[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

The wild thing about this is they introduced a system specifically to make it easier to visit friends on other servers then made it hard and frustratating to do so an expansion later. This is such a bad change. It makes it harder for FC's and communities who host events on more populated servers to allow members in those communities interaction. My friends can visit me, but I can't visit the ones on servers like Balmung or Seraph (The two big Rp servers on the Crystal and Dynamis data centers specifically.) Fortunately for me most of my friends are on mateus but it's still so bad.

i was looking forward to attending events on NA DCs again but i guess i'm shit out of luck until they do something about this. i can't see my friends on aether or crystal and they can't come to my world on primal either. raid progs have been canceled because they couldn't get in nor out of dynamis with all other worlds being barred outright. far too many horror stories about people getting booted while waiting and then being unable to log in for hours on end. seriously if this isn't changed soon i'm likely going to drop my NA character entirely. aether is practically perma congested so i can't transfer back there, and there's no point in having an alt if i can't play with my american friends anywhere but materia anyway.

what was the intention behind this change anyway? on NA it looks like it ruined everyone's cross DC statics and only further helped screw over the population of dynamis. if they were trying to fix the "damage" done to each data center's respective party finder then they probably should have taken action sooner and not this long after implementing the system. just seems like a stupid decision they didn't think about at all. like, what's the appeal of transfering to a less populated data center now when you can't even keep playing with the friends that stay behind? why get new friends into the game if they can only create a character on new worlds and you can't even play together? and then there's the cool new feature of even if you manage to travel there's no guarantee you can log in at all. any amount of queue will already bar you from entering entirely when you're a traveler so good luck during peak hours. i just don't see how this positively affects anything.

Ah so this is collateral damage for like....people having this scuffed hivemind to pile up in one DC? That sucks, I think everyone should enjoy that freedom, then again when given freedom people piled up on Aether/Light and made them the region's 'raid' DCs. I used to see plenty of PFs on Chaos to keep me occupied, but ever since cross DC happened, there was barely any so I stopped doing content. DC travel is tedious to me, I hate losing access to my retainers and buffs.

I don't know that this is the best solution, in an ideal world we'd have the ability to have a cross world PF/DF within the same region so people don't have to run to a certain DC to do content. Then DC travel can be for going there to hang out with friends or for PVE stuff.

I really don't understand the change, to use the phrase "if it ain't broke don't fix it" the launch of Dawntrail was super smooth and the system worked well as it was. Now you got people unable to leave and unable to return home easily and you (se) turned on automatic house demolition.

Edit: if they are worried about people flooding a dc for raids, they should try to work out that cross DC party finder they mentioned a few years back, maybe use the cloud DC as a instance holder for cross DC parties? I'm sure people wouldn't mind a little loading time if it meant a smoother overall gameplay with more people across the world

Any of that would require that they care at all about their player base outside of getting our money

It is pretty annoying cuz while trying to get my girlfriend into the game she kept hitting barrier of entry upon barrier of entry trying to make a character on my data cluster, ended up having to go to a completely different one and I'm scared to do any DC travel right now lol. RIP.

I agree with the OP. Ever since these travel restrictions I have not been able to progress with the savage raids because of the low population on Dynamis. The selections for PF is really low. On average there are 10 groups and most are empty or fresh. Not at the same prog point that I'm at. Lot's of times I see these groups have been waiting for 30 minutes or longer. It's really unfair that the players on Dynamis have to be disadvantaged in their progress thru this savage tier because we can't travel to a more populated server that would otherwise have a ton more groups in PF allowing us to progress faster.

Another thing that's really making me mad is that sometimes I can travel to another datacenter like Aether but when I get there I can't login. Why are you allowing me to transfer if I can't login? Completely wasting my time!

It's really aggravating!

I made my character on Crystal back when Crystal had bonuses for character creation there. I'd be much more inclined to take the free homeworld transfer to Dynamis if it didn't mean potentially being stuck there.

We had our event last night and the crowd that showed was honestly pretty decent - certainly lighter than it had been pre-Dawntrail, but we had more people than I'd expected based on what I'd been hearing. It was kind of a hassle for people to hop over to Crystal, but the ones who did so early managed to get there in plenty of time for the event. I still don't think the situation is great, I wish the system would just go back to the old way it worked, but it's not as big a blow to the RP community as I'd worried it might be. If it continues to be a hassle for people to transfer over though, then I would wager fewer people will bother with it.

This is actual suicide for the game to not allow people in as much as they were.

Restrict the marketboard entirely if you must, but you can't just open the floodgates for two years, then go 'Nah this is dumb' and put severe restrictions on it. All this will do is enrage people who are used to dc travel, and likely kill Dynamis completely, let alone Materia. How Materia even deals with being a literal gaol DC is beyond me.

If the changes remain like this, or even worse, get further restricted, you basically locked every static who somehow isn't on the same datacenter to make some members choose to sacrifice everything they worked for on something that isn't guaranteed. Hope you're not part of an Ultimate static because if this goes further, you might as well not even bother unless you're all on the same dc, which I can count on my hand the amount of those that exist now.

DC travel is what made many of the statics even be remotely possible now. Personally speaking, I will lose the static I'm in since we'd be cut into thirds, and lol Crystal.

Brainrot decision at its finest.

I hate this congestion restrictions they brought in as well when reopening it why open it anyway if there are issues still
I want to run things cause my dc is dead a lot of the times but having to hop onto 7 different servers cause a world is full with 3 people in the q waiting is great

They implemented a feature that people used for 2 years with no problems only to implement so many restrictions that makes it feel like it's completely removed and make you wonder why implement a feature just to make it so people can't make use of it.

Is what they're doing necessarily the best answer. Probably not. But, whatever it takes to bring growth to Dynamis and make it inconvenient for everyone to just run to Aether.

Even after having to wait until a world opens up to be able to transfer to, and hope it succeeds.

I can't even log into the world with my character because of the restrictions.

https://i.imgur.com/HLnHXZ3.jpeg

Tested with another character that is located on the same world I'm trying to log into with my DC traveled character. I'm being blocked due to their login queue system.

Moronic.

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Originally Posted by MisterNublet

Even after having to wait until a world opens up to be able to transfer to, and hope it succeeds.

I can't even log into the world with my character because of the restrictions.

https://i.imgur.com/HLnHXZ3.jpeg

Tested with another character that is located on the same world I'm trying to log into with my DC traveled character. I'm being blocked due to their login queue system.

Moronic.

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The login queue for the bottom part is their normal login queue. I get that all the time because they only process logins on intervals. I do agree though that either they should stop you from being able to transfer to your destination, or the transfer happens. The transferring only to be told you can't login is pretty bad design.

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Originally Posted by Menriq

The login queue for the bottom part is their normal login queue. I get that all the time because they only process logins on intervals. I do agree though that either they should stop you from being able to transfer to your destination, or the transfer happens. The transferring only to be told you can't login is pretty bad design.

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I'm well aware that it's their normal login queue system. I was simply showing the "congestion" the server is facing with another character that originates on the same world I'm trying to log into with a DC travel character.

Hence, I'm being blocked by SE's login system.

Welp, this whole thing has gotten me to make a forum post.

I'm mostly RP-focused and more of a social player before I'm anything else. I miss my friends so bad. It's been rough being stuck on Dynamis, but I figured with time the restrictions would eventually lift.

Now that they have lifted, I almost feel like travel should've remained locked. Queue times were smooshed dramatically and overall this has been a much better launch than EW was, and that's awesome! Way to go SE! But this is just... As a raider, it's tough, and as a social player, it's really tough. I miss my friends, and I miss working at my favorite cafes to spread smiles to people I'll not be able to see for some time.

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Originally Posted by MisterNublet

I'm well aware that it's their normal login queue system. I was simply showing the "congestion" the server is facing with another character that originates on the same world I'm trying to log into with a DC travel character.

Hence, I'm being blocked by SE's login system.

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That's fair. There have been several posts in the past, and on Discord's, who think that queue screen is the server is full and not just how it normally is, so I try and not take it for granted that everyone is aware of how it works.

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Originally Posted by Menriq

That's fair. There have been several posts in the past, and on Discord's, who think that queue screen is the server is full and not just how it normally is, so I try and not take it for granted that everyone is aware of how it works.

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Yeah, benefit of the doubt and all. Still great that this individual brought receipts, though!

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

Is what they're doing necessarily the best answer. Probably not. But, whatever it takes to bring growth to Dynamis and make it inconvenient for everyone to just run to Aether.

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Not sure this will help Dynamis grow. If anything I'd encourage people not to roll on Dynamis. Especially as raiders or rpers. Unless your friends are already here, you run the risk of getting trapped and unable to interact with them.

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Originally Posted by Andanie

Not sure this will help Dynamis grow. If anything I'd encourage people not to roll on Dynamis. Especially as raiders or rpers. Unless you're friends are already here, you run the risk of getting trapped and unable to interact with them.

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Exactly, it won't. If they wanted more even player distribution, they should have left things as they were, possibly merged Dynamis into the rest of the DCs.

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Originally Posted by KazukoHimura

Exactly, it won't. If they wanted more even player distribution, they should have left things as they were, possibly merged Dynamis into the rest of the DCs.

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Dynamis is necessary now for the same reason Crystal was necessary in 2019. The game needed the additional data center. That's why it was added.

But sure, let's dump all of Dynamis onto Primal and Crystal, so all the players can enjoy the Aether problem.

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

Dynamis is necessary now for the same reason Crystal was necessary in 2019. The game needed the additional data center. That's why it was added.

But sure, let's dump all of Dynamis onto Primal and Crystal, so all the players can enjoy the Aether problem.

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Ah, you have a very solid point. Then perhaps Dynamis just needs its own draw, like how Crystal tends to be the RP server and Aether tends to be the raiding server.

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Originally Posted by KazukoHimura

Ah, you have a very solid point. Then perhaps Dynamis just needs its own draw, like how Crystal tends to be the RP server and Aether tends to be the raiding server.

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That's a great idea! For now, the only thing we have on this side, as far as I know, is the road to 90 buff (though I don't think that's available on Seraph now) and an easier go at housing.

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

That's a great idea! For now, the only thing we have on this side, as far as I know, is the road to 90 buff (though I don't think that's available on Seraph now) and an easier go at housing.

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I'm a Dynamis native (moved from Aether last year), and that's pretty much it. And yeah, last I checked, the buff vanished on Seraph since it's the one congested world on Dynamis.

I'll be honest, I'm not even trying to get to Aether. All my friends are on Crystal and Primal. Typically am on Coeurl or Malboro in the case of Crystal, occasionally Balmung or Mateus if a person's house is there. Famfrit and Hyperion for Primal servers. And tbh for my own stuff RN it's mainly just Hyperion I'd like to get to, since my next RP scene is at a player house there.

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Originally Posted by KazukoHimura

I'm a Dynamis native (moved from Aether last year), and that's pretty much it. And yeah, last I checked, the buff vanished on Seraph since it's the one congested world on Dynamis.

I'll be honest, I'm not even trying to get to Aether. All my friends are on Crystal and Primal. Typically am on Coeurl or Malboro in the case of Crystal, occasionally Balmung or Mateus if a person's house is there. Famfrit and Hyperion for Primal servers. And tbh for my own stuff RN it's mainly just Hyperion I'd like to get to, since my next RP scene is at a player house there.

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Nice to meet you! I'm more of a recent Dynamis arrival myself. I came back from a break saw we had a server named Seraph, and I was feeling nostalgic since I was on Seraph in FFXI, so I jumped the day before the game went down for the Dawntrail patch.

If it's Primal and Crystal you're trying to get to, you should be able to get around there pretty easily (I went through them all shopping yesterday). I could pretty much touch all the servers on those two DCs, including Hyperion. The only problem being Balmung. I got there once, then world jumped to check a price elsewhere, and when I made it back around to Balmung, I couldn't get back in.

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

Nice to meet you! I'm more of a recent Dynamis arrival myself. I came back from a break saw we had a server named Seraph, and I was feeling nostalgic since I was on Seraph in FFXI, so I jumped the day before the game went down for the Dawntrail patch.

If it's Primal and Crystal you're trying to get to, you should be able to get around there pretty easily (I went through them all shopping yesterday). I could pretty much touch all the servers on those two DCs, including Hyperion. The only problem being Balmung. I got there once, then world jumped to check a price elsewhere, and when I made it back around to Balmung, I couldn't get back in.

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Nice to meet you too! Actually on Halicarnassus since I wanted to kind of do my own thing and most people I knew were on the other three (Moved prior to the additional four servers being put in)

Balmung and Mateus are lower priority compared to the other two on Crystal (and the two on Primal). Coeurl is where the house my character lives in is (my actual owned house belongs to her parents, and actual owned apartment is a tiny adventuring HQ. Most of the time that one can be worked around). Malboro and Famfrit are the home servers for two of my predominant RP partners. Third one is on Hyperion, but he typically comes to me. Another partner is on Balmung, but like the Hyperion one, they often come to me as well. I do have an RP partner on Faerie, but due to timezone differences, we pretty much RP on Discord exclusively, so the only real issue there would be if we wanna do a Gpose in his house.

Though in all honesty, a lot of my issues were because I've had some crashing issues for a while, but I have tried something to fix them (Note: Found out that apparently my initial BIOS settings had my CPU set up to overclock, and I know FFXIV doesn't really like those.) So even though I'll still be active in this topic and ones like it because a lot of more public RP scenes or events require DC travel to be more stable and to be at specific places, I probably can work around stuff.

I'm in primal. I want to play and hang out with friends in Aether.
They can't come to primal because of this. I can't go to aether because of this. And dynamis puts us in limbo. So I cannot play with my friends on aether.

In conclusion, this change blows huge chunks. Absolutely the worst thing they've done in years, and the damage it's doing to statics and other various forms of player interaction is considerable. How do they keep doing this thing where they roll stuff out without any thought about the consequences? This is two steps back from what we had before. It's not sustainable at all.

So everything's to remain buggered up and unplayable is it? >.>

One of the largest problems is the forced PERMA lock on servers until the next patch cycle. On adamantoise, we have under 40 queues to get in (which is just a throttled login - it's not actually congested) around the clock. I can't make an alt on these servers. People have a hard time visiting. Recruit a friends can't make characters on the server either. This has been going on for 2 months. I can't even ask my friends to come back to the game since they can't even play with me. I can't even defend SE at all in this.

If you have to mark a server as congested for server stability... FINE, but make it dynamic. You cannot force ppl to make characters on tiny servers. I suppose you can, but most people end up leaving the game because of this.

Fix it.

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

Dynamis is necessary now for the same reason Crystal was necessary in 2019. The game needed the additional data center. That's why it was added.

But sure, let's dump all of Dynamis onto Primal and Crystal, so all the players can enjoy the Aether problem.

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the problem with Dynamis is that it has been added at the worst possible time not very long after the introduction of DC travel. It also had a lot of housing. Many people created characters or moved there with the intent of getting a house while continuing to play with their friends on other DCs. Since the queues were awfully long, people just DC travelled making the problem even worse and the DC never had the chance to build a community to fill df/pf.

SE should work on making PF/DF regional. It’s the only way to solve the annoying issue of people converging to a single DC and having near empty PF on other DCs (DF remained healthy of Primal).

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Originally Posted by Fluffysilverkitsune

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

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What are you even queue'ing? I ran every main roulette at 2-4AM EST including alliance raids, and end game dungeons and got pops within 10min. Are you running some side quest dungeon from stormblood at 5am and not recent content?

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

SE should work on making PF/DF regional. It’s the only way to solve the annoying issue of people converging to a single DC and having near empty PF on other DCs (DF remained healthy of Primal).

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Yoshi P already said this is 3 years of full force work if it's even possible. This is not on the table realistically from a business perspective. You are not going to spend that much development time and money on something when you can shut off what caused the problem to begin with. This is only after everything else has failed.

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Originally Posted by VoidsentStatus

Yoshi P already said this is 3 years of full force work if it's even possible. This is not on the table realistically from a business perspective. You are not going to spend that much development time and money on something when you can shut off what caused the problem to begin with. This is only after everything else has failed.

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"Everything else"

They tried nothing though ? lmao

If you really think giving a mediocre mount for transferring is an incentive, I dont know what to tell you

Doing this as a way to grow Dynamis is even dumber because it's just attempting to fix a mistake with another mistake. As much as the community hated it when it happened with the need for Crystal, they had to launch new worlds in all the DCs and kidnap a few populated world from the other DCs towards Dynamis. Instant population. They even had the DC Travel excuse ready and it likely would've been less of a hassle than a thousand players playing on Dynamis total realising that there is nothing going on there because there was no real incentive to make characters there from the start.

The fix is not to "lock DC travel" - just means you're now being disincentivized to go there in the same way you'll be disincentivized to go to Materia; you're literally going to a gaol DC.

From a business perspective, we know FFXIV is the thing that's mostly keeping SE funded. It absolutely is a realistic from a business perspective to improve the infrastructure of your game to make it so that more people are having a good time playing it.

As someone who plays on Chaos having to travel to Light for PF sucks. Having to travel and having the experience suck due to artificial limitations on the system is just making the experience of being on whatever the hive-mind has deemed the non-raiding data center even worse than it was. Either disable DC travel entirely (unlikely now people have cross-DC statics and friend groups) or make the system work as it did before. Chaos has been active enough for M1S to M3S this week but people already seem to be congregating on light for M4S.

I like how someone on the dev team saw everything working fine and just said "what if we just made it worse?"

Guessing its the same designer that made the Portrait system

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

the problem with Dynamis is that it has been added at the worst possible time not very long after the introduction of DC travel. It also had a lot of housing. Many people created characters or moved there with the intent of getting a house while continuing to play with their friends on other DCs. Since the queues were awfully long, people just DC travelled making the problem even worse and the DC never had the chance to build a community to fill df/pf.

SE should work on making PF/DF regional. It’s the only way to solve the annoying issue of people converging to a single DC and having near empty PF on other DCs (DF remained healthy of Primal).

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Yeah, this is 100% the problem. They also didn't lock down the other datacenters when it launched to funnel all new players/characters to it. If they really wanted Dynamis to fill they shouldn't have let people make characters on other datacenters for a good long while.

They could have also considered doing what they did for the great Aether/Primal sundering where some servers were sent to Crystal along with the new ones. Servers like Balmung and Mateus being pulled off Aether allowed Crystal to naturally grow and thrive very quickly. It wouldn't have been ideal, but it's something that could have been done.

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Originally Posted by angienessyo

Yeah, this is 100% the problem. They also didn't lock down the other datacenters when it launched to funnel all new players/characters to it. If they really wanted Dynamis to fill they shouldn't have let people make characters on other datacenters for a good long while.

They could have also considered doing what they did for the great Aether/Primal sundering where some servers were sent to Crystal along with the new ones. Servers like Balmung and Mateus being pulled off Aether allowed Crystal to naturally grow and thrive very quickly. It wouldn't have been ideal, but it's something that could have been done.

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Yeah we are way past that now, the big problem is that they are trying to populate Dynamis still now after the patch but are actually making Dynamis worse (and making people leave Dynamis)

This is going to go agaisnt their plans, the people that were already on dyna before the patch and are still unable to DC travel, have statics on other dcs or even friends, will move away, just like I did, while the ones that moved while DC travel was down will leave the minute their 3 months of being stuck there are up.

This is not going to work the way people (and SE) think it will. This is damaging the DC and will continue to do so until reverted, people wont travel there with the risk of being stuck on it.

10 Pf's right now on Dynamis for end-game content, good job SE. This one is on yall, not the players.

Still can't even play with this issue or clear things until they fix and lift this up ever