Data Center Travel Changes Have Made Raiding Impossible, Where is the Fix?!?

In NA, Aether Data center has been where raiders have traveled to for raiding since we were able to. It was a great community idea, since it meant more like-minded people would gather and parties would fill much faster. Now it has become impossible to travel there, even during non-peak times. People "park" characters there, making it permanently impossible to join for those that need to move back to their home world. I have been wanting to prog DSR for weeks now and I haven't been able to. I can't go to Aether, there are no DSR parties on my server, and any that I set up don't fill.

Please revert these changes already, or make party finder cross-DC asap. I thought we'd hear about a fix in these coming patches but so far 0 noise about it. Is it really just NA having these issues?

No, it's not just NA. Everyone in the JP region goes to Mana, everyone in the NA region goes to Aether and everyone in the EU region goes to Light.

Unfortunately it's not necessarily that simple to add a cross-DC PF (depending on how they go about it). World Visit and DC Travel themselves were complex and risky additions requiring lots of untangling, problem-solving and testing (this is just an obvious thing if you understand it) and that's why each of them took a whole 2 years to add. Even now, you're lucky if there isn't a glitch that causes character data loss while traveling and it's a relief that we haven't seen a massive issue with that.

I think that they know people want it as a solution because they've discussed it but they will probably be thinking of other ideas until it's developed.

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Originally Posted by YonaAkatsuki

It was a great community idea

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A "great" community idea that basically destroyed any sense of raiding community on any datacenter other than Aether (NA)/Light (EU)/Mana (JP), ever since they introduced it back in EW. If it weren't for Data Center Travel, you likely would have been able to find DSR parties on your own datacenter.

The system was a mistake, and they'd have been better off had they poured resources into developing cross-DC PF instead.

The only sense of raiding community that existed before was the sense of superiority that data centers had in their strats vs those of others. I still remember the initial hump of aether and crystal people disliking each other's strats and saying the others' was bad. Discords have now merged, and NA is now the community.

As for finding DSR parties in my own data center, at best it would have been 1/3 of the people interested in ultimates. The ultimate community is already small, so merging them all has been the best thing that's happened.

This this this all day long this.
It's why I'm not subbed.
EU. Travel but no DC PF , lead to mass migration that has killed even Duty Finder and Rouls on Chaos. (Unless you content just to run ARR content) and lead to literally deserted map regions (I'm talking Idyshire not Thule)
I've migrated, but now I need to make new friends. But unfortunately it's left a bad taste in my mouth and without friends waiting for me when I log in I just can't be bothered. Chaos was unbearable frankly. And while light is barrable, bareble is not enough right now.

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Originally Posted by YonaAkatsuki

It was a great community idea

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Yeah it was a super great idea to annihilate every DC that wasn't Aether. :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Yeah it was a super great idea to annihilate every DC that wasn't Aether. :rolleyes:

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Queues are still popping, and the non-raiding scenes are still great. Heck, extremes and other easier content can still fill well. But for less populated content like savage and above, I'd prefer to have more people fill parties faster than be able to use my retainers.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Maybe on Crystal, but Dynamis is another story entirely. PVP if any kind if pretty much non-existent, the PF is literally just a little bit of venue spam, and unless you play during peak hours you won't get any roulettes done at all. But then Dynamis had the misfortune of being born right when DC travel was added, whereas Crystal was at least born out of worlds that already had a population. Only reason to come here is for a house and then hop elsewhere for content, but in light of the travel restrictions, we're not even getting new transfer moving in despite there being a bunch of Mediums and even Larges up for grabs, or how even the Smalls would be valuable in light of the upcoming interior space changes.

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The thing about Dynamis is that most of the people who went over went for housing. They didn't plan on staying since the server was mostly empty. You're right that it had the misfortune to open right as travel became available. With time and more new players it should go up. Eventually when PF becomes data center wide, none of this will matter. That's the goal of a post like this, but Yoshi-P mentioned it would take a long time if they decided to go that route. In the meantime, these new changes are just making everyone unhappy in different ways.

Man when they didnt add this you needed money to pay to move to dc now u can visit dc and ppl hate it........FF14 community in a nut shell.

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Originally Posted by Zakuyia

Man when they didnt add this you needed money to pay to move to dc now u can visit dc and ppl hate it........FF14 community in a nut shell.

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If I could indeed move to different DCs whenever I wanted? 11/10 feature no issues there.

We are on the thick of it everybody knows... Only fix is A) Mega Data Center or B) Spread the servers for NA. For EU Just mega server it. JPN mega server it

You could just lock the Party Finder to a specific Data Center, have UCoB and UWU on Aether, TEA on Crystal, DSR and TOP on Dynamis, and FRU on Primal. Same with the Savage Tier. You can still raid with private parties on your server if you'd like, but if you want to find other people to do the content, you'd have to travel.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Unfortunately come November, Dynamis will have been around for 2 years and it *still* has population issues. Even the claims of "just wait for the Xbox players" fell through because they mostly went to Aether/Primal/Crystal instead, and the whole "more people will show up for Dawntrail" also failed to bolster our numbers because, yep, they all went to A/P/C with Returners of course having no reason to visit us at all.

It's a large part of *why* there's travel restrictions in place right now, because Square-Enix got tired of waiting for the playerbase to disperse on their own and stop making a super data center, so they took matters into their own hands short of removing DC travel completely.

It's especially rough for Dynamis because we already got locked down once to little benefit (where we couldn't leave *at all* for about 3 weeks) and now we're under a "soft" lock down where we still can't travel easily to get stuff done during some hours of the day. I had to wait until after 10PM tonight to slip into Faerie for my roulettes because everyone was apparently already long gone on Maduin where I was looking at a 15+ minute wait just for 4-man content, whereas I was getting "less than 5 minutes" on everything I wanted to do (on DPS no less).

Their current plan isn't likely to force people to transfer to Dynamis though, and while it may have stemmed the amount of people that hop to Aether, it's just made Primal & Crystal into the go-to places for a lot of folks (I myself often hit up Behemoth for example). Their plan is indeed making people unhappy for different reasons now, but lifting the travel restrictions would just bring back the previous problems of Aether bursting at the seams while Dynamis twists in the wind. There just isn't a good solution no matter what.

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I get what you mean, and it really is rough for Dynamis players. I do think a mega data center is the way to go to make everyone happy, but will they really spend the money and resources on it? It's why I made this post, to try and add to the yelling for action to be taken.

That wouldn't be too bad, but people still prefer to go to aether for savage content, and less so for extremes. My main gripe is the fact that they've locked the servers past a certain amount of people, and in order to get around it people park their characters there and make it worse. I've now become part of that problem after parking my character after finally being able to get in at 3 am est, and I hate it.

They should make anyone with the Traveler tag count as loot locked automatically.
That way, you only get rewards for current raids if you're on your home DC, but can still go elsewhere to help out friends.
"Oh, but what about my static. we're all spread apart across the different DCs"
don't care. I just want to raid from the comfort of my own house again. This was an issue ever since DC travel was added, and the fact that it's been over two years with the most cursory of fixes is just baffling. Square really should have known better.
Locking down travel didn't fix anything, it just made Aether the place you get to at 2AM, then stay there as long as you possibly can.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Unfortunately come November, Dynamis will have been around for 2 years and it *still* has population issues. Even the claims of "just wait for the Xbox players" fell through because they mostly went to Aether/Primal/Crystal instead, and the whole "more people will show up for Dawntrail" also failed to bolster our numbers because, yep, they all went to A/P/C with Returners of course having no reason to visit us at all.

It's a large part of *why* there's travel restrictions in place right now, because Square-Enix got tired of waiting for the playerbase to disperse on their own and stop making a super data center, so they took matters into their own hands short of removing DC travel completely.

It's especially rough for Dynamis because we already got locked down once to little benefit (where we couldn't leave *at all* for about 3 weeks) and now we're under a "soft" lock down where we still can't travel easily to get stuff done during some hours of the day. I had to wait until after 10PM tonight to slip into Faerie for my roulettes because everyone was apparently already long gone on Maduin where I was looking at a 15+ minute wait just for 4-man content, whereas I was getting "less than 5 minutes" on everything I wanted to do (on DPS no less).

Their current plan isn't likely to force people to transfer to Dynamis though, and while it may have stemmed the amount of people that hop to Aether, it's just made Primal & Crystal into the go-to places for a lot of folks (I myself often hit up Behemoth for example). Their plan is indeed making people unhappy for different reasons now, but lifting the travel restrictions would just bring back the previous problems of Aether bursting at the seams while Dynamis twists in the wind. There just isn't a good solution no matter what.

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Dynamis is in horrible, horrible shape. Seraph is relatively healthy, but the other 7 servers are pretty dead. Cuchulainn in particular feels empty in a way that I've only seen on F2P MMOs 5 years past their peak and 1 year away from shutdown. Server merges or DC closures and redistribution would be a bad sign to outsiders, but Dynamis as it is can't be considered anything other than a failure spurred on by streamers making FF14 their flavor of the month and the chip shortage rendering Squeenix two years too late to accommodate. Not that it matters, since all of the streamers were on Aether, so everyone would just try to get on there to follow them rather than go on a new DC.

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Originally Posted by GartredZW

They should make anyone with the Traveler tag count as loot locked automatically.
That way, you only get rewards for current raids if you're on your home DC, but can still go elsewhere to help out friends.
"Oh, but what about my static. we're all spread apart across the different DCs"
don't care. I just want to raid from the comfort of my own house again. This was an issue ever since DC travel was added, and the fact that it's been over two years with the most cursory of fixes is just baffling. Square really should have known better.
Locking down travel didn't fix anything, it just made Aether the place you get to at 2AM, then stay there as long as you possibly can.

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So you would rather punish people who have raided together for years, and force them to break up as a static...all so you can sit in your in-game house watching a show on your second monitor while waiting for a raid to fill? I don't understand this level of selfishness...

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Originally Posted by GartredZW

They should make anyone with the Traveler tag count as loot locked automatically.
That way, you only get rewards for current raids if you're on your home DC, but can still go elsewhere to help out friends.
"Oh, but what about my static. we're all spread apart across the different DCs"
don't care. I just want to raid from the comfort of my own house again. This was an issue ever since DC travel was added, and the fact that it's been over two years with the most cursory of fixes is just baffling. Square really should have known better.
Locking down travel didn't fix anything, it just made Aether the place you get to at 2AM, then stay there as long as you possibly can.

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This would be truly catastrophic. Before I un-subbed about the last people in my Chaos communities still logging into the game were raiders. (spending a lot of their time on Light.) If you did this you'd murder their statics and their reclears. And they would most definitely transfer or stop subbing. I'm not sure those are arguments against but its bordeline hostile to the new sprouts naively starting their new adventure on Chaos. I feel just so sad for them, I really do. They are happy now, but they are not going to be. XIV is a *wonderful* reflection of the better side of humanity but they are murdering it at the moment.

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Originally Posted by YonaAkatsuki

I don't understand this level of selfishness...

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Calling other people selfish while demanding to go back to when the game was miserable for everyone not on the regional dogpile DC is absolutely wild lmao

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

"more people will show up for Dawntrail" also failed to bolster our numbers because, yep, they all went to A/P/C .

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inaccurate statement when we had more new players signing up for Dynamis than the main 3 data centers.
https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/58615522.html
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...a65385ac98c3c&
https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckyban...b/ebb814be.png

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Originally Posted by YonaAkatsuki

So you would rather punish people who have raided together for years, and force them to break up as a static...all so you can sit in your in-game house watching a show on your second monitor while waiting for a raid to fill? I don't understand this level of selfishness...

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Not just that I can sit in my house. It's so that I can do anything without having to log out, Check if any server in Aether is open, wait for the transfer to complete, log back in, and then check the party finder.
We got along just fine on our own Data Center before DC hopping was added. we'll do so again. Remember all of the restrictions you're under while DC traveling. You can't use your retainers, you can't talk on Linkshells or your Free Company chat, You can't gather timed nodes.
Currently, anyone who was unlucky enough to have a character on a Data Center that isn't Aether, Light, or Mana is just out of luck in finding anything to do involving raiding. And here you are calling me selfish for wanting Square to actually fix this without just undoing the entire DC travel system?

If these static players really want to raid together under this system, then they could always just buy DC transfers, or form new statics.
Would you give the same advice to me and every other raider who doesn't live on Aether? Just to buy a DC transfer and oversaturate the one raiding server even more?

You're blind if you don't think there's an issue here. I'll ask for what solution you propose then.
If it's cross DC party finder, then that's not a bad idea, but even Square admits it would take a lot of development time to get up and running properly, and that we're still a long way away. These issues are happening now, and they have been for the past two years.

It appears that the devs feel they made a mistake by opening wide the flood gates for dc travel. The new restrictions, most likely, are the fix or at least an attempt at one.

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Originally Posted by VoidsentStatus

inaccurate statement when we had more new players signing up for Dynamis than the main 3 data centers.

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Because you literally CANNOT make characters on Aether right now, or half of Primal/Crystal. If a world is marked congested you can't make a character there. Your argument is flawed.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Calling other people selfish while demanding to go back to when the game was miserable for everyone not on the regional dogpile DC is absolutely wild lmao

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I sincerely don't get this argument. I'm from crystal, and can still do everything else just fine. When I went to check out Aether for the first time, I was astounded at how many groups there were for raids and ultimates. Parties filled up so much quicker too! Having to go over there for reclears wasn't miserable at all, and didn't even take that long. I could go when I wanted, and return to Crystal without issue. My home world wasn't empty by any means, and it def wasn't one of the dogpile DCs. What exactly was so miserable about that?

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Originally Posted by GartredZW

Remember all of the restrictions you're under while DC traveling. You can't use your retainers, you can't talk on Linkshells or your Free Company chat, You can't gather timed nodes.

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To be fair to your statement none of these things affect me much. I won't die if I can't send my retainers out for a few hours, and keep everything I'll need on me or my chocobo saddle bag when traveling. Linkshells and FC chat don't matter since communication has always been through discord for me, and the hunt train LS i'm a part of don't matter since I wouldn't be able to transfer to the random S ranks in time anyway. As for timed nodes, I've always made money through other means so I can buy the timed resources.

I get your point if you have no other way to communicate with people, but i'd take the silence any day to have savage and ulti parties fill with 2/3d's more people.

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Originally Posted by YonaAkatsuki

I'm from crystal, and can still do everything else just fine.

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What do you categorize as "Just Fine"?
I just tried checking there a little bit ago. It's a saturday, maybe a bit early for the west coast, but definitely not dead hours. There was one PF entry in High End. A M1S prog party.

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Originally Posted by glitteringcosmos

Because you literally CANNOT make characters on Aether right now, or half of Primal/Crystal. If a world is marked congested you can't make a character there. Your argument is flawed.

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I think you missed the point of the argument. You actually gave another point in my favor for why people weren't going to Aether/Primal/Crystal if they couldn't because of what you said. The reason is irrelevant, it's the fact that they made a false statement of people fleeing in mass and not logging into Dynamis when that's a demonstrably false claim.

Square's solution was dumb, but I'm surprised the raiding community isn't adapting and just meeting on Primal instead of Aether since that dc is actually open. I'd heard from some friends that this was the case, but OP's post leads me to believe that there's still a sizable chunk of folks who refuse to leave the locked datacenter and would prefer to wait until crazy-hours to sneak in rather than just migrate to a new hub dc. Weird.