10+ minute queue time back to Dynamis, 10pm at night

For the past two days, it takes over 10 minutes to go back to dynamis (data center travel). Few people play there; there is usually less than 10 pf during prime time, over half of which are advertisements under "others," so it can't be because of "real people" congestion. When I first ran into the long queue, first i thought there might be coincidentally a hunt train but seems unlikely when I repeatedly run into long queue times.

Is it infrastructure? or is it bots (which makes me think of this post)

If it's a botting issue, I don't know if SE will ever address it. Maybe posting on social media and shaming them will do the trick? they hate losing face.

Yeah, I had that too for the first time tonight. I managed to get back at about the 10 minute mark. Yesterday was OK for my DC hopping though, although mine was mostly done in the morning/early afternoon.

Been having this issue too as of the past week or so.

I'd assume it's log-in traffic from the flood of bots as I've noticed they can be rather...unstable in terms of how prone they are to DCing.

I suppose that's just a consequence of trying to connect several dozen/hundred accounts from the same location.

As far as I can tell, travel time is affected by the total players using data centertravel at the same time for the entire region and not the population of the destination world/data center. If I'm making a very brief visit, traveling time is usually the same both coming and going even though I'm usually taking my Marilith characters to congested Crystal (since that's where my friends are) then returning.

Population on the destination world is going to impact the log in queue time instead.

Patch has brought more players back to the game so there are more using data center travel. Everyone ends up with longer travel times.

There's nothing for them to be ashamed about.

We literally just got a new patch and people came back. Some moved to Dynamis as I've been seeing more returners than usual over there. We also hit almost 30 PF ads at 4 PM EST yesterday (which is the highest ive personally seen) so I'm inclined to believe there's been a bump in population in general there.

I think you're right about DC travel load being shared throughout the region. If DC travel time decreases in the future when players drop off, then we know with good certainty that DC travel load is shared across the region.

And yes, there's much more people in Limsa on Marilith now! Hopefully we'll more activities in the party finder soon.

The shame I referred to lies in their reluctance to punish gil buyers and dealing with bots. Maybe make an example of high profile groups? For anyone who don't know what high profile groups refer to, ask around and I'm sure you'll get the answer pretty quickly.
Anyway, as long as SE's not hardware banning, they're not truly fighting bots even though they said they'll take more actions against botting in a new letter they released Oct/Nov last year. I'm still waiting to see a difference, and hopefully I'll see some.

There's bots that SE can't prevent as long as account creation is easy and the game is free to try. I understand that, and that's all cool.
Anyone who's curious can just do a player search with no first name and last name, but set min and max level both to 3. Then you'll see a list of around 100 bots (supposedly clipped underground) ready to make RMT whispers. When one gets banned, the afk bots are ready to take its place. Then you'll realize the "report rmt activity" you can quickly click on doesn't really alleviate the problem. Effectively, that button just gives players the feeling that something is being done. I'm not blaming SE on this one. They're a business, want new players, and letting people try the game for free is fantastic.

The part I mind is them not banning bots that matter and dealing some hurt (crafting and gathering bots for example). Let's say there's no shortage of posts complaining that those bots don't get banned even though players repeatedly reported said bots for months. I still see crafting bots I've reported several times last expansion still happily crafting away in an inn.

It's not even hard for SE to see which characters are most likely bots. Do a database scan. Which characters have only one combat class at 90, and maybe one or two other combat classes under level 10, but botanist and miner at 90 OR all crafters at 90? Oh look, they don't even rest! Hm..the character is in an FC with all other members at level 22, and all the same class?!. Thaat's weird?! And they only have minions and mounts that you get by going through msq and no other. Almost seems not human! It's not hard to figure out, but they won't. In fact, botters not even trying to hide the fact that they're botting tells me how unafraid they are.

And the "Special Task Force" that's supposed to take care of botting is apparently just a three-man team?? for the whole world according to the ending credits in Shadow Bringers.

You can see why I have my doubts about SE. Yes, every single one of those crafting and gathering bots mean sub money; not only basic sub money, but most likely max retainer sub money. Just my two cents

* I'm not sure how practical hardware banning would even be for XIV without the use of kernel level anticheats, or tying to the Trusted Platform Module (which on top of the other "why we don't use an anticheat" issues basically means "Regarding the End of Windows 10 Support" incoming, seeing that you'd basically need to mandate Windows 11 to utilize that feature effectively).

* Yes, they're paying a sub, and practically speaking, I expect that's why the enforcement is lukewarm. It's something I've observed since all the way back in the Diablo II days (where bots would be routinely banned but nothing would be done to prevent their return or shore up the game's security to more effectively bar them). Distasteful as it is, I'm actually not sure if these live service games (apart from the ones with stupid amounts of P2W or lootbox slime) actually add up financially without "dark matter" sources of income like this (certainly it was the case for Diablo II since it was buy to play; for XIV there is the fact that competition with WoW more or less prevents sub rates for either from going up to keep up with costs/inflation, and I'm really not sure what other solutions there are there).

* As I've opined in the past in a place or two: it also allows them to have less urgency on certain other parts of the game: e.g., there's less need to worry about slow rates of crystal/shard acquisition vs use when the MB bots basically act as vendors for crystals. MB bots also likely function to some or other degree as a gil sink in a game that suffers from a severe lack of them (i.e., the bots get banned and take all the gil with them).

At least they've taken care of some of the worst offenses (like how back in ARR, bots used to send you a friend request, so that you'd be forced to listen to them for longer, as you wouldn't be able to simply add to blacklist with the friend request pending ...).

About 9 PM central time I took my Marilith character to Jenova to get crystal tower done to knock it out for later MSQ(I waited 3 hours for a queue to pop that never did on Marilith). It took me 20 minutes to get to Jenova and 3 minutes to get back to Marilith.

This was the first time I had ever used DC travel and I was surprised how easily things went.