Feedback about Data center travel July 2025

As the population shrinks it seems the restrictions are getting tighter to transfer to other data centers and due to the fact i want to raid and i work till prime time i'm stuck having to stay on Aether rather then crystal and have access to my retainers and house due to possibility of having to sub for raiding i would like to see the restrictions of transfer to ease up while we are not in a true congested environment.

Just remember, in EW we didnt have these restrictions and the game worked fine! There were no major issues caused by DC travel afaik and I didn't have to spend 30 minutes refreshing a list because players refuse to raid anywhere by aether. What were the developers thinking? Very anit-player change.

They have to pretend the game is booming with congestion since the majority of the population sees the playerbase is shrinking more and more every day, it's their way of putting on a tough face and acting as if the game is exploding with players to the point that an entire DC is full.

In their minds, this is how they combat the issue of everyone congregating on a handful of worlds for raiding/erp. Every month we lose players, but somehow we're soooooo congested, lmao. Balmung has like 500 people in uldah and some gooners in a basement, meanwhile the rest of the world is dead af, barely anyone in the overworld, maybe some small crowds in gridania, a smaller limsa than most worlds. "Congested" btw though. lol. lmao.

Obviously you don't know what re you talking about. Jeez.

Make a PF on Crystal, be the change you want to see.

Might even give you some more options (e.g., strats that aren't the traditional speedrun-go-brrr risky Aether strategies. Maybe you can bring the JP strats which are generally regarded as more consistent and cozy for getting reliable PUG clears here, I would LOVE to see a datacenter on Western side pick up JP style strats so I can have a haven away from the hyper-competition without having to wait months or years till I've learned Japanese well enough to play on Mana!)

The restrictions feel like a response to people who wanted to raid on their own servers, bit of a tinfoil hat opinion here on my part I guess, but if the aim was to keep people on their servers there could be a better incentive without feeling like they're punishing us for the changes they made.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

Make a PF on Crystal, be the change you want to see.

Might even give you some more options (e.g., strats that aren't the traditional speedrun-go-brrr risky Aether strategies. Maybe you can bring the JP strats which are generally regarded as more consistent and cozy for getting reliable PUG clears here, I would LOVE to see a datacenter on Western side pick up JP style strats so I can have a haven away from the hyper-competition without having to wait months or years till I've learned Japanese well enough to play on Mana!)

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Many have tried, at this point you just end up waiting 3 hours for it not to fill. It's actually pointless. There were people who resisted for a while, but it's futile at this point and don't pretend like its not.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

The restrictions feel like a response to people who wanted to raid on their own servers, bit of a tinfoil hat opinion here on my part I guess, but if the aim was to keep people on their servers there could be a better incentive without feeling like they're punishing us for the changes they made.

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Unfortunately its a failed experiment, and it also punishes people who want to use the MB or go to a hunt.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

Make a PF on Crystal, be the change you want to see.

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Unfortunately, I think we're in a case of the Prisoner's Dilemma:

• Staying silent = Staying on Crystal
• Testifying = Traveling to Aether

Collectively, inhabitants of Crystal would be better off just staying on Crystal, but when each individual person has to make a choice, it's (allegedly) better to travel to Aether.

Thus, the collapse of PF on Crystal, and the fact that the few times I traveled to Aether, I found myself in a party where 6 out of 8 people were from Crystal. :confused:

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

Unfortunately its a failed experiment, and it also punishes people who want to use the MB or go to a hunt.

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I actually think that Hunts should have been kept for your DC only, but that's a topic for another time.
But yes you are right.

I still will always say them doing this lock is an over correction.

They should just either enable Cross Data PF. I would personally just merge both data centers into a Super Data Center. Keep every "server" but make it one Data center. You can still preserve your house, your FC, access your retainers, you can still travel, and also, PF will be just 1.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

Make a PF on Crystal, be the change you want to see.

Might even give you some more options (e.g., strats that aren't the traditional speedrun-go-brrr risky Aether strategies. Maybe you can bring the JP strats which are generally regarded as more consistent and cozy for getting reliable PUG clears here, I would LOVE to see a datacenter on Western side pick up JP style strats so I can have a haven away from the hyper-competition without having to wait months or years till I've learned Japanese well enough to play on Mana!)

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How about instead of suggesting players fix a problem SE created due to their severe lack of foresight, we demand better from the company we're paying a subscription fee to? It isn't as if people haven't tried to put up parties either. They rarely fill because people don't want to wait around for over an hour when they can hop to Aether and have 30 parties to choose from. Even if that means logging in at 3am just to sneak under the congestion restriction. It's still better despite losing access to your retainers and house.

With that aside, you will never see NA adopt JP strats. Not only is it already a huge ask just getting people to raid outside Aether, you're not going to spring a strat on them that nobody else uses in our region? That's doomed to fail before it even gets off the ground.

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Originally Posted by VerumNaos

I still will always say them doing this lock is an over correction.

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The lock made sense when Dawntrail launched if only as a precautionary measure after the disaster that was Endwalker. So I get it from that perspective. Keeping indefinitely is where they've overcorrected to the point it's actively hurting the community.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

How about instead of suggesting players fix a problem SE created due to their severe lack of foresight, we demand better from the company we're paying a subscription fee to? It isn't as if people haven't tried to put up parties either. They rarely fill because people don't want to wait around for over an hour when they can hop to Aether and have 30 parties to choose from. Even if that means logging in at 3am just to sneak under the congestion restriction. It's still better despite losing access to your retainers and house.

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Which is the big problem, you can't even just say "ok I'mma hop over to Aether for raid night." You have to go early and spend the day. It becomes like clocking in to work rather than something reasonable for a video game. I guess raiding really is something you have to treat like a job rather than a hobby nowadays, then?

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With that aside, you will never see NA adopt JP strats. Not only is it already a huge ask just getting people to raid outside Aether, you're not going to spring a strat on them that nobody else uses in our region? That's doomed to fail before it even gets off the ground.

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It's still a big question why sufficient pressure cannot be applied in this direction, though.

JP strats are literally designed around the needs of PF (or even DF, sometimes!) - to be executed by a random PUG group with minimal need for external comms and to minimize the chances of something going wrong.

In other words, the sort of thing you'd think NA PF would want, given that mostly what people seem to do is complain about how often things go wrong in PF and the need to keep joining discords to do anything.

Why do we keep adopting horribly counterproductive pug strats then to the point there seems to be no good alternative that doesn't involve either quarter second pings (Materia often does use JP-similar strats IIUC) or having to get fluent enough in Japanese to avoid friction on Mana?

What if we want to play FFXIV rather than FFLogs (which seems to be the only purpose of these rickety, overly cheeky uptime strats that have no good place in a PUG)?

Again, it basically seems that unless you speak JP or live in OCE you're being told "sorry, gotta adopt the jerb mentality or this content's not for you" with no viable alternative. In other words, that it's over, FFLogs is the game you have to play now and FFXIV is just the platform you use to do it ...

Personally, I'm cool with world visit, always have been. Data Center Travel was a mistake imo.

I wonder if CBU3 can put the genie back in the bottle.

My issue is that if I join into a party and a members home DC is on light, I can't even DM them for anything if they go back to light, so DC travel is good in that sense when I can go to light from chaos and actually message them to see if they're available. This actually happened recently when I wanted to do a Deep Dungeon run in 2 seperate days, so I was glad DC travel existed for that situation. Even if I ended up waiting for 30minutes for them to drop out of Eureka Orthos.

But that's kind of my only usecase for cross DC travel unless I am in a raiding phase and chaos is just dead, but I don't raid all the time so it's kind of whatever.

I would be ok with them to close DC travel, but allow cross DC messaging, but only if PF/DF is also cross DC.
but as it stands cross DC feels like a bandaid solution to what the actual solution would be.