[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

Oh hey, was gonna pop over to Primal tonight to run some Rival Wings for the moogle tomes since Primal is the only server that runs it enough to get the queues to pop frequently, but NOPE, it's closed right now! Can't even do the thing I wanted to log on and play, have to wait until later in the evening to try again, I guess. I sure love paying monthly for a game that doesn't let me meet with my friends on their DC or go play the game modes I want to play due to this new arbitrary restriction! /s

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Aye, totally understandable, and I don't fault anyone for wanting to take a break from the game due to the travel restrictions. Hell, when Dynamis got locked down and nobody could leave (but other people could still enter) I knew some folks that shelved the game until the lock down was lifted, because being trapped on Dynamis had the exact same effect of cutting people off from each other unless folks from Aether/Primal/Crystal were willing to come over to play the new content, and most did not..

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and it could also cause another problem with this extended lockdown/restriction that SE put in place. in that once things do open up..people would wind up to xfering over to aether just to not be locked out by SE again for lord knows how long and not leave. both sides are a problem here in this situation where those like me that don't have a dog in the fight, that just want to play with others. at this rate, not even sure if i'll even be back to a game that restricts things to this degree since the full game isn't free and the community putting lables on DCs to the point of dogpiling on certain ones isn't helping either for those of us in the crossfire just wanting to play with friends. only time will tell what's going to happen either way.

I'm currently trying to DC travel to visit friends, & I literally can't even hop to any other world on my regions data center other than one other world. I get its reset time & that I'm on Dynamis, but this is preposterous regardless.
https://imgur.com/CFn5jdk.png https://imgur.com/DZK8LyQ.png https://imgur.com/jNFVoQ7.png https://imgur.com/45HcYpS.png

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Originally Posted by Naomi_Sinclaire

I'm currently trying to DC travel to visit friends, & I literally can't even hop to any other world on my regions data center other than one other world. I get its reset time & that I'm on Dynamis, but this is preposterous regardless.
https://imgur.com/CFn5jdk.png https://imgur.com/DZK8LyQ.png https://imgur.com/jNFVoQ7.png https://imgur.com/45HcYpS.png

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But the game is congested ! Cant you see it ?

https://steamcharts.com/app/39210

An all time low since december 2023 and the previous time it was this bad was in march 2022, but apparently now the game is super congested and all the worlds are full

this congestion stuff is such an absolute joke its not even funny anymore

And before anyone says "its only steam !!!!", its called statistics. Steam players arent any different from players on other platforms.

I don't blame people for transferring back/to the formerly congested worlds.

The implementation of DC travel basically had an understanding that people could transfer off from their communities to spread out the population but still be able to play with their friends and such at any time. SE has totally went against that with these restrictions.

I wouldn't trust them at this point even if they claim they'll never do it again. SE has kind of shown the risk of being cut off from friends/communities/etc. is at their whim and they will literally not care.

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Originally Posted by Arzalis

I don't blame people for transferring back/to the formerly congested worlds.

The implementation of DC travel basically had an understanding that people could transfer off from their communities to spread out the population but still be able to play with their friends and such at any time. SE has totally went against that with these restrictions.

I wouldn't trust them at this point even if they claim they'll never do it again. SE has kind of shown the risk of being cut off from friends/communities/etc. is at their whim and they will literally not care.

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Yep, quite a few people still on Dynamis are actually ready to move the second their cooldown is ready, and a lot already did (including myself)

The second crystal opened for transfer, i was outta dynamis and never looked back, I can visit my dyna houses just fine and only lost a small house, not worth being stuck on dynamis with no travel for god knows how long because "muh congestion" that doesnt even exist.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

It honestly makes me think that something *did* get strained during the whole ordeal, and now Square-Enix is stuck trying to bucket water out of one boat and into another, and the instant Aether gets re-opened for transfers the problem comes right back and will probably be worse than ever. If we knew *how* congestion is determined, maybe the playerbase would be willing to cooperate and spread out in some fashion, but as it stands, it just feels like we're fighting with SE over some invisible metric.

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and this is the crux of the issue. unless SE is transparent with us on what is where, maybe even number wise on their end, this will go around and around until something gives, if it hasn't already. and with their current back end, which again, only SE has any real details on about and the growth in the game with ShB/EW days, is outside of improving whatever is on the back end but again that would take time to do. plus its not like the players have any concrete details about anything either way and a little info goes a long way with maybe helping helping alleviate all this, COPIUM tho it may be. and unless SE starts opening up details, which isn't likely at all on their side, the problem will continue on both ends

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Originally Posted by PassinLay

Yep, quite a few people still on Dynamis are actually ready to move the second their cooldown is ready, and a lot already did (including myself)

The second crystal opened for transfer, i was outta dynamis and never looked back, I can visit my dyna houses just fine and only lost a small house, not worth being stuck on dynamis with no travel for god knows how long because "muh congestion" that doesnt even exist.

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I'm also thinking of transferring back to primal once my cooldown is up in 2 weeks because of the restrictions square enix did to datacenter visit and most of the time I can't visit the 3 other datacenters to get content done since there always marked as "congested" then stuck waiting 30+ minutes in a que on dynamis.

can't go to aether its full. can't do content.
what to do...

Log out unsub go to wow. enough is enough.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

I know I strongly considered moving to Primal or Crystal despite starting on Dynamis after the first lock down because it was miserable, especially as an avid PVPer who was stuck getting boring, uncontested wins and loses thanks to the massive influx of premades who were engorging themselves on all the trapped Dynamis players, many of whom had never done PVP before and of course were dipping their toes into it for the first time for leveling to 100. Currently I'm not fond of loitering outside Primal's door on the data center travel list just because I want to do Rival Wings for mogtomes, and that data center has always been the hotspot for it even when travel to Aether was still available.

...But recently my brother started playing more actively and my sister has thought about coming back as well, and I don't want a situation where I'm somewhere they can't get to on Primal/Crystal, so I come to them back on Dynamis, but then we're stuck in long queues even if we're 3/4ths or 3/8ths of a party (and none of us like healing so WELP), because even that won't always help you during non-peak hours on Maduin as we're prone to playing later in the day/night. I'm basically being forced to choose between companions or convenience, same as everyone else in this damn leaky boat.

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I spent most of my time on primal since 2013 and went to dynamis for a chance of a medium house since I struggled to upgrade my small to a medium on leviathan and to play with a friend but they hardly play so I feel I wasted my time and should have just stayed and kept the small I had especially with how bad dynamis que times can get at certain times and party finder is going back to pre dawntrail levels after the dawntrail hype died down.

I'm hoping since it's not Tuesday Reset I can actually go to Primal today for mogtomes. I did eventually get on the other day, but I had to wait until much later in the night and didn't get to play as much. Lately my static has just been meeting on Dynamis to raid since we can all get there, but we wanted to do some PvP too. But nope, can't raid on Primal and can't PvP on Dynamis, so we have to keep hopping around and waiting just to get together and play the stuff we wanted to play, when this was never an issue before.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Even better, some of the mogtomes events require doing Alexander raids for the current weekly or Treasure Map groups for the Ultimog, with group content in general making up most of the standard objectives. Suffice to say some people have had a hell of a time trying to get a lot of those things to pop on Maduin during certain times so they try to data center hop and... WHOOPS, can't enter Aether/Primal/Crystal for most of the day! I only finally got my own Alexander weekly done recently (on Primal at like 1AM) because I joined someone else's Alexander and people slowly jumped in and jumped out for the next 2 hours until there was no one left that needed it. By comparison, my own Alexander PF on Maduin went for *40* minutes with no takers and it was like, only 8:50 PM by that point, and between 9PM-1AM I just did the rest of my roulettes and got some Rival Wings done while I was still on Primal.

It really is night and day between Dynamis queues and A/P/C ones, or how Primal activity has started reaching Aether levels of "you can still find people queuing late on the weekday" because more and more people are getting into and camping there when they can't reach Aether. This is the first mogtome event where people on Dynamis *can't* just easily data center travel to complete objectives and it's as painful as you can imagine, and while you *could* just do GATEs... it gets kinda lonely being one of the only people wandering around Gold Saucer (and also boring depending on the GATE).

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this is causing more problems then they thought out with the restrictions here. and removing the afk timer when still insisting on said restrictions is another mistake since ppl can just hop over early morning/very late night and just afk there so they themselves don't have to fight the travel restrictions in place which makes things worse all around, specially for those on dynamis

Another day stuck in DC prison for the crime of wanting to game with my friends who spread out across the DCs because there was no reason not to. I tried to wait a while and hoped I'd just get used to it, but the complete inability to even reliably plan if you can get somewhere or no makes it an inevitably, and consistently frustrating experience.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Unfortunately the only way for scattered friend groups to consolidate themselves is to transfer to the same data center (and preferably the same world within that data center), but it costs money if one's target is Primal or Crystal (and you only have 4 choices each), and Aether isn't an option at all.

That leaves only Dynamis, but there's clearly not enough incentive to make people do it, including there being plenty of housing plots for those who are worried about giving up the one they already have on Aether/Primal/Crystal. Square-Enix may be operating under the false assumption that people will get fed up enough to free transfer when there's an equal, if not greater, chance that people just stop playing until data center travel goes back to normal ...if it ever does, assuming this is indeed being deliberately done to force player re-distribution by making Dynamis the only option for group consolidation (minus Seraph which is apparently already considered "populated enough" by their unknown metric).

Of course, this doesn't really consider what else would get left behind in the process. So yeah, great, someone manged to get all their world-spanning friends on board ...but none of their free companies or venues want to make the jump, so one *still* ends up having to part ways, and for someone on Aether its probably especially grueling to consider because the data center is the hardest one to get back into after you leave.

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Yeah, my static formed before the changes, and most of us were Aether, one on Primal, but with DC travel being opened, a lot of our members moved to Dynamis for the easy access to housing. And all the members of my static, even the ones on Dynamis are now just suffering. Because this hasn't really helped Dynamis to their perspective. Queues still take forever to pop over there, the Dynamis economy is still slow... nothing's really improved for them even with this in theory pushing people towards Dynamis, the reality seems like it's lacking.

So now we're all stuck raiding on Dynamis, which is mostly fine, until someone can't make a day, and then we're down 1 person and it's near impossible to find a fill in PF because Dynamis is indeed still dead, and it's still basically impossible to get anything to happen in PF. We've tried occasionally to just go somewhere else, it doesn't have to be Aether, but so often everything else is already locked by the time we're raiding so we're just marooned on Dynamis.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

It certainly feels like a "soft lock down" for Dynamis, where instead of being barred from DC traveling at all like they did earlier, they've made it difficult to find somewhere else to go so I feel stranded until later in the day. But now there's also the added oof that it's affecting Aether/Primal/Crystal folks from playing with each other as well (whereas before the previous lock down didn't affect them at all).

All of this during a mogtome event no less where some of the better ways to farm them is all group content and yet a lot of people can't do any of it. It's just... UGH.

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which is causing more problems for everyone here. where 90-95% of the mogtome is grp content and only solo stuff is fates/gold saucer. everything else is a "get fkd" situation that now affects everyone, worst of all for those on dynamis.

I guarantee if Aether is opened up to new characters/character transfers at any point in this expansion, they are going to get an unprecedented number of people wanting to have their characters on Aether. Why have your home world be anywhere else at this point? If you're on Aether, you're as free as a bird. You can go practically anywhere you want, anytime you want. If you're on any other data center, good luck getting into Aether, and god help you if you need to do any sort of content (like Diadem) that forces you to be on your home data center. If you're not on Aether, you're a second-class citizen.

To be honest, I'm not sure I have much faith in them rolling things back at this point, and if Aether does open up, I'm seriously considering transferring my character over. If this is really how they want things to be, fine. You reap what you sow, Square Enix. Enjoy Aether becoming even more densely populated and exacerbating the problems even further, I guess.

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Originally Posted by Marche100

I guarantee if Aether is opened up to new characters/character transfers at any point in this expansion, they are going to get an unprecedented number of people wanting to have their characters on Aether. Why have your home world be anywhere else at this point? If you're on Aether, you're as free as a bird. You can go practically anywhere you want, anytime you want. If you're on any other data center, good luck getting into Aether, and god help you if you need to do any sort of content (like Diadem) that forces you to be on your home data center. If you're not on Aether, you're a second-class citizen.

To be honest, I'm not sure I have much faith in them rolling things back at this point, and if Aether does open up, I'm seriously considering transferring my character over. If this is really how they want things to be, fine. You reap what you sow, Square Enix. Enjoy Aether becoming even more densely populated and exacerbating the problems even further, I guess.

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Being an Aether player myself, even we're feeling it. Primal is kinda the main server to do PvP related events, like Rival Wings for example. I'll admit I'm still lucky as I still can get to Primal if I try late enough at night, it's a smaller issue than people on other DCs are feeling for sure.

Regardless, the point still stands, the second the gates open up on any kind of transfer, Aether will get flooded, and at this point, I welcome all with open arms. Let every square inch of Aether be as densely packed as the Balmung Quicksands, I am ready to greet all of my new neighbors. Ironically, I basically only play on Dynamis at this point because all of my friends can't get to Aether anymore. It'd be kind of a homecoming for me too.

Just coming back. This is still a problem. As an rper it can still be hard to get onto Balmung- the server most events are held. It's definitely a bit better now for me- but it's not for raiders either. Locking all the realms like this is still insanely frustrating.

This is still absolute garbage. I moved my character from Aether to Dynamis for a multitude of reasons, but helping the congestion was one of them. I feel like I've been penalized for doing so, as getting on to Aether at any point other than from aroun 6am to 9am EST is impossible. I was up at 4am EST last night and STILL could not get in. Making the congestion restrictive of creating characters and transferring them there I can understand, but the heavy restrictions on just visiting is gutting a lot of social aspects of the game for the players who want to transfer out but still play with their friends on Aether. And as Marche said above, what's going to happen is the minute a world on Aether opens up for transfers, they're going to have a massive influx of players flocking to move their characters to Aether to get around all the restrictions and exacerbate the problem. The "solution" they came up with is making things worse.

Cloud servers and cross-DC queueing can't come any faster. I've never had my character on Aether but my entire raid static is on Aether and it's frustrating for everyone to have to transfer to Dynamis just to get our raid group together when I'm the only one there.

Beyond that, joining Hunt Trains or PvP events as well as other social/content related events becomes more and more difficult as I often can't move around much. And it's not just isolated to Aether either, If there's a PvPrimal event happening, Primal often ends up fully congested and I can't participate. I understand the why's but the results have ended up counter-intuitive post expansion release.

It is just WILD and BAFFLING to me that during a content drought in an MMO where the only "new" things to do for veterans is Savage raids and/or community ran events and getting together with friends, then take such drastic steps to prevent us from doing ANY of those things without significant hassle.

I guess if your entire raid and friend group has always been on Aether and nowhere else, you're good. But mine isn't, and it sucks.

Came back for the free game time for returners and the queues are about as bad as I remembered on Dynamis, 15+ minutes for some roulettes as healer, 30-40 minutes on alliance raids. The kicker is now I can't really travel to other DCs to fix that anymore so I have to just eat the long queue times.
Real nice system Square, not a fan of this at all.

Clearly, it's time for mega servers.

Megaservers would destroy this game's communities overnight. Been there, done that.

Also, they'd have to actually put effort to addressing the housing system to ever consider megaservers. So it's never going to happen. They clearly don't care enough to change that.

9:50 am est on a tuesday. this is unacceptable.

image of the queue blacked out in case the forums won't load the picture: https://imgur.com/a/s5yNmYd

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...bd7ac54e245e1&

And as an Aether player, I can tell you, there are not nearly so many people logged in at that time to warrant this at all. At this point, even though I'm an Aether player, I have been parked mostly on Primal or Dynamis just to try and meet up with my friends to try and do anything together. I decorated my house for Halloween and then realized that half my friends I play with can't even come by to see it.

Nothing makes me want to just say "f*** it" and leave this game more than little moments like that, where I realize the things I used to do just casually with friends can't happen anymore. It's so disheartening.

Once more joining in here to say that this is ridiculous... almost 4 months post release and I still can't properly play with friends.

This is honestly just so much worse than if they never opened up DC travel in the first place. When I started, I asked my friends which server they played on. They said Cactuar, so I joined on Cactuar. I made new friends on various worlds across Aether, many of whom chose to leave Aether for the housing on other servers. And that was fine, I'd visit them, they'd visit me, we'd all have a good time with it. But now we can't, the promise of a feature of the game was taken from us, and we don't even have the option to take back our own choices because of this. People who moved to Dynamis are just kinda stuck there now, with their weak in game economy, long queues, the lot of it. They moved on the promise of at least still being able to visit their friends, and now that's been taken from them, in exchange for nothing.

More than shutting down servers for travel, SE needs to do what they did with adventurer in need but for DCs.

Set up a system where the DC with the lowest population at any given time has a boost to gil and xp for all content you do through the Duty Finder while not in a premade group. Encourage people to travel to dynamis to fill out their queues for better rewards.
Time and time again it's been shown that punishing unwanted behavior in players doesn't work, the only thing that does work is rewarding the behavior you do want, which is evening out the DCs populations on any given day so they stop crowding a single DC.

I play this game for ultimate raiding, I actively dislike content like Bozja, there is nothing here for me except the ultimates, which I play as often as I can. In EW this was approaching 5-6 times a week. Now in DT it's 1-2 if I'm lucky, and usually I am not. I cannot simply park my character on Aether forever for a few reasons e.g. statics. I feel like I got punked at character creation and have been paying the price ever since. As soon as Aether opens up I will leave my fc and permanently world transfer my character, but there's little to no reason for me to play this game once I'm done with FRU because it's just frustrating.

Is Square even aware of how much the ultimate scene relies on Aether? Why is there no fix for this DC travel issue months after the expac released? This game had the reputation for not having any bugs, yet here is a horrible outstanding issue that wouldn't be acceptable for even one day just sitting around for actual months.

There is no fix for this issue other than cross-dc pf or opening up travel. You can't undo years of raiding culture just by crippling essential features and hoping it works out. There are roleplayers on Aether now and there are raiders on Crystal, and these groups aren't going to be able to fix this issue alone.

Very disappointed the Live Letter today made no mention of fixing this major, glaring issue. It's quite upsetting.

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Originally Posted by glitteringcosmos

Very disappointed the Live Letter today made no mention of fixing this major, glaring issue. It's quite upsetting.

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They kinda did, but it was in the PvP section. In case you skipped that, they are forcing NA to go to Primal for any ranked PvP. Yoshi-P indicated this is not their preferred solution, and they are currently working on the cross DC PF changes, but they have to do it for all content, so it's more involved, but they would provide more info as they got closer.

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Originally Posted by Menriq

They kinda did, but it was in the PvP section. In case you skipped that, they are forcing NA to go to Primal for any ranked PvP. Yoshi-P indicated this is not their preferred solution, and they are currently working on the cross DC PF changes, but they have to do it for all content, so it's more involved, but they would provide more info as they got closer.

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That is even worse of an idea. What are they thinking??? Holy crap.

Also, that does nothing for the fact that they've reduced capacity for Travelers and Wanderers on congested worlds that aren't really that full. They just appear to be because of the travel restrictions. There aren't even 200 players in ALL of the Shroud on Adamantoise right now. They need to increase capacity for off-world players again, there is NO reason to be restricting it this long after expac launch.

This section from the 7.1 patch notes does not fill me with much confidence that we'll see the restrictions rolled back.

https://i.imgur.com/RU1X0Iq.png

Great! We'll know why a server is unavailable and not be able to do a damn thing about it. Since this thread's inception, I've found my interest in the game wane more and more. If it weren't for housing auto-demolition, I would have taken an extended break in my subscription by now.

So now ppl can only do ranked matches on one DC. Which they most likely then can't get to when it's "congested", shutting them out of ranked pvp? Please, somebody make it make sense.

It's been months, still upset by this tbqh square

A bunch of servers on Aether are open for new characters/character transfers now, and I have exceedingly little faith that they'll roll back these changes (or if they do, it'll be far too late, as is tradition for Square Enix), so fine. They win. I'll pay the "you were an idiot for transferring to Dynamis" tax so I can stop feeling like a second-class citizen in the game I pay $15 a month for. I encourage others to do the same if you have the means and don't have anything tying you down to your data center, because at this point, I don't really see them doing anything about this unless the situation in other data centers gets so bad that it's impossible for even a company this dense to ignore.

I'm extremely disappointed that these concerns have not been addressed in the slightest this far out while Aether remains consistently locked out at any decent gaming hour. I'm now heavily considering homeworld transferring my character off Dynamis, forfeiting the house I have there, in order to freely play the game with my friends as I'd like to be able to and, well, adding more to Aether's home world congestion issues as a result.

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Originally Posted by wirebones

I'm extremely disappointed that these concerns have not been addressed in the slightest this far out while Aether remains consistently locked out at any decent gaming hour. I'm now heavily considering homeworld transferring my character off Dynamis, forfeiting the house I have there, in order to freely play the game with my friends as I'd like to be able to and, well, adding more to Aether's home world congestion issues as a result.

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its what i had to wind up doing myself. now that at least some servers are opened up to xfer/character creation, i just pulled the trigger on moving my character off of primal to aether as many of my friends are on the DC as it stands and hated having to make each and every one to go out of their way to meet up with me with me being one of the only ones NOT on Aether at the time. so i just decided to say "fk it" and pay the $18 xfer fee to make it easier for those i play with. as it stands, you couldn't blast me off this DC for anything since i don't want to be locked out of it again for MONTHS at at time or for lord knows how long the next time it gets completely locked down again. its sad that doing this only adds to the problem but i feel i don't have much of a choice outside just to xfer or risk being locked out of my grp/friend circle again and have to make them go out their way to DC travel when it would just be easier for me to go to them. but alas idk what would be a solution but whatever this is just is NOT it.

I am extremely disappointed that this is still an issue at all. It has been months since Dawntrail, Square Enix could easily give us travel back, they simply won't. Absolutely horrible.