Something needs to be done about Party Finder outside of Aether

You can say this is a self-inflicted problem players did to themselves but basically all endgame content has moved to Aether DC leaving Primal PF 99% empty. Comparatively, if you want a reclear party for savage raids there will often be 0 parties of any kind on Primal and 30+ on Aether.

We can blame streamers all we want for all picking Aether but the game is the root cause of it separating the party finder. At the very least SE should look for how to make the party finder cross-DC and suddenly the problem goes away. Right now it sucks to move from primal to aether, losing your LSs and friends and FC buffs etc and feeling essentially isolated from everyone you play with just to look for raids.

If nothing else, we should be able to queue up for duties cross-DC in the same region. (minus balmung of course)

I feel like they should give the DC travels the same treatment that they implemented when gathering timed nodes in different world ( You can't). Make it a social thing , see what's up in pf ( you won't be able to join anything) but can use that as an opportunity to see what a server can provide before moving. Primal pf is already plauged by 100+ dj bars can't image having to share that with all the other dc

Hard disagree. It’s much easier to find pugs and subs when everything is centralized. Pool is bigger too.

Cross-DC party finder/matchmaking is the play.

People get weird and try to blame the players for some bizarre reason, but the current situation makes complete sense; Given a common interest (particularly one that requires you to form groups), people will generally choose an arbitrary place to congregate. Aether was chosen because it's had a longstanding reputation as the raiding DC due to servers like Gilgamesh, going as far back as I can remember.

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Originally Posted by Ivtrix

Hard disagree. It’s much easier to find pugs and subs when everything is centralized. Pool is bigger too.

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Try re-reading the post and comment again. Your comprehension seems off

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Originally Posted by LewdCoffee

I feel like they should give the DC travels the same treatment that they implemented when gathering timed nodes in different world ( You can't). Make it a social thing , see what's up in pf ( you won't be able to join anything) but can use that as an opportunity to see what a server can provide before moving. Primal pf is already plauged by 100+ dj bars can't image having to share that with all the other dc

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I thought that initially but, a lot of statics have cross-DC members. Perhaps allow people to join parties but not access party finder? I.E. require invites? Or just open PF to the whole region.
There are solutions to fix this, but right now having everything related to party finder consolidating on aether is ruining the gaming experience for people on Crystal and Primal. Want to do EX Trial farms? No parties exist. Want to do reclears on your alt? No parties exist. Want to help your friends learn content? No parties exist.

Want to make your own party? PF up for 60 minutes and shuts down with 3 members.

Another thing they could do is provide people with a free dc travel if they decide to do it. "Oh no but my house". Most people who are willingly going over to aether to raid hardly even leave so I don't think having property is that important for them.
Think the problem with doing invites is having people just spam /tell pf leaders to let them in.
But yeah really sucks having to sit in pf for 5-6 hours at a time for content and being lucky just to get one or two people to join sometimes for things such as no echo BLU or Criterion dungeons.

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Originally Posted by LewdCoffee

Another thing they could do is provide people with a free dc travel if they decide to do it. "Oh no but my house". Most people who are willingly going over to aether to raid hardly even leave so I don't think having property is that important for them.
Think the problem with doing invites is having people just spam /tell pf leaders to let them in.
But yeah really sucks having to sit in pf for 5-6 hours at a time for content and being lucky just to get one or two people to join sometimes for things such as no echo BLU or Criterion dungeons.

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That I don't know. Most people I know on Primal DC travel to raid, and then come back after. For full 8/8 statics they stay on primal, but if they have to rep 1-2 people they almost always go to aether because if you have a 2 hour raid window or 3 hours, and you spend 60 minutes looking for a healer, that wastes your night. And it happens. A lot.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

Try re-reading the post and comment again. Your comprehension seems off

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Oh yeah I didn’t bother reading at all but after reading I agree

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Originally Posted by LewdCoffee

I feel like they should give the DC travels the same treatment that they implemented when gathering timed nodes in different world ( You can't). Make it a social thing , see what's up in pf ( you won't be able to join anything) but can use that as an opportunity to see what a server can provide before moving. Primal pf is already plauged by 100+ dj bars can't image having to share that with all the other dc

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It's too late for this in my opinion. People have already created the mindset of what DC serves what purpose, and in their minds Aether serves the purpose of being the raiding DC.

If you took this action now people would either quit, or migrate their characters to Aether permanently.


No. The answer is obvious. We've been saying it for a long time now. Cross-DC Party Finder. That's all.

You've got my vote, OP!

Investing in a mega server with just a ton of layering would solve this issue too. Just put us all in the same place.
Why servers are still a thing in 2023 is beyond me. Just seems like lazy development.
And for those who say it's to combat latency (by having servers closer to you), we have tools nowadays to help with that and also, let's be real, this game sucks with latency already anyways XD

What? I love leaving Primal to join an Aether PF where 8 out of 8 people are from Primal.

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Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

It's too late for this in my opinion. People have already created the mindset of what DC serves what purpose, and in their minds Aether serves the purpose of being the raiding DC.

If you took this action now people would either quit, or migrate their characters to Aether permanently.


No. The answer is obvious. We've been saying it for a long time now. Cross-DC Party Finder. That's all.

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Cross-DC party finder is definitely the way, but if SE doesn't recognize the damage its causing now then it won't prioritize it.
I suspect without confirming that the JP data centers don't have a problem like this. If they did surely SE would take notice and fix it

So the best thing we can do is bring up that this has become a problem. It was ok last tier, this tier it's -dead-. Primal went from possible to impossible in a few months.

It might auto fix itself, who knows. SE can for-sure fix it by merging the PF within the region. And this would only benefit the game to have more parties to choose from. When you see 100 parties that meet your criteria you'll more likely find what you want rather than trying to make one of the four parties available work

EXAMPLE: Last night we were bored on primal. (note I have cleared this tier, not all friends and LSmates have). We looked up P11S - 0 parties. Looked up P10S - 0 parties. Looked up Orthos - 0 parties. Looked up Golbez - 0 parties. Looked up Ultimates - 1 party for UWU, nothing else. Looked up the weekly Unreal - 0 parties. Tried making my own, 60 minutes, 1 person joined (in addition to the two I had with me to start it). Disbanded after 60 minutes with 4 players.
This is not sustainable for retaining players.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

What? I love leaving Primal to join an Aether PF where 8 out of 8 people are from Primal.

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isn't it funny when all the primal people are on aether so the pf is still primal people? lol. This is such a stupid self inflicted problem

If only arthars knew it would be the Crystal players traveling to him

https://clips.twitch.tv/TenderEagerMomTriHard

Thats a dev issue, they need to address it for future of this game. Sadly, we are on standby until they fix this issue they've made. One day we get cross pf for each continent.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

I suspect without confirming that the JP data centers don't have a problem like this. If they did surely SE would take notice and fix it

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It's happening for every region. In JP their Aether equivalent is Mana. I don't know how it is now but at one point the problem was so bad the DC travel feature would become unusable on Tuesday, so if you wanted any shot at your reclears you would have to transfer and park your character there Monday night. JP players have been very loud and unhappy about it so SE is definitely aware of the issue.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

SE can for-sure fix it by merging the PF within the region.

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Unfortunately this may not even be possible due to technical limitations. If it is possible I would imagine it will take quite a bit of time, both from a technical perspective and from the devs weighing the pros and cons of implementing such a system. If it isn't possible perhaps they could disable PF while on a different DC.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

People get weird and try to blame the players for some bizarre reason

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Probably because it's entirely their fault.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

Investing in a mega server with just a ton of layering would solve this issue too. Just put us all in the same place.

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That is exactly what annihilated any sense of community in WoW. No thanks.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

That is exactly what annihilated any sense of community in WoW. No thanks.

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I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons why that happened to wow (I never even knew wow was a mega server now).

But how would this ruin the sense of community? You act as if FFXIV actually creates community's in game (they don't). Everything community wise is driven via discord outside of the game.

If anything I think making it a mega server would bring more life to the game.
Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

The band-aid until a long-term fix would be to disable the party finder cross-dc, while still allowing party invites and duty finder. I don't want statics to have to break up

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

The band-aid until a long-term fix would be to disable the party finder cross-dc, while still allowing party invites and duty finder. I don't want statics to have to break up

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Just be honest about your tactic.

This isn't a band-aid. This is making the problem worse for the sake of trying to get SE to realize that the issue exists. While it is a tactic that I appreciate, it won't work here.

Personally, I think you'd have better luck attempting to fill each world on Aether until they're all congested.

Personally I'd love to see all cross world cross DC stuff gone for good. Let worlds develop their own personalities again. And yes I do play on Dynamis regularly and know well how much this would hurt short term. Long term things would spread out and settle into something workable. People are just too impatient to wait though so it will never happen.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons why that happened to wow (I never even knew wow was a mega server now).

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WoW isn't one big merged server, it's clusters of servers connected together. Throughout all of the game's ups and downs, server communities were alive and well until connecting servers and sharding came around.

Of course that's assuming their populations weren't dead, but the solution there would be to just merge them into entirely new servers as most MMOs do so they can form a new identity and community. Even FFXIV has done this in the past, that's how my own server Hyperion came into existence.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

But how would this ruin the sense of community?

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On a normal server if you're an asshole you get a reputation for being an asshole. You see this and that person hanging around their favorite spots. You form friendships with people you see regularly as you would in real life. I have a long list of friends I've made on Hyperion/Primal exactly that way.

On a megaserver you quickly realize it's almost impossible to see the same person twice. You lose all the little things that make a server feel alive because every player you meet is just another faceless body in the meat grinder. Everyone around you becomes a temporary means to an end, they may as well be NPCs. It's a very soulless experience.

I played WoW from vanilla beta onward for many, many years and witnessed all of this happen in real time. Back in the day I made friends on the opposite faction that I had no way of even communicating with, just from running into them frequently out in the world. I would go to Ironforge and /shout to announce my presence and they would come outside to a little clearing where we would duel each other. All that came to an end with the connected realms.

This is a lot of why people wanted classic servers for WoW. They missed that sense of community.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

You act as if FFXIV actually creates community's in game (they don't).

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FFXIV has a wonderful community that is very alive and easy to engage with, current content drought woes notwithstanding. If that hasn't been your experience that sounds like a you problem.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

Everything community wise is driven via discord outside of the game.

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Discord certainly helps organize certain things but to say people only ever meet and interact in Discord and not the actual game is absurd.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

If anything I think making it a mega server would bring more life to the game.

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It has the exact opposite effect.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

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Zones in WoW are just as dead as this game, and that's factoring in all the little world events they have going on to motivate players to be out there. It's just the nature of MMOs. Even if you added fabulous events and rewards to every zone (which I would love), people would grind them, get what they want, and go back to being AFK in their favorite city.

You may say "but they would be alive for that little while!" to which I would say that's already the case. Join a hunt train, an S rank kill, make a FATE party, host/join an RP event, etc. There's an FC on my server that hosts RP get togethers at towns out in the world all the time.

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Originally Posted by Myrany

Personally I'd love to see all cross world cross DC stuff gone for good. Let worlds develop their own personalities again. And yes I do play on Dynamis regularly and know well how much this would hurt short term. Long term things would spread out and settle into something workable. People are just too impatient to wait though so it will never happen.

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I don't think the worlds have lost their personality overall but that is certainly the case with Dynamis. More accurately it was never given a chance to develop one to begin with because everyone bails to another DC to do everything. If DC travel didn't exist each server could have slowly grown its own community like any other server. The irony is if everyone on Dymanis stopped DC traveling tomorrow they would have plenty of people on the DC to run content without any issues.

I'd say this is more of a reap what you sow situation.

Back when cross world function was new back in 6.18, Primal Party Finder was still very active. This trend was constant all the way up to the first few weeks of 6.4's savage tier release. Weeks later in 6.4, people from Primal ended up going to Aether for Party Finder. It got to the point where even Bozja and SB Eureka became more active than Party Finder in Primal most of the time.

Why is this sudden trend for Primal data center happening now? I guess we'll never know.

Kinda crazy how cross-dc play was implemented without a cross-dc dutyfinder/partyfinder system to balance out this inevitable problem, I agree. Also shoutout to that dev who said in an interview that the economy wouldn't be affected even though they created an opportunity to hop to another DC, buy an item for cheap, and then come home and just sell it for more because why not. Which is exactly what loads of people did until the market on that specific item leveled out and approached a similar price on both datacenters. Sure sounds like the market's being affected to me! But hey, what do I know.

Idk it just feels like the whole cross-DC approach was done with really sweet intentions but didn't take into account the issues it would create or the fact that different DCs really do have different cultures. Crystal is basically a zoo that primal/aether players head to when they wanna see some wild action while eating popcorn, and before I quit, Ul'dah's chat was literally always some dudes from Aether or Primal being like "Balmung so lewd, balmung so wacky xDDD" while simultaneously being the source of the worst of the conversations. It's like visiting a zoo and throwing rocks at the monkey because you want him to dance. Meanwhile Aether is just, the place people go now to actually play the game. Which sucks btw because I recall logging in and seeing like half of my old guild "online" but on another DC for something as basic as their daily roulettes, because the impression was formed at some point that crystal can't play the game at any level and if you want a decent experience with randos you should just head to aether. Like are you kidding me guy? But that was how at least 2 people I knew felt, which sucked balls because most of my friends were "playing other games" and the ones that weren't, might as well have been gone since I couldn't communicate with them anyway. And idk what niche primal even has. And dynamis is literally the suburbs where anyone can own a home I guess.

Hell, dynamis. Now there's a topic. You wanna bring up a DC harmed by cross-DC play? Dynamis didn't even get to breathe on its own for a week because everyone who hopped over there immediately came back to crystal or aether or w/e and the place has been dead ever since. Really sucked for anyone who wanted to be on the bleeding edge of a new community, literally one of the funnest things you can be a part of in an mmo. It'll basically never happen again as long as cross-dc is a thing because the economy will always be subsidized by other DCs and the players have every reason to just dc hop to get everything done that they could ever want. I legit met a sprout who got baited into playing on Dynamis and I felt so bad for that guy because he was alone. He didn't want to DC hop either. Man wanted to play on his own DC, which I can respect. I'd check in on him every so often and help him with msq dungeons, but it was honestly rough as hell. We were just trying to do copperbell for his main scenario and even with me on a healer the queue still took ages. Eventually this tank joined us in what was honestly a really cute/organic mmo moment, and even then the wait to just find a single dps had us sitting around for several minutes. Was genuinely unreal, like everyone there has just given up and gone to other DCs. I wonder if that guy's still playing, but I kinda doubt it since the last time I saw him he just seemed sad that every town he'd been to was dead as hell. I sincerely hope he just remade on one of the big 3 because dynamis feels totally abandoned. They could at least fix the queue issues with a cross-dc pf/df; maybe in dawntrail they'll implement it, or maybe it'll be like all the other systems in this game that were implemented and then kinda forgotten about for years.

Man being on Dynamis is just.....I'd rather hug a cactus. Everything is just dead, Bozja, Euereka, EO, PotD, HoH, any trial between ARR and EW. Really is sad.

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Originally Posted by Kyrj

Man being on Dynamis is just.....I'd rather hug a cactus. Everything is just dead, Bozja, Euereka, EO, PotD, HoH, any trial between ARR and EW. Really is sad.

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It's really tragic. I know the players are doing this to themselves but we're operating in the parameters SE set. They are in control of the situation and people are flocking to the path of least resistance which is to consolidate everything in one location.

And here I am begging for Zurfan synced clear before I start SB ...

I am currently scouring Discord, Reddit ...etc to find a community that want to do old EX/Savage contents because I have 3 possibly 4 expansions to catch up to and I hate wasting a challenge and a good time by blazing through it unsynced. But it I doubt there are enough player base that is willing to re-learn old contents .

No matter what solutions they implement, it is the player base that needs to help new players not just with basics, but with hard contents . SE can only incentivize this. If player insist on only doing current EX/Savage contents, they will die quick.

Only thing comes to mind is giving elite players reward for synced clears with parties including first time bonus for 2.0 3.0 4.0 trials and raids. but they have to make it worth while.

Imagine someone having their name posted on the server and celebrated as a savior with public announcements. or getting rewarded a special mount, or item or gear glamour because they went back and helped a party of 5 people clear T9 synced . heck make it a point system, who helps people pass old contents the most is the leader this month/week.

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Originally Posted by Thurmnmurmn

Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

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A majority of the content in this game is mostly instanced, and the only open world content in this game that has a large player interaction beyond its initial launch is hunts. For the most part open world content is just incredibly barren as is, and having a mega server wouldn't fix it. Overall, I think having a mega server would just create more issues than it solves.

I’d honestly say to hell with it and just bring Cross-DC PF/DF as everyone says. The infrastructure is there - just simply build on it to make it so we are literally not having to jump everywhere unless we want to. My static has had to jump to Aether just to raid because Primal has lost its raid scene to Aether. This problem will persist until Yoshida does something about it; and I’ve a mind to throw this in the QnA when it comes time again.

Its not just Primal; Crystal is suffering too, and Dynamis didn't even get a chance. Crystal did have a raiding scene before DC travel, but it was much smaller than Primal and Aether. It was first hand I saw my old FC dissolve because most of the active players were raiders. It really does suck for smaller communities. It feels a lot more lonelier even though there are friends online playing still.

i agree. this is a disaster on par with 1.0 and if they dont fix it really quick this game is going down the shitter

Primal for PvP, Aether for PvE, Crystal for venues/nightlife and dynamis for new players.

What a mess. Constant need to DC travel back and forth depending on what you're doing.

Unfortunately the problem has its roots back in the early days of ARR. Back then, the NA and EU servers were both hosted in the same location. Canada, I believe. This was later changed but due to the lack of a region lock a lot of European players ended up flocking to the North American servers. Many then befriended people there and understandably didn't want to leave even when the EU servers were improved. The situation has balanced out somewhat but it does contribute to Aether being propped up artificially.

If not for the scarcity of housing, I actually think the situation would be a lot worse - players are often attracted to where the most activity can be found after all. Though many of us would rather not sacrifice a house to achieve that. Though it is not my intention to imply that the housing system shouldn't be changed to be more readily accessible.

Aether's popularity just goes back to Gilgamesh being advertised as the subreddit server during ARR's launch, and a lot of the raiding community started up characters and Free Companies there early on. You likely saw similar population spikes on Ragnarok/Chaos back when Angered was actively involved in world progression.

This is fairly standard behavior in MMOs. Players congregate where there's action, so high population servers get bigger and low population servers get smaller. Cross-server PF and statics make your server choice less important, but you won't truly move towards a stable equilibrium without Cross-DC PF. You either live in the big city or you commute.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Aether's popularity just goes back to Gilgamesh being advertised as the subreddit server during ARR's launch, and a lot of the raiding community started up characters and Free Companies there early on. You likely saw similar population spikes on Ragnarok/Chaos back when Angered was actively involved in world progression.

This is fairly standard behavior in MMOs. Players congregate where there's action, so high population servers get bigger and low population servers get smaller. Cross-server PF and statics make your server choice less important, but you won't truly move towards a stable equilibrium without Cross-DC PF. You either live in the big city or you commute.

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yeah but it wasn't until it became "the streamer server" that things got out of hand. Everyone seems to think they'll be featured in asmongolds stream or something.