Re-merge Chaos and Light please

i've presence on both so whatever, re-merge away

saves me having to travel when i need to sneak stuff and money from one to other

I wonder which datacenter players will have to sacrifice their houses, FCs and linkshells to make this happen, just to please the PvE high difficulty content players.
You are not the center of the world + you had no need to gather on one datacenter to do this content in the first place, it worked very well on both before.
You did this to yourself and now you want the other players to pay the price, no thanks.

Meanwhile pvp players got shafted and didn't bring it on themselves, yet are being forced to DC travel to play ranked...

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Originally Posted by Valence

Meanwhile pvp players got shafted and didn't bring it on themselves, yet are being forced to DC travel to play ranked...

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Casual is almost dead too. 1 pool and a half at reset time in Light is no good. Waiting 8 min at reset on Chaos neither. Right now on Chaos, waiting time more than 30 min for Casual, while it queued good at the same hour like a month ago.


I'm talking about DF and PvP when some aims at high difficulty content players. /facepalm

Let Square implement instanced housing and find a solution for FCs and submarines. Linkshells can move in a minute. False problem.
That the DC merging poses an infrastructure problem is a real problem that belongs to Square. Where are the Cloud DCs we tested in 2023?

We did this to ourselves? What a joke. This is a problem that Light players can't see right now because they're taking advantage of the fact that LPDU has drained everything, not only high end content. Nevertheless, the number of players is dropping, and it's palpable in PvP in both DC, and Light will soon feel it in other contents. Let's continue to read "you did this to yourself" instead of demanding what would be best for the entire community.

Literally trying to get a 4man treasure hunt party going and it's impossible even through PF and shouting all over the region.
Not good.

Merge them.

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Originally Posted by Kirutsuki

Literally trying to get a 4man treasure hunt party going and it's impossible even through PF and shouting all over the region.
Not good.

Merge them.

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Just to be clear, SE split all the old DC into new DCs for all regions to improve efficiency, and the worlds were unstable in the past along with reducing load during new expansions, which has caused problems too. Also, they had tried to re-populate Crystal with a few older worlds, but it was deeply unpopular as they gave a free transfer to anyone who wanted to move back too, so this is why Dynamis is only made up of new worlds now.

It wouldn't make sense to re-merge them if it would make the remaining DC unstable again for them.

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Originally Posted by Trekkie22

Chaos PF is dead as hell right now. Re-merge them into one data centre or allow cross data centre PF and DF within the same region.

Absolute travesty the state of Chaos in general right now.

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They had to remove worlds from Japanese DC and merge them under new DC because their servers could not handle more than 8 worlds at once. You're asking for one server to handle 16?

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

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Any remotely serious raiders will permatransfer of course, this'll just cause Chaos DC to become hypercasual where you will create character if you don't care much for raiding

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Originally Posted by Underscore

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

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Don't worry, if they made DC travel inconvenient for everyone, then they will 100% transfer all to aether DC for good now.

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Originally Posted by Alicie

Any remotely serious raiders will permatransfer of course, this'll just cause Chaos DC to become hypercasual where you will create character if you don't care much for raiding

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Originally Posted by CCheshire

Don't worry, if they made DC travel inconvenient for everyone, then they will 100% transfer all to aether DC for good now.

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The outcome is basically the same, whether they keep DC travel as it is or make it a lot more inconvenient.
Either people keep DC travelling on mass to Aether/Light and leave their old server a ghost town, or the ones that really want to will pay for a server transfer to Aether/Light...and leave their old server a ghost town.

The cat was out of the bag when they introduced DC travel without considering the consequences, and it ain't going back in the bag.

"They should just make a cross-DC party finder."
I mean yeah, that would be nice but it has been over 2 years since DC travel was added and cross-DC PF is nowhere in sight. We don't actually know if they can do it in the first place.
And while we're twiddling our thumbs waiting for a solution that might not ever happen it is only going to get worse.

I’m a native from Light and I think that the fact that Light is more active than Chaos can be brought back to two factor or possibilities:

1- Chaos holds up legacy players (iirc) or the vast majority of EU players who started playing XIV back in the 2013z They grew sick of the game and left. Light players are mostly newly (I myself have been here around since 8 years) so still they have hope.
If SE doesn’t bring back its own game alive it’s just a matter of time before the same situation you see now on Chaos will be transferred here on Light.

2- I’ve been raiding for a while on Chaos due the fact my ex static was there. From what I recall Chaos “mentality” was more pointed towards creating pre formed parties from friends and groups of people who knew each other already and avoiding interacting with other people outside their circle.
Light’s is just a free-spirit mentality. You go where your heart is leading and meet whoever you meet in your path. Play together, be civil, have fun, clear the content see ya next week. (And sometimes we did).

So, these are my personal point of view of why Light has more activity than Chaos. Free to agree or disagree or to have different opinions.

I’m telling you this because I’d rather not to give my trust on SE implementing an “unified system” to solve the problem.
If so, there would be also the issue of player integration, but that’s not for today.
What is my suggestion is to start to implement on Chaos what has been already implemented on Light and see if it can work.
You should “export” what each of you of Chaos see as “good” and try it on your own Data Center, IF, and I mean as a goddamned big IF you want to start finding a path to a solution.
Or, if you don’t give a shit, you just jump on Light and respect how we do the thing, quietly so all we can have fun.

At the end of the day, be this problem or another it’s up to us find in solution, devs have shown us that they simply don’t give a fucking shit of their game.

There is no reason for Chaos to have all the ancient or legacy players and Light all the new ones. Chaos servers got split equally when SE decided to split DCs all across the board for ShB. Half of them ended up on the new Light DC while the other half remained on Chaos. It's not very different to what happened on NA: Aether got cracked in half and SE decided to move all the supermassive RP servers (that offered everything, raiding included) with absolutely dead worlds into the newly created Crystal DC. This I feel was also a mistake since Crystal from what I gather has been funneled as the RP DC over anything else, which forces players to travel to Aether/Primal for serious pve. I'm not speaking about the more recent Dynamis as this much like the OCE DC faced other challenges, namely the game not keeping its growth to meet population expectations.

If anything Chaos up until Endwalker was very slightly more active than Light until LPDU dramatically shifted the deal (and perhaps Syncademy to a smaller extent as well). When only one provider exists for a resource or service in need or very central to the playing experience, people are naturally going to flock more and more to the source of that service. Chaos should have offered its own LPDU (CPDU or whatever) if it wanted to keep its own activity, and hope both services would be equally valued and not one just dominating the other.

The dramatic difference between allowing server visit and DC travel is that the former didn't break the physical boundaries of the matchmaking and duty system that was already happening at the DC level. The latter literally shattered this by allowing players to overcome the very limitations that are still in place today with duty instancing (DF and PF) and that's the fundamental problem.

All in all, the game bleeding players combined with DC travel being allowed is essentially turning some DCs into the rust belt of XIV.

And I guess when new players come to the game some of them will ask beforehand which server they should choose, and everyone would say they should choose any server on Light DC because there are more people.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

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That would be rather extreme but they could start with not being able to create a PF unless you're from the DC. A lot of PF I see on Aether aren't even started by Aether people. SE could monitor the effects of a small change like that first to see if it helps the issue while also not implementing barriers to players wanting to join friends, which was something that SE said DC travel was supposed to help with.

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Originally Posted by Valence

If anything Chaos up until Endwalker was very slightly more active than Light until LPDU dramatically shifted the deal (and perhaps Syncademy to a smaller extent as well). When only one provider exists for a resource or service in need or very central to the playing experience, people are naturally going to flock more and more to the source of that service. Chaos should have offered its own LPDU (CPDU or whatever) if it wanted to keep its own activity, and hope both services would be equally valued and not one just dominating the other.

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I still remember this one quite well, as someone who went through the original Chaos server split and only stayed on Odin because my FC was still active at the time.
Pretty much all throughout Shadowbringers Chaos was known as the more active and successful DC when it came to raiding.

At some point, probably 5.3, I actually considered transferring to Chaos because my FC was dead at that point and the PF experience on Light during that tier was actually painful.
The patch lasted so long that the playerpool had degraded to the point that even weekly 2-chest clears were a dice roll and everyone remembers the disaster that was E8S Ilya Light Rampant.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

The outcome is basically the same, whether they keep DC travel as it is or make it a lot more inconvenient.
Either people keep DC travelling on mass to Aether/Light and leave their old server a ghost town, or the ones that really want to will pay for a server transfer to Aether/Light...and leave their old server a ghost town.

The cat was out of the bag when they introduced DC travel without considering the consequences, and it ain't going back in the bag.

"They should just make a cross-DC party finder."
I mean yeah, that would be nice but it has been over 2 years since DC travel was added and cross-DC PF is nowhere in sight. We don't actually know if they can do it in the first place.
And while we're twiddling our thumbs waiting for a solution that might not ever happen it is only going to get worse.

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Not really, as the said players who DC visit for raids still come back for their retainers, market sales, FC, FC houses, private houses, and friends on the same server tho. If they did a paid transfer, they would drain their old worlds badly enough it would make the market slower and empty along the main starter hubs to be desolate, causing more ppl to flee them to the bigger DC causing a domino effect or be trapped on the DC like Materia which has always been struggling to get new ppl to start there and remain there for good despite everyone can DC visit them for friends on different regions.

I have liked being on chaos it was fun and i met many great people but many of those have moved to light for the simple reason it's dead here and they can do anything on light and i can't blame them there is little here to keep them from leaving i myself have thought many times about just transferring to light the only thing that still stops me are my houses
knowing how much i them and how hard it would be to get a house let alone a large is really the only thing stopping me at this point when it comes to friends you can always just visit through dc travel
i just think they didn't really think this all through and react to things way to slow to fix problems like this at this point the only real option i see is make pf dc wide though this still would not fix the imbalance it would be a great step forward

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Originally Posted by ACE135

And I guess when new players come to the game some of them will ask beforehand which server they should choose, and everyone would say they should choose any server on Light DC because there are more people.

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I mean, why would you want new player to come to an empty server?

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Originally Posted by Alicie

I mean, why would you want new player to come to an empty server?

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I mean, assuming even when the population on both data centers would be equal but 50 % always hang out on the other data center for whatever reason and potentially new players where told to go to that data center with now 150 % population because obviously there are more palyers, could lead to the population of that data center getting bigger and bigger while otherwise new players would probably populate both data centers equally.

That could just be one factor contributing that one data center dies out.

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Originally Posted by OdrN

I wonder which datacenter players will have to sacrifice their houses, FCs and linkshells to make this happen, just to please the PvE high difficulty content players.

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Unless worlds get deleted in the merging process, no one should lose anything. But there is a reason each DC has the exact same amount of worlds, otherwise they wouldn't have made it this way long ago.
I think region-wide DF and PF would ultimately benefit more people because it's a system NA would also benefit from, specially Dynamis. They could have an extra server solely dedicated to holding instances in each region (so as long as you're in your home region, you shouldn't see a ping spike) and just throw us in there every time we go into an instance. Then back to our home servers once we're done.


Chaos is a pretty nice DC overall, and there's honestly not that much difference in raiding culture between Chaos and Light. Mostly because the vast majority of Chaos raiders go/travel to Light and adopt their strats and culture. Player integration was mentioned in another user's post and while I can imagine that being a bit more rough for NA, EU is fairly similar barring some details.


The culture of "raiding within your own group and not branching out" is not necessarily "Chaos" culture, we're forced into it because our PFs are empty. All the "free spirit" players just go to Light and use their PF because ours struggles to fill for an EX group. It sucks, but if you want to raid specifically in Chaos, you need to find friends or a static within the DC. I really hope they add a region-wide PF system.

as a chaos player i'm more on light due to base social-aspects the chaos feels soo.. empty

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

I'd rather they just upped the rewards for doing stuff on your own DC, something akin to "adventurer in need" but like, requesting locals instead. There needs to be incentive to make people stay, not punishments for traveling, because that just makes people want to circumvent said punishment by becoming a transfer instead.

Alternately, buff rewards based on data center status. Make playing on "Preferred+" actually feel, you know PREFERRED because one made the decision to join that data center to help it grow. Make the bonus apply to travelers too and you'd have folks from Aether/Primal/Crystal suddenly having a reason to visit the so-called "dead" data center when they're getting more for the time they spend over here, and who knows, maybe they'll find something that motivates them to transfer until eventually, data centers start leveling out.

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I think a carrot idea would help for general roulette content but a big part of the reason that people DC travel is for raiding. How do you give a bonus to doing something like Savage on your own DC with something that has limited loot and weekly lockouts?

A solution is easy in a way, although it would probably set the world on fire for a moment: remove the ability to queue up for anything on DCs other than your home DC, and wait for a while until the communities readjust themselves to a state prior to DC travel.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

That would be akin to a lockdown as Dynamis went through during Dawntrail launch, and the only thing that succeeded in doing was making some people transfer out the first chance they got. If anything this could be worse, because nothing would be stopping people from transferring during the suspension of queuing (as the lockdown barred transfers as much as traveling during those weeks).

There's also the issue that Dynamis never had a "state prior to DC travel" because we had it from the very beginning of the data center, so we've pretty much never developed any sense of only having our own worlds to rely on.

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That's because the game's been bleeding players steadily which is a different problem.

Just check how many houses are on chaos server. Specially Sagittarius server, incredible amount and yes people will always try to take larges first or mediums and rest is dead content. But devs don't seem to understand that nobody cares about small houses and their "fix" is never going to be implemented at this rate.

Check how many Large houses did Alpha server lose. In the span of several weeks, we had insane amount of larges getting emptied as people aren't interested so much into the game. So now it was the best opportunity to grab one if possible. Even my server still holds big number of empty plots but chaos is very specific. PF is dead and most of content is "go to light".

It's crazy since during/after Abyssos I've hardly done pf stuff in Chaos, only Light.

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Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

Just check how many houses are on chaos server. Specially Sagittarius server, incredible amount and yes people will always try to take larges first or mediums and rest is dead content. But devs don't seem to understand that nobody cares about small houses and their "fix" is never going to be implemented at this rate.

Check how many Large houses did Alpha server lose. In the span of several weeks, we had insane amount of larges getting emptied as people aren't interested so much into the game. So now it was the best opportunity to grab one if possible. Even my server still holds big number of empty plots but chaos is very specific. PF is dead and most of content is "go to light".

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Last night, a neighbor from my FC's ward moved/got demolished. A very nice medium plot. In my personal ward, I've seen both larges open up more than once since DT dropped. Worrying stuff.


I really wish Light and Chaos shared a PF, at the very least. I find that DF doesn't struggle that much to pop unless you're queueing with a bunch of DPS and no supports or a strange party setup... but PF is just bad.

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Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

Just check how many houses are on chaos server. Specially Sagittarius server, incredible amount and yes people will always try to take larges first or mediums and rest is dead content. But devs don't seem to understand that nobody cares about small houses and their "fix" is never going to be implemented at this rate.

Check how many Large houses did Alpha server lose. In the span of several weeks, we had insane amount of larges getting emptied as people aren't interested so much into the game. So now it was the best opportunity to grab one if possible. Even my server still holds big number of empty plots but chaos is very specific. PF is dead and most of content is "go to light".

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Tbh I as a player from EU moved to play on NA servers just because they're significantly more populated and are not further divided by language as much as EU ones. Idk why EU suffers a lot, maybe lack of translation to popular languages, we don't have CIS languages and they're huge playerbase, Turkey, Italy, Spain also left out, no regional prices for poorer countries too that are a lot in Europe (Europe, not EU, though even within EU income significantly varies)

If we've been slowly but surely getting player numbers back to pre shb levels or close enough, think about it. EU used to only have a single DC with a similar amount of servers than current Light or Chaos (I believe pre ShB EU was about 10 servers, today it's 8 and 8). That single DC shared the same queues. This means that in comparison to HW/SB, we're currently playing with about 40% less activity and players on duty instancing than we used to before ShB.

They can't just re-merge, apparently, based on their infrastructure. Cause that would put the EU DC at 16 worlds which causes instability, in other words a merge would mean worlds getting yeeted. Just make a cross DC party finder at this point. Less hassle.

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Originally Posted by Nyastra

They can't just re-merge, apparently, based on their infrastructure. Cause that would put the EU DC at 16 worlds which causes instability, in other words a merge would mean worlds getting yeeted. Just make a cross DC party finder at this point. Less hassle.

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This, and also a cross-DC party finder would be something other regions like NA would benefit from. They can use that technology to help Dynamis's population too.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

This, and also a cross-DC party finder would be something other regions like NA would benefit from. They can use that technology to help Dynamis's population too.

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For sure, I don't know what they'll do about OCE though, that's a lost cause.

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Originally Posted by Nyastra

For sure, I don't know what they'll do about OCE though, that's a lost cause.

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It worries me as well. My only ideas are possibly sharing PF/DF with JP, but since apparently the reason the technology to travel between all regions is because of them not vibing with us... At least let OCE people come to NA/EU! T_T

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Originally Posted by Shistar

It worries me as well. My only ideas are possibly sharing PF/DF with JP, but since apparently the reason the technology to travel between all regions is because of them not vibing with us... At least let OCE people come to NA/EU! T_T

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As an EU player, I'm fine with them coming to us or going to NA or JP, I just don't want NA to be able to come to us. Very specifically left that behind and wish to avoid them.

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Originally Posted by Nyastra

As an EU player, I'm fine with them coming to us or going to NA or JP, I just don't want NA to be able to come to us. Very specifically left that behind and wish to avoid them.

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Easy fix, move to JP! /jk
Now seriously, that's not fair, and it's pretty mean. Everyone should be able to go everywhere.
If you're worried about raiding, people will most likely stay in their DCs because no one wants 100+ ping added for no good reason.
If your concern is more along the lines of stalking, nothing necessarily stops them from following you to EU, unfortunately...


Most people will still stay within their regions unless they have a specific reason to visit, such as seeing friends. It's not like you will suddenly see the entirety of NA in Spriggan's Limsa when they open region travelling. If you are in a smaller world or like hanging out in areas that aren't very busy, you'll see them even less.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Easy fix, move to JP! /jk
Now seriously, that's not fair, and it's pretty mean. Everyone should be able to go everywhere.
If you're worried about raiding, people will most likely stay in their DCs because no one wants 100+ ping added for no good reason.
If your concern is more along the lines of stalking, nothing necessarily stops them from following you to EU, unfortunately...


Most people will still stay within their regions unless they have a specific reason to visit, such as seeing friends. It's not like you will suddenly see the entirety of NA in Spriggan's Limsa when they open region travelling. If you are in a smaller world or like hanging out in areas that aren't very busy, you'll see them even less.

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Nah, I hear you though and I get it. Sure would be nice in an ideal world, cause ngl, I'd love to hop to my JP friends on my main.

However, SQE's tools lack the ability to protect targeted individuals from exactly that.
Raiding cool, people will likely play where they have less ping because if you don't then you're really a masochist or something (?).
The stalking, while one could technically make another character and follow, it's a lot more work for these people than just hopping.

Not against everyone traveling entirely, just would like them to step up the safety game a tad to set boundaries and not be accommodating toward the people who made life a living hell to satisfy their own narcissism.

Example if I blacklist a character - it should blacklist that service account from my side. That would help I think. But alas. Here we are.

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Originally Posted by Nyastra

Not against everyone traveling entirely, just would like them to step up the safety game a tad to set boundaries and not be accommodating toward the people who made life a living hell to satisfy their own narcissism.

Example if I blacklist a character - it should blacklist that service account from my side. That would help I think. But alas. Here we are.

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Yes, of course I agree with this. I thought the current BL behavior was blacklisting the entire service account already, though? Wasn't this feature the reason PlayerScope became a thing, after all?

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Yes, of course I agree with this. I thought the current BL behavior was blacklisting the entire service account already, though? Wasn't this feature the reason PlayerScope became a thing, after all?

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I'm actually not sure? Since moving I haven't really paid *that* much attention to it all. I'll have a look into it? Cause if so, then open the damn GATES.

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Originally Posted by Nyastra

I'm actually not sure? Since moving I haven't really paid *that* much attention to it all. I'll have a look into it? Cause if so, then open the damn GATES.

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"Not only that, but any additional characters made on that person's account will also be invisible—though it's worth noting that this part only applies to any characters who are made from Dawntrail's release onward, and the blacklist will be able to distinguish between ones made pre and post-expansion."

So not sure if this means that it only applies to characters created later on or all? or if this is invis specific details?

Regardless, if this applies to the service account (I'm not bothered about visible or not) then that's news I'm happy about.