From what I've seen, a lot of the "new players" are just alt characters of people who wanted the free game time or another house.
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Very true, but the problem of leaving for faster queues seems more the concern. It really shouldn't be a thing that I can jump to Aether and queue. It shouldn't matter what server I am on. At this point our servers are just names next to our character names. They've eroded any sort of server identity long ago. It seems rather pointless to have that barrier as well. Maybe soon they will add it. Let's hope for so for the sake of Dynamis.
They should make some kind of small reward for running content on your home data center, whether gil or clusters, or XP. As it stands now, having a dynamis character gives you the road to 80 buff on every server. Some reason to stay specifically on your home DC would fix this, you'd want to stay on your home DC but could move if you needed to.
It would also help fill out certain side content that people seem to DC travel for, and player numbers suffer, like Bozja, Eureka, and Hunts. Last time I went into Dynamis Bozja, it was 2 people and me in the southern front for 2 hours. That pretty much makes CLL, DR, and Dal impossible to run without traveling to another DC, and there's no reason for people to stay if everyone else is going to travel for it.
I am still confused with the initial mania of rushing into a backup storage DC spun up just in case 7.0 might kill the servers again.
It is the California City, California of data centers.
Unfortunately I recently joined one of those alt free companies. Good people mind you it's just not enjoyable to play with people who only play on their alt when they feel like. Again nice people it's just when you are alone like 95% of the time playing it doesn't feel like much of a free company.
I agree that the option to DC hop hurts of queue times, but I feel forcing people to queue locally would hurt Dynamis far more as people would just refuse to make a character here. Not everyone has hours of time to play each day, and certain queues can easily eat up 30+ minutes (and usually far, far, longer). I was sitting in alliance roulette yesterday for over 45 minutes before it popped. I've had an alliance queue that took almost 4 hours. Earlier in the week I was trying to clear some of the ShB & SB raids for glams, and even with 5 items selected, it was still showing over 30+ minutes. I finally moved as I didn't have that much actual playtime at that moment.
Also, the queue times lie. I can't tell you how many times I've queued up for something and it will initially show less than 5 minutes, only for it to grow to over an hour. The opposite has also happened, shows like a 20 minute wait, only for it to pop sooner....but that is faaaaar more rare in my personal experience.
I personally will queue locally when I can, but I can't fault anyone for actually moving to be able to get things done in a timely manner vs staying for the "needs of the DC". I don't think that means they're selfish. We don't owe anyone or the DC our free time to just sit around in a queue. Do I hope more people will queue locally? Yes, of course. And I'm optimistic that with time it will continue to get better. It's already better than it was a month ago, but it's just going to be a slow process.
Cross-DC queueing when? :3
I prefer to queue on Dynamis when I can. Sometimes the queues can pop fairly regularly now, at certain times. I was able to do every roulette last night on Dynamis. Select things good luck with those ever popping, or certain things you need to directly queue for.
In general though, the queue times do lie, same with the adventurer in need, it seems. It's all over the place.
No I agree with you. I just feel like a lot of people say they're trying to help, but they exclusively queue on other servers. I had a few people in my old FC do that. It was faster to jump over to Aether then wait 20 mins for a healer queue. I understand their frustrations. Like you said forcing people isn't the best option. I agree with that. I just wish people understood what datacenter hoping does to Dynamis. I'm not anti people playing with their friends, but in a lot of ways datacenter travel hurts us more than it helps them. I wish it didn't but that's the truth. But I think as long as we stick to our guns and at least try queue here when we can we can make a difference. If not for us than for others. But I'm no server architect. I'm just a man who wants to help anyway I can to make this place more of a home.