to give away my FC in the party finder to the first person who wanted it, naturally it was somebody's alt hoping to get a Medium house for free but they rarely come online while waiting the 30 days to hand them full leadership, and I plan to surrender my personal house, private quarters, and apartment in preparation to transfer out.

Only question is, do I wait until 7.4 to see if any Aether or Crystal worlds open up (they seem to update server status nearly every patch), or do I just leave for Primal right now? Might be a jerk move though to disband the FC without turning it over to the rando alt first, but what are the odds they'll just turn the place into yet-another-dang bar/nightclub/cafe anyway? (They have "WU/T" on their adventurer plate, so I just assume they're an RPer.)

I don't mind waiting either of course, as 7.4 drops mid-December I believe and I can fork over leadership on December 22nd... ironically 1 day before the FC's own first anniversary. What a way to celebrate by throwing it away to a total stranger, eh? So it's not like it's an agonizing wait and I can just ignore any FC upkeep in the meantime because I gave the rando alt every permission I have (yes, EVERY permission, so I could just as likely log in tomorrow and everything has been demolished/relinquished, good riddance lol), but I also don't want 7.4 to drop and suddenly Primal gets all locked up too like Aether & Crystal and I end up stuck on Dynamis until sometime in 2026...

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Wait until Aether opens up. It doesn't makes any sense to transfer anywhere else - you'll have to dc transfer to Aether anyway.

I've been feeling this way too. Started back on FFXIV again this month and started on Dynamis.
It's been an actual nightmare trying to get queues to pop. Going through the MSQ and approaching the final three raids leading into Heavensward took over 1 hour for EACH raid.
I try to use party finder but as you've mentioned it's absolutely spammed out at certain times with venue advertisements.
The three cities are also just that in the chat, spam for venues. Or RMT bots.

It would be nice if SE would do something but what would they do that wouldn't upset a large portion of people. If you set each Datacenter as a "RP, PVP, Raid, Levelling", it'd put a bandage on the problem but wouldn't do much imo. Almost need a datacenter that is entirely for venues or something.

It sucks that there's a queue to login but yet the actual duty finder queues feel so barren.