Oceanic World

EDIT: Was just furious about the fact the game kicked me off at the start of an Amdapor Keep run and wouldn't let me on because server was 'full'

As much as I would like to encourage you folks from the Oceania region to keep fighting to have a better gaming experience, you are getting it wrong. Your thread is unfortunately as confusing as is your petition.

Firstly, you use the term "World", which is an abstract concept. It represents an instance of the whole game, which is FFXIV:ARR. This world is hosted by servers and with today's technology, 1 server does NOT equal 1 world (it's a concept called virtualization). To explain it in its simplest terms, it means that if a server goes down, it will not bring down any active world.

As such, what you ask is to create a new instance of FFXIV:ARR, labeled for Oceanic players (which would be the same as the European worlds). As such, you would still be playing on the Japanese infrastructure because it's the closest to your region. You wouldn't see an improvement for lags or connections, it will stay the same, with extra text in the world name (like: "Tiamat (Oceanic)"). If it's what you want, fine, but your petition is not precise enough for that.

I believe what you truly want is a regional "datacenter". It's a building in which you have a bunch of servers (super computers designed to be turned on for years without too much impact on their performances) and on these servers, you have FFXIV:ARR worlds. Now, the cost of such infrastructure is, simply put, a huge expense. To illustrate, consider the following: it takes hundred of thousands of yearly subscribing players to make it worthwhile and that is for something like 5 years before initial costs and recurring costs makes it possible for a lower amount of player revenue. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there is that many Oceanic players that play FFXIV and will pay for it for 5 years.

It is my personal opinion, but I don't expect SquareEnix to provide Oceanic players with a regional datacenter anytime soon. American west coast is more likely to get one way before Oceanic players. If I had to make a waitlist for potential datacenters (in order of potential amount of players), I'd go: American West Coast, Europe and then Oceanic. Simply put, SquareEnix doesn't possess the amount of money it would take for such a risky project.

Finally, I would like to show an example that went wrong with an Oceanic datacenter. SWTOR is one of the few online games that I know that decided to built one. Not long after it was ready and functional, the playerbase vanished and all three world turned into ghost towns to the point ONE world was too much to support the entire Oceanic playerbase (talk about a net loss for Electronic Arts). It lead to a lot of work to transfer every players to American worlds and a lot of unhappy players. Of all the bad things SWTOR did, one of them was to waste money to accommodate Oceanic players without even being able to please them. Ultimately, SWTOR ran out of money is is now a shadow of what it could have become.

Morale of the story: wait until you have secured enough playerbase to support such crazy projects.
Morale of the morale: do risky costly projects with low potential return on investment only if you generate a hell lot of money.

I encourage you to keep promoting the existence and pertinence of the Oceanic playerbase. The more game developers are aware of you, the more they will find ways to accommodate you. Yet, if you make too much noise and only leave disasters behind, the risk will never seems worth it. My recommendation would be for you to petition for SquareEnix to do the same as European worlds, which is to label worlds as recommended worlds for Oceanic players. It won't give you less lags or better connections, but it will be the first step in being recognized as a potential market and a playerbase of your own, plus it will be easier to organize a community.

In SquareEnix point of view, adding a "recommended for Oceanic players" label would not involve money cost. Just a few more characters in the game code with very little risk to generate bugs.

My two-cents,
Lloyd Shade

Servers are not divided into regions, they're divided into time zones. EU players generally play at the same time, NA at the same time, JP/AU/NZ at the same time. You forget that North America also includes those crazy canadians and mexicans, not just the United States. Mexicans don't cry about their own server, perhaps because you can't play the game on a tumbleweed, but still.

I'm actually quite content playing on the JP servers. I get decent ping (130ms) and the community is nice. Yes the 1017 error is a pain but its being worked out and player numbers will inevitably drop overtime anyway so spending a lot of money and resources on opening an oceanic specific server just to improve the ping by a small amount for the minority seems pretty unreasonable.

I DO however suggest adding more currency options to their payment system... Forcing people in the AUS/NZ regions to pay in EUR instead of their local currency when the exchange rates are in constant flux seems pretty unfair. One month we may pay the standard $15 and then the next its possible to be paying $20 or more due to changes in the exchange rate. seems a bit silly if you ask me...

*pats Umbra* there will be plenty more AKs haha

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Originally Posted by LloydShade

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EA have experience running AU servers, they're one of few companies to do it multiple time they did it for ultima(well not them at the time) but they did it for WAR and the same thing happened, i think they did like 7 AU servers. thats ridiculous, then to do the same thing in SWTOR? thats EA being dumb, 1 server is fine for AU.

But yea if EU cant have their own datacentre, theres not much hope for oceania/SEA.

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Originally Posted by Sen_Dire

I DO however suggest adding more currency options to their payment system... Forcing people in the AUS/NZ regions to pay in EUR instead of their local currency when the exchange rates are in constant flux seems pretty unfair. One month we may pay the standard $15 and then the next its possible to be paying $20 or more due to changes in the exchange rate. seems a bit silly if you ask me...

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This to me is the biggest issue facing Oceanic and other regions (bigger than data centre issues). Granted I'm not sure how the crysta method works completely but paying a monthly sub in a foreign currency is not something I look forward to. If the crysta method works around this then great. Otherwise it's something I hope they can investigate further once there's stability in servers and populations.

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Originally Posted by ProphetMagnus

This to me is the biggest issue facing Oceanic and other regions (bigger than data centre issues). Granted I'm not sure how the crysta method works completely but paying a monthly sub in a foreign currency is not something I look forward to. If the crysta method works around this then great. Otherwise it's something I hope they can investigate further once there's stability in servers and populations.

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I'm also not quite sure how Crysta payments work since i cant seem to find any concrete info on how much Crysta is required for a sub. Even so we would still be buying Crysta with foreign currency so the issue would remain the same i think? It just seems so bizarre to me to not allow people to pay in their local currency when you officially encompass their regions into your player base.