[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

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Originally Posted by Qorani

If their rewards offerings are enough, then why is Dynamis still having issues with population? It really does seem that no one has a compelling reason to go there.

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I don't know what you mean by still. This is minimum 3-4x the population Dynamis had throughout Endwalker even on patch days.
https://i.imgur.com/LfjxX2w.png

Then surely a fair amount of the issues that you cited are either nonexistent or significantly reduced at the moment?

Also, to not post twice regarding your previous discussion about queues on savage patch day. Despite all of the extended queues for DC travel, throughout the day as I hopped from DC to DC delivering gear, and even during peak hours going to Dynamis, my login queue when I got there was never more than 30-40 people. On day one of savage, during peak hours. If anything you said about "you should have expected high queues" is accurate, that means that they moved all of the login queues to DC travel queues that we're actively crashing and throwing errors. Even if it was intentional for them to shift the queues to DC travel, errors and bugs are not intended.

Not even to mention the issue of still having to pick a non-crowded server to jump to when you start to DC travel being potentially locked to DC travel players for long periods of time when you get there. I tried to go to Primal during the middle of the day today, when congestion was reasonably at its lowest, and still couldn't get in.

Stop defending the problem and start proposing a solution that people can agree on.

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Originally Posted by Qorani

If their rewards offerings are enough, then why is Dynamis still having issues with population? It really does seem that no one has a compelling reason to go there.

It makes one think... that maybe the devs haven't made it feel worth it? That maybe they should have added additional worlds to pre-existing data centers instead? Not my job to fix things since I'm not a game dev, but the issues are apparent.

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As in free character boosts, free housing plots, list goes on. In short all the stuff SE is not going to do..

Made an account just to post here about this issue and how awful it is.

Why would you open data centers, let us make new friends across all of them only to then RIP AWAY my ability to hang out with them anymore? So much for having people over to my in-game house I worked tirelessly to decorate, they'll never see it now. This change is so blind to the social aspect of this game it is astounding to me how far they missed the mark with it.

I have lost a LOT of faith in the team over this one and I've been here since day 1 of ARR.... beyond dissapointed with this. I will simply never be able to visit my friends ever again on certain servers now because they are ALWAYS congested as a result of being a social hub.

I came here in solidarity with a lot of the folks who are upset by this. I have been a long proponent of data center and world travel systems and the way congestion issues are being addressed, DESPITE the fact that SE's main concerns about congestion during launch have not been realized feels incredibly rushed and dismissive of the community.

I'm also very displeased with this system. Since the creation of cross-DC travel, I've made many friends between the data centers and have also since moved to Dynamis with the promise that I would still be able to see all my friends on my original DC because of the data center travel system, but now I can no longer do that and I'm effectively stranded. This is a poor solution to the congestion issue and makes the data center travel system practically non-functional on NA! Square Enix, PLEASE reconsider this!

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Originally Posted by Qorani

Then surely a fair amount of the issues that you cited are either nonexistent or significantly reduced at the moment?

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Significantly reduced. Bozja is hit or miss depending on the day, market is slowly building up but not main data center level yet, other areas such as queue's are better, casual pvp is popping. Instead of PF being blank or having 2-3 listings we have 6 Extreme pf's and 27 Savage PF's currently.

As for the queue system during peak, JP twitter already stated that these errors are not problematic. There is no mention of them even trying to fix it.
https://x.com/FF_XIV_JP/status/1818498557399466211
"About data center travel congestion
Since patch 7.05, the number of users using Data Center Travel has increased significantly, and we apologize for the inconvenience caused by the congestion.
If the estimated travel time displayed when selecting the DC/world to move to is "Expected to take a long time due to congestion", the wait time for data center travel may exceed 1 hour because it is extremely crowded, or Errors may occur due to timeouts.
Even if the client closes due to an error while waiting for your turn after applying for a move, the data center travel process itself will proceed without any problems, so we apologize for the inconvenience, but please wait for a while. Please restart the client after that.
Please note that if the character selection screen is displayed at the data center before the move, it means that the application has not been completed, so please apply again."

They just released a known issue after patch 7.05 lodestone that made no mention of the login errors. That has to be something they can't fix.

And there is no solution to be agreed on. Yoshi P flat out said he wanted to get rid of discrepancies between the worlds and data centers. Data Center Travel creates discrepancies from how the community uses it when it's completely free and not restricted. Even if they disabled PF/DF use, disabled MB use, you still mess up the logins on that world and create barren social areas from where you left that Yoshi P said they do consider. Places like Uldah/New Gridania/Limsa they want populated for newer players. Your presence on another DC is problematic in itself if its not for a really short time period. They implemented it, the community segregated and messed up the health balance of the worlds, and now it has to be taken away if Square doesn't want to invest 3 years of development time just to possibly find a different solution. Development time that could be spent on other things that are more valuable in the day to day of the player base. No world/DC including Dynamis is going to be opened up without restriction because the community will flood it and create another Aether. This isn't the negotiation stage, this is the head of the ship already decided the direction of the feature and you have to deal with it.

Hello, I'm not necessarily affected by the travel changes, but rather the labeling of Seraph as a Congested server. Congested in what form? Our login queues are back to under 40 players. My recent content queue times have been horrendous, meaning all the people padding our population have left. We even lost our Road to 90 buff, to which I've asked a few people how they felt as somewhat recent transfers intending to be extremely casual players, and this change ruined their drive to continue logging in. Whoever made the decision to label Seraph congested has clearly never been to Dynamis, where queues die off after midnight CT and Frontlines didn't even pop for many people even after over 300 hours of queuing (yes we've intentionally waited). We have to move over to other DCs just to even see alliance content most evenings.

I know none of us who already lost Road to 90 will get it back, but at least return Seraph to what it used to be. It might be the biggest Dynamis world, but people hardly last more than a month on this server before moving of to Aether for their queue times.

FF14 is a very social game and this update disrupt that massivly.
And this will lead to a lot of bad will.

And its clear to see Obscura/Voidsend that this is the case.
Also its not as if BU3 is famous for there well thought out decisions.
Look at the Forum you have plenty of proof of that.

They really chose to implement the most half-baked method. Just remove any travel restrictions for Dynamis, at least, it is ridiculous that a DC that already struggles with filling its queues should have the same travel limits that the other DCs do.

I get stuck in inifinite dc travel loop, and when I do make it it's after like 3+ hours. I gave up and parked my character on my static's world thinking hey I'll just log in early before our raid and not log off. NOPE. I am still literally blocked from logging in cause "not my homeworld". I am actually getting replaced now in the static because they want to raid, and I LITERALLY cannot join them to play because every NA dc is ALWAYS congested. For reference I have played with this group with zero issues for almost 5 tiers now. But because Square implemented this change it's impossible to play with friends now. Like what were they even thinking... DC travel worked before, it was just slow. Now with the changes DC travel is "OPEN" but because NA is always congested there is zero way to play together. I'm just blocked from playing with my friends ever looks like. Might as well just quit the game at this point if square refuses to acknowledge they effed up.

I'm just confused. Why would they make a feature work fine for two years straight just to break it for no reason? I've made a lot of friends on Crystal and I can't even hang out over there unless I log in way too early and spend way too long there. That's all this change encourages people to do.

Last time I saying this. Characters who reside on a dc/world should get log in priortiy over visitors. The restrictions are too limit visitors so more players who reside on said dc/server can log on. Its not hard understand and selfish to think you have a right to log into a dc/server you dont reside on.

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Originally Posted by badamlyanhua

Hello, I'm not necessarily affected by the travel changes, but rather the labeling of Seraph as a Congested server. Congested in what form? Our login queues are back to under 40 players.

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Congestion is tied to how many players regularly sign in to a world overall and not how many sign in at the same time for the login queue. That's why the original consequence of being labeled as Congested stopping people from home world transferring there or creating new characters. There's open world congestion and then login congestion that are separate. I do agree that they should've kept the Road to 90 buff though.

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Originally Posted by Ayalu

FF14 is a very social game and this update disrupt that massivly.
And this will lead to a lot of bad will.

And its clear to see Obscura/Voidsend that this is the case.
Also its not as if BU3 is famous for there well thought out decisions.
Look at the Forum you have plenty of proof of that.

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100%. I'm just pragmatic in saying that the good will they gained will be higher than the bad will which is what Yoshi P has to consider. How many people you piss off isn't important, it's how many people you make happy. For every venue that lost their staff and guests, there's venues that will gain that traffic. For every static broken up, those are members able for other groups to pick up. For every friend group that got broken up, new one's will be created locally. And the pissed off people definitely don't mean anything if they aren't unsubbing. There's bad will with pvp rewards, viera/hrothgar headware, glam restrictions with gender and inventory management, materia lack of creativity, job balance and content design, support system with GM's, MSQ being botched writing wise, they have a lot bigger concerns toward a discussion of "this game is bad, don't come here" than people not able to go to a different server freely. A new player doesn't care about that, and when they find out it's for their benefit leveling up, they're definitely not going to care. DC Travel just isn't a selling point, but having empty markets and worlds is.

It's honestly astounding how little thought or testing must've gone into these changes. Should be reverted but I'm not confident they will be.

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

Last time I saying this. Characters who reside on a dc/world should get log in priortiy over visitors. The restrictions are too limit visitors so more players who reside on said dc/server can log on. Its not hard understand and selfish to think you have a right to log into a dc/server you dont reside on.

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All fine and dandy but that hardly excuses the horrendous implementation.
Tell one a expected time of one minut but then you experience dozends crashes and times of an hour+.

Even when one assumes the entire idea is great and should be implemented the execution is very bad.

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Originally Posted by Ayalu

All fine and dandy but that hardly excuses the horrendous implementation.
Tell one a expected time of one minut but then you experience dozends crashes and times of an hour+.

Even when one assumes the entire idea is great and should be implemented the execution is very bad.

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Issues with it can be fixed. Allowing people to cancel the travel and return home is a start.

How often do people *actually* have trouble logging into their home world? It's happened to me a scant handful of times, but it was never notable enough to affect my experience. This, on the other hand, very much is so far. I know I'm not looking for new friend groups or raid partners... I'm just giving both up. I had very close friends, and it was only fun because it was with them. I don't think I'm alone in that regard. I don't think this is going to make a lot of people happy. 99% of the posts defending this are Obscura/Voidsent. The others are mostly Nana. I don't really see a lot of people chiming in on how much they love this change.

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Originally Posted by RaenBlackMage

How often do people *actually* have trouble logging into their home world? It's happened to me a scant handful of times, but it was never notable enough to affect my experience. This, on the other hand, very much is so far. I know I'm not looking for new friend groups or raid partners... I'm just giving both up. I had very close friends, and it was only fun because it was with them. I don't think I'm alone in that regard. I don't think this is going to make a lot of people happy. 99% of the posts defending this are Obscura/Voidsent. The others are mostly Nana. I don't really see a lot of people chiming in on how much they love this change.

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1) If you're happy about the change, what's the primary reason for even signing into the forums to begin with
2)How many complaints have you seen from Dynamis people other than 1 Seraph person that's primarily mad at the buff being gone/congestion status and not the travel restrictions in general
3) Can I have your stuff since you're quitting the game? I'm assuming with no friends and no pve content, you're going to let your membership drop.

Yeah, there is no way in the nine hells I would give you my stuff. I am clinging to the hope that these changes will be reverted, or altered so that I CAN see my friends again.

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Originally Posted by Qorani

This isn't supposed to be a good thing lol. Players are suffering (I know the exact wording there sounds hyperbolic, but a better way to phrase it isn't coming to me at the moment) because of the devs not knowing how to handle their game and implementing features that blatantly degrade what was an acceptable player experience before now.

Please don't defend this. They took a feature that people liked - aside from some pf issues - and made it tentatively unusable at best.

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Originally Posted by Qorani

I'll agree that the Crystal and Primal pf issues are somewhat valid, but you can't attribute the Dynamis issues to DC travel.

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This is a very disingenuous downplaying of the issue. There was nothing "acceptable" about what DC travel (or more accurately how players chose to use DC travel) was doing to the game. You're painting it like "oh well maybe a couple people here and there had a teensie weensie issue with PF sometimes" when in reality PF was completely destroyed on every DC that wasn't the anointed DC of that region, which is to say nothing of the countless negative ripple effects into other areas of the game.

Not only that, but the troubles of Dynamis were 100% because of DC travel. The census has consistently shown that Dynamis has plenty of players to do content with, they just never stayed on their home DC because of DC travel. It was a self fulfilling prophecy, just like the Aether raiding thing.

Was this the best way to go about solving the issue? That's debatable, but something had to give eventually. I'm sure the devs were acutely aware of the shitstorm this change would cause but decided the change was less damage to the community than what the community was doing to itself with its DC dogpile shenanigans. It's unfortunate that people are having trouble playing with their friends now but as others have said, if the community used DC travel responsibly no action would have been needed. It's not the first time everyone has had to deal with a tool being removed or restricted due to some people misusing it and it certainly won't be the last.

You cannot seriously be arguing that Dynamis's PF and population issues are because of DC travel. You know what would happen to Dynamis if DC travel stopped working or never happened? People would have left. You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf when they could just go back to any of the other data centers. The reason that some people were even on Dynamis was because they could go there with relatively low risk.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

It's not the first time everyone has had to deal with a tool being removed or restricted due to some people misusing it and it certainly won't be the last.

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This was my viewpoint. My old game had a lot of features and content they just removed from the game entirely if it was too inconvenient to fix. We used to be able to go between US and EU servers on PS4 like what PC could. But the method that we could do it that involved having 2 clients on the console that interacted with another helpful feature they implemented called Linkdead. Originally if you DC'd from content, you would reconnect into open world and have to be re-invited to the instance instead of just dying and respawning mid-raid. The code for linkdead that was helpful to everyone that ran pve and pvp content, also allowed for an exploit that allowed people to freeze the account wide currencies we had, and we could use EU to reset the currency values after spending them. They removed linkdead from the game entirely and it didn't return even after 5+ years, and EU server on console got made to instantly freeze/crash your console. No longer able to play with EU people like PC could. If there was a raid that was bugged or getting abused by speed hackers, they'd take it away from the menu entirely like what Square did the pvp maps. I'm used to content/features getting ripped and not having an ETA on returning.

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Originally Posted by Qorani

You know what would happen to Dynamis if DC travel stopped working or never happened? People would have left. You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf.

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So, this is exactly what Materia is. Materia has an even lower population than Dynamis does and they literally created community discords and organized with Elemental from JP (where most of them came from) to host events and get content done because it didn't happen naturally. They still have FC's and venues, statics, gpose studios, streamers, etc. The people I know from there, actually got pissed off when Square Enix opened up Cross Region travel because most venue people from NA and EU disrespected the culture they had from JP, shouting and advertising everywhere including in Novice Network when spam isn't part of what they do. Everything was loud and annoying after people showed up and a decent amount of natives avoided the new crowded public areas because the entire vibe of what they were used to for years had changed. I had to reach out on discord to find out why my friends weren't in Limsa where they normally were. Materia isn't dying, it's just not growing because OCE is a small section of the community. I expected Square Enix to funnel Xbox entirely into Dynamis when it came out because that would've pumped the queue's for lower content and given them the buffs they needed along with housing opportunities, but I guess funneling travelers was a better idea to them.

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Originally Posted by Qorani

You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf when they could just go back to any of the other data centers.

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I'm not sure why you're so mind blown by this concept. Launching new servers to accommodate a growing population is nothing new to the genre. Server communities grow organically over time as new players make their first characters and old players transfer for any number of reasons. The only unusual wrinkle in this case was the introduction of DC travel which killed the DC before it ever had a chance to naturally grow that community due to everyone spending all their time elsewhere.

I do not care about any arguments any of you have to give in favor of this change. We've been having unrestricted DC travel for years at this point, and restricting it to the point where it basically becomes worthless is just going to alienate players that have spent the last two years building connections on other servers, including statics. SE made their choice to implement this system. They cannot roll it back without severe consequences.

Pretty much what Lemstar said. There is nothing positive about this change. It is GUTTING the social scene. In a social game.

They have to roll this back, if they care about their player base at all. The fact that there's been nothing but silence on the VERY OBVIOUS issues since Tuesday speaks volumes.

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Originally Posted by xanatosdc

There is nothing positive about this change. It is GUTTING the social scene. In a social game.

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That's a very "don't care, got mine" take.
The fundamental dilemma here is that different parts of the community need very different things.

The non-gameplay social part of the game, including stuffe like RP, need DC travel to be freely possible, otherwise you are tearing apart communities that have formed over the past expansion.
The gameplay part of the game needs DC travel to be limited at least for now, else you end up with dead datacentres with long queue times and just flatly being unable to do certain content on them, savage and ultimate raids in particular; and thereby forcing anyone who still subjects themselves to DC travel and becoming a part of the problem to a plethora of disadvantages over people actually "native" to a given DC.
Both of these cause frustration and anger and do hurt the game. Which one causes more damage, I have no data to say.

And until they can either implement Cross-DC Party Finder, or remove DC-travel limitations such as no FC buffs, no retainers, etc., all you can do is pick one side and brave the fallout and negative consequences for the game that come with it.
Of course, Square made it a lot worse by exposing a functional problem in the DC travel system with this measure, with people getting stuck "between" DCs, which is a bug they ought to fix as quickly as they can.

In trying to regulate DC travel, Square went for using a system they already had in place, that being the DC travel capacity. There are perhaps other stop-gap solution that shouldn't be too difficult to implement until they can fix the more fundamental issues in 2-3 years that I'd like to see them try. Something that doesn't require a rework of server architecture and could be accomplished with a single extra check somewhere, and is less obstructive to the non-gameplay parts of the game.
Preventing people from making PFs on other DCs (but still being able to join them) might be a decent start. Maybe also preventing a party from queuing if more than 50% of its members come from a different DC than the one they are queueing on. There are options left that I hope they explore.

For what it's worth, even though the current state of the fix is a buggy mess, I am glad they are attempting to resolve the situation, cause the pre-DT state of PF was absolutely untenable.

Except I can't even do the "gameplay" part of the game now because half the people I play with are not from my DC. I'm not just talking about RP.

Can someone explain to me what happened? I'm reading the lodestone post and I'm confused.

Just adding my two gil in as someone who owns one venue and helps manage several others, this has us all pretty worried. The open public RP nights in Buscarron's Druthers on Balmung that a few of us have been working to promote had a fraction of its usual population the other day due to the changes. I have the reopening of my fight club venue tonight, and I'm already expecting it's going to be a much lighter crowd than pre-Dawntrail. We have a number of off-DC participants and patrons, and I really don't want them to be excluded because of this.

Members of my static also unable to raid with us on Aether, and we can't travel to another server or we get locked in queue for an hour, then when we finally transfer over, we have to spend another hour trying to login because "Servers are congested, Visiting Characters cannot login."

It's single handedly the biggest blunder they've made involving world travel.

I get that it was to prevent too many people on one world, but it's preventing their community from interacting with each other.

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Originally Posted by KuroMaboroshi

There are perhaps other stop-gap solution that shouldn't be too difficult to implement until they can fix the more fundamental issues in 2-3 years that I'd like to see them try. Something that doesn't require a rework of server architecture and could be accomplished with a single extra check somewhere, and is less obstructive to the non-gameplay parts of the game.
Preventing people from making PFs on other DCs (but still being able to join them) might be a decent start. Maybe also preventing a party from queuing if more than 50% of its members come from a different DC than the one they are queueing on. There are options left that I hope they explore.

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I agree with this, honestly. There are plenty of other methods they could try that don't interfere as egregiously with the social/community aspect of the game. I would like to see them attempt one of these first rather than what they did, which was implement a sweeping change on a major patch day without any forewarning.

Hell, I'd even be happier with a queue system for DC/world travel if they're adamant about keeping the restrictions in place. Anything that isn't a "click and pray" system reminiscent of the old housing placards. I'll wait in line as long as there's a line to wait in.

I moved to Dynamis to get housing because i knew I could travel to other DC to run content. Dynamis is so dead a vast majority of the content I want to run cant be because there are no players (spent 1h 46m in que). This change now prevents me from playing content, visiting friends, try new venues, or even play the base game in a reasonable amount of time. They need to change this back, I even made a forum account just to post this. By far the worst thing they have done since i started playing

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Originally Posted by Fluffysilverkitsune

I moved to Dynamis to get housing because i knew I could travel to other DC to run content. Dynamis is so dead a vast majority of the content I want to run cant be because there are no players (spent 1h 46m in que). This change now prevents me from playing content, visiting friends, try new venues, or even play the base game in a reasonable amount of time. They need to change this back, I even made a forum account just to post this. By far the worst thing they have done since i started playing

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This is why most people I know from Dynamis ended up there, because it was the easiest (or only) way to obtain a house - and I don't blame them. I've considered rolling characters on Dynamis for housing, but if DC travel is going to be such an issue, then there's really no point to doing that now. If housing was more available on Crystal, I'm sure there's a lot of people who wouldn't have bothered moving datacenters.

As someone that tries to meet up with friends regularly to do maps, this change has made our lives very difficult. I (Balmung-peep), often go to Seraph to meet with my friends and queue up for stuff so they can keep their FC bonuses. Now, we all have to go to Cuchulainn just to meet up for maps, and we all lose our FC bonuses.

Hunts have been made much harder for me, as there's no guarantee I'll make it in on time (if at all).

Additionally, I help run a RP fighting venue. Not all of the staff is on Balmung, often coming to us from other places in Crystal. Obviously, not all of our visitors are from Balmung, either. We've just lost 3/4ths of our visitors from where we were prior to this change, as now only people on Balmung can swing by reliably.

This change isn't helpful. Prevent new characters if you want, but this is doing more harm than good for the average playerbase.

I understand them trying to keep everyone and their mom from descending upon us on Aether for raiding, but they made it really annoying for everyone with the restrictions. I'm fine with there being some restrictions, but I think they might have made them way too strict. The 1 person in my static that isn't on Aether has to world transfer 7 hours before raid to ensure he doesn't have to fight crowds to get in at prime time.

I think what I hate about this most is that it's actively incentivizing us to participate in the behavior they're trying to quell. I'm being far more stubborn about trying to get "my slot" on foreign data centers now. It's not incentivizing me to play on my own world and data center, it's prompting me to hog the space on the desired location for longer than I even intend to use it.

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Originally Posted by angienessyo

I understand them trying to keep everyone and their mom from descending upon us on Aether for raiding, but they made it really annoying for everyone with the restrictions. I'm fine with there being some restrictions, but I think they might have made them way too strict. The 1 person in my static that isn't on Aether has to world transfer 7 hours before raid to ensure he doesn't have to fight crowds to get in at prime time.

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Inversely, I am the only Aether-dweller in my static, and a majority are on crystal. It is frustrating to no end, as I either cannot access fc buffs, my retainers, or do certain things that SE locked down to people only on their homeworld (Diadem, timed gathering nodes to be precise) for multiple hours each day, or spend 1+ hour trying to get over to crystal right before raid.

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Originally Posted by Eskat

I think what I hate about this most is that it's actively incentivizing us to participate in the behavior they're trying to quell. I'm being far more stubborn about trying to get "my slot" on foreign data centers now. It's not incentivizing me to play on my own world and data center, it's prompting me to hog the space on the desired location for longer than I even intend to use it.

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I was thinking along these lines myself. I was contemplating going and parking my ass on aether and never logging out. Might do that around 6am when I can actually get over there.