Aether is always still locked - Raiding in NA Party Finder sucks everywhere else.

Since you can bring your own better buffs to other servers as well and repair from other teammates during a fight, we really need to move the raiding scene from Aether. I have no idea why the community does this to themselves, and the raiding buffs aren't worth it. If you think they do, you're completely insane. SE should take action to resolve this, but in all honesty, the problem is a community problem in NA.

No, it's happening in all regions.

JP all go to Mana.
EU all go to Light.

OCE probably would, but they can't.

SE did this to the community. Putting the blame on the playerbase hasn't worked well for anything. 10-year game that has no cross-DC queues and locks DC travel at peak times. Primal had an actual raiding party finder before DC travel.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

SE did this to the community. Putting the blame on the playerbase hasn't worked well for anything. 10-year game that has no cross-DC queues and locks DC travel at peak times. Primal had an actual raiding party finder before DC travel.

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It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Everyone believes that they have to go to Aether if they want to play with "good players." But that means that aether's party finders are full of both good players, and people who think they are better than they actually are.

When I had a semi-static on Primal DC, we had no issue picking up good fill-ins from people who were smart enough to check locally BEFORE they dragged themselves to Aether. Universally, the sentiment was "oh thank the Twelve someone put up a PF for this so I didn't have to DC port."

People think they will automatically pass any PF duty simply because of the DC they are on and all those skilled statics and guilds are going to help them.

They are wrong.

Blame SE short sight of vision. The reasoning was humble at first, but they forgot human mind thinking. In a few years we will get cross world pf data center. For right now, if you do not owned a house better transfer character.

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Originally Posted by Zarkovitch

Blame SE short sight of vision. The reasoning was humble at first, but they forgot human mind thinking. In a few years we will get cross world pf data center. For right now, if you do not owned a house better transfer character.

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Transfer how? Aether DC is locked.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

...10-year game that has no cross-DC queues and locks DC travel at peak times. Primal had an actual raiding party finder before DC travel.

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I absolutely love DC travel... but equally, they DO need to enable cross-DC queues, for both PvE and PvP.

(If they did it for PvP, we might actually get to do Rival Wings more often than when "Big Discord Group is scheduling a time, on these evenings, come fight!" Unless there is an Irregular Mogtome event going on, about the only time you can maybe get enough for RW is when the Discord groups set something up. With cross-DC queueing, it would help a lot and we might see combining a few people from multiple worlds/DCs upping the amount of times RW is actually playable---as in, they have enough people for queues to pop.)

It still baffles me how 10+ years after launch we still don't have cross data center party finder or even cross data center roulettes.
Or, even better, how we still can't whisper someone that is inside an instance. Or how you can't whisper someone that is on a different world than you UNLESS they're on your friend's list.

One day people will learn that they can get off aether's 🍆

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Originally Posted by brinn12

SE did this to the community. Putting the blame on the playerbase hasn't worked well for anything.

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This is like intentionally driving you car into a wall and then blaming Honda.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

This is like intentionally driving you car into a wall and then blaming Honda.

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The difference here is that Honda intentionally made the brake harder to access and lobbied local governments to make all roads lead to the same brick wall.

The problem is that raiders want to raid, and if everyone knows all the raiders are on aether, they'll go to aether because they want to raid. This, in turn, means everyone is always on aether trying to raid, and the cycle perpetuates.


Your analogy is closer to what happened to crystal, where everyone foolishly created this notion that crystal would be a dead raiding server, and enough raiders bought into this notion, bringing it into something of a reality. What's actually happening in Aether is water is finding the lowest point in a group of bowls to collect, but each bowl is individually not big enough. So most of the bowls are too empty, and one is overfull.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

The difference here is that Honda intentionally made the brake harder to access and lobbied local governments to make all roads lead to the same brick wall.

The problem is that raiders want to raid, and if everyone knows all the raiders are on aether, they'll go to aether because they want to raid. This, in turn, means everyone is always on aether trying to raid, and the cycle perpetuates.


Your analogy is closer to what happened to crystal, where everyone foolishly created this notion that crystal would be a dead raiding server, and enough raiders bought into this notion, bringing it into something of a reality. What's actually happening in Aether is water is finding the lowest point in a group of bowls to collect, but each bowl is individually not big enough. So most of the bowls are too empty, and one is overfull.

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Everyone is in full control of their own actions. Nothing forced the community to pile on one DC other than their own short sighted self interest. SE provided the car, the community chose to drive it into a wall. You could argue that SE should have never provided the car to begin with but that doesn't change who's recklessly driving it now.

At this point though whoever you or I believe is at fault is largely irrelevant, the problem is here and needs to be solved quickly one way or another. The travel restrictions are an improvement but they're still just a band-air over a gaping chest wound.

SE devs : "Is this a problem for JP players ? No ? Then don't care."

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Originally Posted by Taranok

Your analogy is closer to what happened to crystal, where everyone foolishly created this notion that crystal would be a dead raiding server, and enough raiders bought into this notion, bringing it into something of a reality. .

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lol the devs put balmung (the only server on crystal with any sizable raid population) with all of the smallest servers on crystal. Many people who were on crystal servers were part of statics where all the other members were on primal or aether servers. Of course they would transfer back to primal/aether to stay with their statics. Crystal being dead for raiding was 100% on the devs.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Everyone believes that they have to go to Aether if they want to play with "good players." But that means that aether's party finders are full of both good players, and people who think they are better than they actually are.

When I had a semi-static on Primal DC, we had no issue picking up good fill-ins from people who were smart enough to check locally BEFORE they dragged themselves to Aether. Universally, the sentiment was "oh thank the Twelve someone put up a PF for this so I didn't have to DC port."

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It isn't just people assuming Aether has all the "good players" but rather wanting access to a bigger pool of players. There's no denying Aether has more of an established raid scene. Yes, Primal was quite healthy too, but Aether was always the best option in terms of quantity. Everyone congregating in one location gives those players significantly better chances of finding a party than if they're spread out. This is why roleplaying remained dedicated to Balmung for so long.

To put it another way. If there are ten parties all M8S phase 2, it's better that all of them are in one location than five on Aether, three on Primal and two on Crystal. Of course, it sucks for the players who either don't want to be forced into DC traveling all the time or simply can't due to Aether being consistently locked. However, this is when we circle back to SE and their poor planning They absolutely deserve the lion's share of blame here after implementing a system with zero thought beyond it's initial impact and essentially throwing up their hands and saying "it's just too hard!!!!" to fix a problem they created. The sad irony is the utter lack of content and regular lulls we've seen since 6.1 has brought the active population back down to Shadowbringer's launch, y'know when Aether wasn't congested.

In other words, the whole congestion thing is a farce meant to make the game look more active than it is.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Everyone is in full control of their own actions. Nothing forced the community to pile on one DC other than their own short sighted self interest

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This is ridiculous. Of course we're focused on our own self interest. We're paying for a product. Why should I or anyone be forced to deal with an inferior product and essentially doe the work for SE all while giving them 30$ (CAD) a month? I lucked out when Crystal happened as I had already moved to Aether years prior because of meeting new friends. But for the sake of argument let's pretend I didn't. If I remained on Balmung, I'd have a significantly harder time raiding regardless if people didn't immediately transfer back or not. The overall population on Crystal simply isn't interested in the raid scene to the extent Aether, and at the time, Primal were. Why should I sacrifice my enjoyment to build a community that maybe is half of what Aether already had? That isn't shortsightedness, it's valuing my money.

Now if you or SE wants to, pardon the meme, "pay my sub". I might sing a different tune. But I wouldn't do SE's job for them. To borrow your analogy, it would be akin to buying a Honda but being told you can only drive it in a specific city. Live in Austin and wanna visit Dallas? Sorry, your Honda isn't allowed to do that.

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Originally Posted by Qyoon

SE devs : "Is this a problem for JP players ? No ? Then don't care."

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Yes for some. Meteor is dead, if I wish to get anything done I have to smuggle myself to Mana before peak hours come in. The other DCs work, but definitely not as convenient as Mana.

Balmung never had a sizable raiding population. Anyone on claiming so is ignorant.

The raiding servers on crystal were Brynhildr and Goblin during early EW and ShB

Primal is acceptable for fills when Aether is full. It's not quite as full, but you can find parties.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Interesting... I had assumed (based on what someone else had told me elsewhere) that Balmung had been heavily populated due to RPers first and raiders second, which is why it quickly turned its self (and the rest of Crystal) into "the" RP world/data center.

But more than likely that was not only a result of raiders moving away back to Aether (and Primal) for their statics, but new people moving into Crystal due to all of the new housing from the new worlds. By no sheer coincidence, Dynamis seems to be growing into "Crystal 2.0" due to a distinct lack of any raiding (or PVP) scene but there's loads of new housing for new venues and thus another place for RPers to gather, especially with Balmung alone being as congested as Aether is entirely.

I know people joke about RPers being the largest demographic holding the game up, but that's one time where they determined whether a new data center flourished even after a whole community transferred away, and they're the only reason Dynamis has any life at all. (Seriously, there's some days where venus spam is the ONLY thing in PF for hours on end.)

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Balmung was the RP server but it was also the most populated server in the game at the time (slightly ahead of Gilgamesh) and shared the same DC as Gilgamesh (the "raid" server from ARR/HW). Balmung still had a ton of raiders due to its sheer size.

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Originally Posted by Jamini

Balmung never had a sizable raiding population. Anyone on claiming so is ignorant.

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Balmung was the server with by far the most raiders on crystal when crystal was formed. Like, this isn't even debatable. It was primarily a RP server but it still had the largest population of raiders for crystal at the time. Do you have any idea how large balmung was compared to all the other ffxiv servers back then? Balmung and Gilgamesh being so large is a major reason why they split them up and created crystal lol.

https://x.com/Bwin4L/status/1063990924026527744/photo/3

https://x.com/Bwin4L/status/1120460278423085057/photo/1

Keep in mind they had to keep Balmung and Gilgamesh closed for a significant amount of time during stormblood due to how popular those servers were. At one point they were like 7-10k~ population ahead of the rest of the NA servers during HW.

Gilgamesh is DYING - there's nobody around. We need the server unlocked for fresh blood. Relying on numbers that are inactive accounts is half the reason why this problem occurs in the first place. The numbers need to reflect active accounts.

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Originally Posted by Jamini

Balmung never had a sizable raiding population. Anyone on claiming so is ignorant.

The raiding servers on crystal were Brynhildr and Goblin during early EW and ShB

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Probably the biggest piece of misinformation on here.

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Originally Posted by Conroy

Since you can bring your own better buffs to other servers as well and repair from other teammates during a fight, we really need to move the raiding scene from Aether. I have no idea why the community does this to themselves, and the raiding buffs aren't worth it. If you think they do, you're completely insane. SE should take action to resolve this, but in all honesty, the problem is a community problem in NA.

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I'm kinda glad Primal players are having a bad time now. Buncha bozos killed their own PF scene for no reason, why? Join an Aether PF and it's 50%+ Primal players...

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Originally Posted by Router

I'm kinda glad Primal players are having a bad time now. Buncha bozos killed their own PF scene for no reason, why? Join an Aether PF and it's 50%+ Primal players...

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god forbid people want to play with other people from aether because its the main hub for it

oh the drama !

Honestly "go to Aether" is a legit issue and PF needs to rebuild on the rest of the DCs too instead of expecting people to travel.

Lessee.

Do you have an active FC on Primal, Crystal, or Dynamis?

Do you like crafting stuff that uses timed node materials and not like being forced to depend on paying MB prices every time you do?

Do you like selling stuff on the MB? Or even having access to any inventory capacity but your backpack and saddlebag?

Do you like going to your house (wait you have one?) or apartment often?

WELL BUDDY! THEN I GUESS YOU DON'T GET TO BE A RAIDER unless you have a static! Because you can't do ANY of these while you're trundled out to Aether to get a group together in a decent period of time! And you'd better go to Aether ahead of time too because there's no guarantee you'll even be able to get in at the hour you actually want to raid, so that's even more time you're locked out from all of the above!

Yeah. C'mon playerbase you can do better. Fix it.

Preferably before it's Aether's turn to be the host datacenter for ranked PvP. Wait, we've already had Crystal and Primal, have we had Dynamis yet? I forget. That means you can probably bet the deed to Buscarron's Druthers it's gonna be Tuesday or the season after that, because I doubt the SE of today's going to be observant enough to skip Aether and not just cycle blindly through the DCs going forward ...