They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

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Originally Posted by WaterShield

All in all I couldn't be less hyped for Shadowbringers.

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I think this is what makes it the idea the most questionable.

They're releasing a new expansion, a new product for sale that they've poured a lot of money and resources into making. It's the worst possible timing to kill their players hype and leave any bitter tastes.

They're cutting corners to save money, but most likely losing money from unhappy customers too. It just seems a bad idea, splashing out the money on proper server updates would be a more profitable long term investment. It's like they don't believe ff14 could actually do well if they tried.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I think this is what makes it the idea the most questionable.

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I think they knew exactly what they were doing with this, by announcing it along side Shadowbringer and Blue Mage, concerns about this data center split are effectively drowned out by expansion hype and Blue Mage... They can also "justify" it by simply pointing at Rabauhn Extreme and going; "Remember that? We're doing this to prevent that happening again"

Ultimately its only a minority of players that are negatively impacted by this. Any amount of players negatively impacted by this is too many IMO, but I can very much imagine corporate greed easily ignoring us few... That greed is what got us with this cheap solution to server issues to begin with... Perhaps greed is the wrong word though... With SE it's more like incompetence... I mean that is why our subscription money went into funding something like XV which has now ultimately failed and cost SE big... Glad they're investing our subscription fees in the right projects /sarcasm.

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Originally Posted by Zsolen

Are you moving to Balmung or another server? I know it would only be anecdotal, but I'm curious where people might move, should they move to Crystal for raiding or other purposes.

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If Balmung opens up, then Balmung. If not, probably Zalera or Goblin

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I think this is what makes it the idea the most questionable.

They're releasing a new expansion, a new product for sale that they've poured a lot of money and resources into making. It's the worst possible timing to kill their players hype and leave any bitter tastes.

They're cutting corners to save money, but most likely losing money from unhappy customers too. It just seems a bad idea, splashing out the money on proper server updates would be a more profitable long term investment. It's like they don't believe ff14 could actually do well if they tried.

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There is no good timing but doing it after 4.5's release is still better timing than doing it during the first half of an expansion when people are still going through new content together.

We've got 7-8 months before the expansion release. If they do the data center change in March as some are expecting, that gives players a good 3 months to get used to the changes and hyped for the next expansion again. While there will be some players still unhappy they were split up from their friends, most players will over it by the time the expansion is ready for launch.

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Originally Posted by WaterShield

If Balmung opens up, then Balmung. If not, probably Zalera or Goblin

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Hope more crafters transfer to Zalera at least as seeing stuff I want not in stock is depressing. Goblin has a better MB than Zalera kinda.

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Originally Posted by Dirwen

Hope more crafters transfer to Zalera at least as seeing stuff I want not in stock is depressing. Goblin has a better MB than Zalera kinda.

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With guesting, you can buy off other servers market boards tho, so there's that.

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Originally Posted by Roda

With guesting, you can buy off other servers market boards tho, so there's that.

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Almost forgot about that yea it will be a godsend for buyers on small quiet servers.

I'm on the 3rd smallest server in the entire NA region, there's usually stuff that desirable on the MB, just at an inflated price. Made me decide to work on my crafting so I don't need to rely on others so much.

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Originally Posted by Alestorm

I'm on the 3rd smallest server in the entire NA region, there's usually stuff that desirable on the MB, just at an inflated price. Made me decide to work on my crafting so I don't need to rely on others so much.

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I'm not into crafting in MMOs as making money or making my own gear is not fun for me. Fanfest news of Ishgard content for crafters might make me level one to check out. However, I'll wait until more news come out about it to see if it's worth it.

My balmung fc is talking of moving well done se.

This is to keep our cross world group together.

If the shuffle is a such a problem then present SE with how the community would like to see Aether and Crystal organized server wise. Reorganize them in a way that ensures crystal and Aether have their share of the raiding community, the worse SE could do is say no to what the community presents.

34 pages. You all are slacking.

I just wish that Omega, Louisoix & Moogle be put to the Light DC.

Seeing that Chaos will be the 'raid' DC I'd rather have Zodiark, Phoenix and one of those German servers with us.
There's too much wipes in party finder as it is, don't want more.

Still no response, or additional information from SE. Good good.

Announce it alongside an expansion to distract most people. Delay responding to any concerns so it becomes "too late" to make any changes/address concerns. Truly, we are valued customers.

I'd rather have it they use better equipment for the Chaos data center so that it's more stable than making another one so that there are less servers on one data center. It will take much longer to get a party through duty or party finder with less servers. I get that they have to split NA data centers because there are way more servers per data center there, but EU?

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Originally Posted by Limonia

I'd rather have it they use better equipment for the Chaos data center so that it's more stable than making another one so that there are less servers on one data center. It will take much longer to get a party through duty or party finder with less servers. I get that they have to split NA data centers because there are way more servers per data center there, but EU?

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If we have to believe SE and all those players who suddenly know fully (and 100%) understand how SE servers work and are configured (without actually never really been there or had 'in house' insights), the majority of the issues have been DDoS and ISP specific ones which SE can't really do much about.


They can of course move to different ISP's but that would cost money.

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

If we have to believe SE and all those players who suddenly know fully (and 100%) understand how SE servers work and are configured (without actually never really been there or had 'in house' insights), the majority of the issues have been DDoS and ISP specific ones which SE can't really do much about.


They can of course move to different ISP's but that would cost money.

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Then why are they splitting those few EU servers on Chaos into two data centers? It doesn't make any sense other than doing it for more stability or something similar (some technical/hardware reason). It's not that EU servers are so full that they are bursting, and it's not that there are so many entries in PF that it's too hard to pick a group to join, it's quite the opposite. It would have been enough to just add one more server to Chaos.

What annoys me the most is the reasoning behind this... OK, Raubahn Extreme was a pain, but you know why that was a problem? Because it was a bottleneck... You literally funnel everyone into the same instance, very early on in the expansions story, of course there will be problems... It's an expansion, lots of people hyped about it and want to progress through it... The solution, IMO, is to not bottleneck like that... I know mentioning XI is taboo around here, but go check out the progression for expansions like Chains of Promathia and Wings of the Goddess. Chains didn't funnel everyone into a single instance, it split them across three Promyvion zones. Wings did something similar, rather than you all doing the same story, it sent you off to pick from one of three nations to progress with, again effectively splitting players up rather than bottlenecking them...

I mean look at major patches... OK, they're not nearly as hype as an expansions launch, but you still have a lot of people doing the content. Where are the Raubahn Extremes on patch day? Not there, because people split their attention across the MSQ, Trials, Raids, Sidequests, Crafting, etc. People aren't funnelled into a single thing and, low and behold, there are no issues. Apply that kind of logic to the MSQ with expansions please... Heck, XI didn't even need to for the sake of stability, it did so simply because a non-linear experience is generally more engaging... Honestly this is an issue with XIVs design philosophy I think, the game is too linear, too focused on purely vertical progression... It really shows with an expansion, because until you're at the level cap again? Nothing else matters, there's nothing else to do. You grind through that single path of new MSQs to reach the end and unlock everything. The expansion itself doesn't really add anything else to do to distract you from that path, that's left to patches adding things like Deep Dungeons. You reap what you sow, I really don't think it matters how you split it, when you have such purely linear progression like this, with everyone focusing on the exact same thing, you're going to have issues. Please prove me wrong, but I expect 5.0 to have its own Raubahn Extreme regardless of this split, it's just unavoidable when you push almost your entire playerbase into the same instance at roughly the same time...

Bottom line for me, this change negatively impacts a disproportionate number of players. Some lucky people are completely unaffected, others are in a lose-lose situation. To me, that makes this "solution" to server stability completely unacceptable, you don't "punish" random players like that, but well... As I've been saying, we're valued SE customers, I guess... I see plenty of other solutions to this problem, but they cost more, they require more effort, smarter planning, etc. We just get the cheap option and those of us who lose out as a result? Whatever, we don't matter.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

Then why are they splitting those few EU servers on Chaos into two data centers? It doesn't make any sense other than doing it for more stability or something similar (some technical/hardware reason). It's not that EU servers are so full that they are bursting, and it's not that there are so many entries in PF that it's too hard to pick a group to join, it's quite the opposite. It would have been enough to just add one more server to Chaos.

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To keep the illusion and lie up that there are 14 million players.

find it really difficult to be hyped for 5.0 when im forcibly being kicked off the dc i started on. i know i'm basically just echoing what's been said already at this point, but i (along with our bard) will be separated from our static who're all on primal, I'm losing friends on primal, etc. cruddy situation all around tbh

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

I just wish that Omega, Louisoix & Moogle be put to the Light DC.

Seeing that Chaos will be the 'raid' DC I'd rather have Zodiark, Phoenix and one of those German servers with us.
There's too much wipes in party finder as it is, don't want more.

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Square Enix choose to do the split between the language and as said previously the split in terms of raids is rather good. Seems like Chaos will be english/french and Light english/german for the most part.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ally_balanced/

Chaos isn't the raid DC :P

https://i.redd.it/aym4xmudpbz11.png

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Originally Posted by era1Ne

https://i.redd.it/aym4xmudpbz11.png

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Those 4.1 numbers really hammer home how potentially pointless this whole split is... We really need this kind of split when an expansion has little over a 50% retention rate in players? Boy am I glad I get to lose friends and housing so there is more room for a bunch of players that aren't even going to stick around... Guess this is the MMO version of "New customers get the better deal!"

At least the raiding community will be healthy on both sides, but it's still going to be smaller and that will create issues... Chaos always felt like a good example of why XIV should have single regional based data centers, rather than multiple data centers per region. Just look at how active Feast is on Chaos compared to the rest of the world (at the time of writing, 10 players have reached Diamond tier, 7 of which are on Chaos), and that's PvP, nobody even does that and it's more active on Chaos because we're all in one place... That should be the future, not more splits... That kind of future costs too much though, I guess... I'm sure it's a much more sound investment to put more money into DLC to cancel in the future, that'll make more money back somehow... Knowing SE, XIV is on the "make do and mend" portion of its life (oh wait, that's been the case since launch), and Final Fantasy XVI Online is getting nice new quality servers instead of us...

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

I just wish that Omega, Louisoix & Moogle be put to the Light DC.

Seeing that Chaos will be the 'raid' DC I'd rather have Zodiark, Phoenix and one of those German servers with us.
There's too much wipes in party finder as it is, don't want more.

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I was unaware that the server you played on determined how good or bad you are at the game, good to know.

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Originally Posted by Tizzy_Tormentor

I was unaware that the server you played on determined how good or bad you are at the game, good to know.

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Apparently it does. There's this fairly dead beaten horse known as "Balmung" that people like to point at. Then there's the much fresher dead horse known as "Mateus".

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Originally Posted by DevonEllwood

Apparently it does. There's this fairly dead beaten horse known as "Balmung" that people like to point at. Then there's the much fresher dead horse known as "Mateus".

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You realize Fhaerron was talking about EU DC, right? We don't have Balmung or Mateus there.

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Originally Posted by JohnSpawnVFX

You realize Fhaerron was talking about EU DC, right? We don't have Balmung or Mateus there.

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Thanks for letting me know that my examples to a stand alone statement of "I didn't know being on a certain server determines how good you are" don't work. I promise to curb my enthusiasm in the future.

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

I just wish that Omega, Louisoix & Moogle be put to the Light DC.

Seeing that Chaos will be the 'raid' DC I'd rather have Zodiark, Phoenix and one of those German servers with us.
There's too much wipes in party finder as it is, don't want more.

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Thank god you are not the one who decides and thank god we have only international servers.

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Originally Posted by DevonEllwood

Thanks for letting me know that my examples to a stand alone statement of "I didn't know being on a certain server determines how good you are" don't work. I promise to curb my enthusiasm in the future.

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Or simply don't try to make it about Balmung/Mateus victimization when no one mentioned them in the first place.

FFXIV doesn't revolve around Balmung and Mateus.

Let's be real.

Square Enix has no idea what they are doing.

They borked Stormblood Launch.
They rehash all their content.
They rehash all their mechanics.
They will make content such as Wonderous Tales to make you do old boring content that takes 1 minute to finish.
They borked Fan Festival
They are borking again.

But hey, The Community Devs don't care they are on a tight leash and lord forbid should they report any negative tidings.

I've never seen seen them take responsbility for their actions and reach out to the community outside Live Letters.

They are as disappointing as WoW's devs.

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Originally Posted by Titor

If you're annoyed at rpers, you could always world visit another server that RPers don't gather on, but not lose your stuff on Mateus.

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Kind of defeats the purpose of being on my server of choice doesn't it? Outside of my FC I don't have much invested here, so it is easier to just move and be happy.

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Originally Posted by Nalien

I see plenty of other solutions to this problem, but they cost more, they require more effort, smarter planning, etc. We just get the cheap option and those of us who lose out as a result? Whatever, we don't matter.

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What are the other options then? Enlighten us what we dont know or maybe SE couldn't consider to their master plan to ruin everyones gaming experience.

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Originally Posted by xbahax92

What are the other options then? Enlighten us what we dont know or maybe SE couldn't consider to their master plan to ruin everyones gaming experience.

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I mean, I literally just detailed how they could perhaps not create a purely linear experience that bottlenecks everyone on a single instance like Raubahn did to improve an expansions launch stability... Everyone wants to play the new expansion, but when there's only one piece of new content to do, one path for everyone to run down, one instance for everyone to jump in... We'll have issues with a set up like that regardless of how much they split the servers up...

They could also shell out extra for superior server hardware/networking, but the white knights of this forum seem to refuse to believe that's a possibility... SE can't invest back into XIV after all, it's just one of their main cash cows... No, they need to invest more in cancelling DLC and driving away developers... I wonder how long until Yoshida pulls a Tabata, must be pretty frustrating having to rely on the Mogstation for his budget more than getting a fair slice of what the subscription fees pull in, and he has also admitted that they have difficulty with designing new content due to trouble hiring content developers, can't imagine why with SEs track record...

There's also just straight up superior ways to handle this split. Free transfer is nice (and potentially can render the split meaningless as far as depopulating data centers goes, but that's another topic), but it really doesn't factor in Housing or Free Companies... At least EU gets new servers, so there's a chance of getting new Housing if you move (although, just a chance is pretty lame when you consider some people have put years into decorating that stuff...), assuming they do the logical thing and lock that for the first few days since otherwise literally no Free Company will be founded to buy land... Really though, if they were smarter with developing a lot of this content they'd avoid such issues... Workshops, for example... Untie them from Housing and potentially you don't lose all Airship/Submarine progression upon moving... Can't add a Free Company transfer system? How about this; Add an item that, when used, gives Free Company Credits (which are used in the ranking up process of Free Companies). There, now you can't transfer Free Companies, but you can get an item and use it to basically instantly restore your Free Company to where it was after transferring... Could do something similar with Housing and Furniture (create a snapshot of a Houses Storage, restore upon moving), but nah, I'm sure that 3m will cover the loss of up to 400 pieces of Furniture, some of which are event exclusive and only obtainable now on the Mogstation for a ridiculous price... And heck, do we even get reimbursed for Free Company Housing? Doesn't look like it so far... Individuals who can buy their own House probably aren't hurting for Gil, but an entire Free Company that needed a group to save up? Not so sure... And again, with the EUs new servers they better have some form of lock on Housing because those new servers wont have Free Companies at rank 6 able to buy plots otherwise... People will need time to reach rank 6 and in that time most of the plots can be purchased by individuals...

Then of course, lets not forget; If this happened once, it can happen again. What's to say 6.0 wont require another split? We wouldn't want a repeat of 5.0s Hien Extreme, after all... It's a short term solution that doesn't future proof the game against these kinds of issues... It's a pointless bandaid fix that screws over a sizeable chunk of players. At least the next time it happens, it'll probably happen to Gaia/Mana/Elemental too, so SE is likely to actually listen to feedback and find another solution...

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Originally Posted by Tizzy_Tormentor

I was unaware that the server you played on determined how good or bad you are at the game, good to know.

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I've transferred to Omega at the start of SB and I've stayed there for over a year. There is really no denying that there isn't a high amount of 'raiders' on Omega, take a look at that picture that other guy posted with the raid numbers.
Moving to Cerberus was the best thing I ever did in this game, I've been getting much more fun and there's much more like minded people on this one.


There's a lot of RP on Omega, and that's something I'm bad at but you guys over there are pro at it, or at least quite a lot you.


The EU DC is the least populated and the raiding community is absolutely the lowest compared to the US & Japanese DC's. And everything combined the raiding community is just low everywhere.
What they did now was took the already abysmal raiding community and split it between Chaos & Light.


First and foremost we never needed a second DC, we don't have enough people for that.
Now they want to, what they could have done was put all the RP & 'casual' servers together in one DC, especially with the new visit world feature you could all visit each other worlds, one big happy family and then put the raid servers in the other DC were all the players care about that other part of the game.

But no, they wanted to put (in an already low number of people) 2 totally opposite kinds of players together...


There's going to be a mass exodus and currently it looks like Chaos will be the destination for 'dedicated raiding', might change though seeing as Ragnarok is on Light ... time will tell, there's word about this on Reddit.
Anyway the mass exodus is gonna be annoying for everybody to find new houses and all the other 'settling in a new server'.

SE could have avoided this by putting the 'raid' servers together in one DC and put the RP and 'casual' servers in the other DC or just not adding another DC in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

I just wish that Omega, Louisoix & Moogle be put to the Light DC.

Seeing that Chaos will be the 'raid' DC I'd rather have Zodiark, Phoenix and one of those German servers with us.
There's too much wipes in party finder as it is, don't want more.

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This from somebody who doesn't even raid smh.

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Originally Posted by BristolRuss

This from somebody who doesn't even raid smh.

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This from somebody who doesn't know you can have more then one character smh.

This is going to tear my static in half :(. Im not sure what im going to do. All of us belong to FC on our servers that we cant leave......

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

This from somebody who doesn't know you can have more then one character smh.

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Sure, don't believe you do though.

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

There's a lot of RP on Omega, and that's something I'm bad at but you guys over there are pro at it, or at least quite a lot you.

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I see people parrot this all the time, that Omega is the "unofficial EU RP server" and honestly, I can tell you right now that there isn't any more RP activity than say, Ragnarok, which I played on for a while with an alt, in general, you won't find RP unless you look for it, almost every server has RP communities, as someone who actively plays on Omega, the idea that it has more just because someone named it the unofficial EU RP server is nonsense, just because someone on reddit declared it so, doesn't make it so, same as how Moogle (my original server) has the status of "unofficial French server" despite the fact that, once again, I saw no more French players than I saw on Ragnarok and English players were the most prominent.

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SE could have avoided this by putting the 'raid' servers together in one DC and put the RP and 'casual' servers in the other DC or just not adding another DC in the first place.

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You seem to be under the misunderstanding that a servers unofficial status means anything in the grand scheme of things, just because a server has a higher raiding population than another means very little in how they shuffle the worlds, considering a servers status as "unofficial X server" is coined entirely by the community and not SE.

You also still seem to think that if players aren't from a raid server, it equals more wipes in party finder, which is just hyperbolic and a bit rubbish to be honest, players who raid on more raid oriented servers aren't automatically better than those who don't.

On one hand, I'm happy to be getting away from Balmung.

On the other, I'm worried what it will do to PVP queues.

EU servers are a mess for a number of reasons, but I don't actually understand Squeenix's position on that.
The game is available in French and German. I've seen Spanish and Italian FCs on Zodiark, I assume there are "linguistic" FCs on all servers... Then why wouldn't some worlds be officially labeled as "here we have a lot of French/Italian" because I see a lot of people that don't speak English at all. I don't mean forcing people here and there, but just as an indication for people looking for a specific language community.

Everything has to be relative because we have fewer players, but I never had any troubles in finding parties when I needed to for Extreme / Savage content. And people come from all the worlds we have, I don't necessarily think the original split is unbalanced as other people have said. There are older worlds on each, younger worlds on each, and when you have a look at EU fflogs ranking, people come from all worlds. But I see a lot of people saying Chaos will be the raiding server, and people on Light are planning to go to Chaos because of that, making it then actually true.