REGION-WIDE Duty Finder & Party Finder: Urgently needed in NA & EU

Hello!

I am making this thread to hopefully get some attention from the devs about this solution many of us have been pushing for in various threads and put it in a centralized thread we can periodically bump or add our ideas to.


What region-wide DF and PF entails:

This means that anyone within their region would be able to seamlessly play with others also in the same region. Let's use the two EU DCs, Chaos and Light, as our example:

Current behavior: When you queue into a roulette or open your PF while in Chaos, you will only be matched up with players currently in Chaos DC, and only PFs created in any of the worlds belonging to Chaos will appear on the list.
If you want to see any PFs made in Light DC, you will have to manually travel there, losing access to any PFs created in Chaos. This causes the majority of players seeking to get matched up for content quickly to pool in a singular DC, in our case Light, leaving Chaos barren except for roulette queues (and only during peak hours)

What we'd like: DF will take players from both Chaos and Light worlds, resulting in quicker queues for everyone and a greater chance for nocturnal players to find others to get their roulettes done with. This will also mean you can run savages and ultimates in PF from the comfort of your home world, as well as interact with the entirety of the region's PF without travelling between DCs and congesting one DC over the other.


Why this is needed urgently in NA & EU:

As the wait between patches draws longer and longer, player population decreases and the pool of players DF can draw from is smaller, making queue times longer than expected even for supports in many cases. In the case of PF, this causes DCs like Aether and Light to become the "raiding" DC, causing the rest to become barren as players travel to get their savages and ultimates done. Since they are there, might as well get their roulettes done. Since they spend all their time there, might as well transfer... and thus these DCs become significantly more congested than the others.

Dynamis DC is the perfect example of why we need this so badly.
Dynamis, despite belonging to the group of DCs in NA (approx. 3 times larger than the entirety of EU), struggles to fill common roulettes every day due to the amount of players it can draw from (only within Dynamis DC). Their PF is completely barren in comparison to other DCs within the same region.
By sharing a PF and DF with the entirety of NA, Dynamis would no longer suffer these issues and new players stranded in these worlds would be able to advance their MSQ with other players instead of relying on NPCs for nearly all duties.

Players can already travel across DCs, quickening the "death" of certain DCs while others are bursting at the seams to match the demand of players logging in. Eliminate this issue by allowing DF and PF to be region-wide. Many players will immediately return to their home worlds, and will do so happily. Many will consider transferring to less-populated worlds now that barren DF and PF is not a worry to them and get to enjoy other features such as housing, which also greatly suffers in congested worlds. This will greatly help towards balancing out player population without dragging players kicking and screaming, closing down entire DCs, forcing merges that will doubtless affect the game's reputation, etc.

In NA, Aether has been in lockdown for long enough for players to be worried about the future of their DC as player activity wanes but new blood is not allowed in their worlds.
In EU, Chaos is lucky to see more than 10 PF listings at one time, and this includes venue spam which typically takes up 4-8 of those 10 listings.


The how to get it done is, at the end of the day, the dev's job to figure out, but please share your ideas or bump this thread if you would like to see this feature added.

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia. Japanese players are quite hostile to English speaking players often putting the phrase "Do you speak Japanese?" In their PF's and kicking anyone who doesn't. English speaking players from Elemental literally cannot say a single word while PFing on the regions "raiding hub" and if they MUST speak have to rely on Google translate and pray no one discovers the secret that they are not Japanese.
Imagine if this happened on EU with all the languages.

Japanese players not wanting to interact with english speakers is the reason why the OCE datascenter exists even though SE knew the region didn't have the population to sustain itself because the Japanese players do not want non Japanese players on their servers and in their parties. Its also why cross DC travel is restricted to region only (NA > NA. EU > EU) square Enix confirmed they limited this feature because of possible "culture clashes" on various DC's.

Long story short we will never get cross region PF or full cross region DC travel because Japanese players do not want to mingle with the rest of the game even within their DC region. This is mind boggling considering players outside Japan make up majority of this games profits and playerbase but SE are incapable of not catering to JP players first and foremost, just look at the ping problem being an apparent non issue.

It keeps getting suggested, but I don't think it can be done except for maybe the European servers, mostly because there's only 2 of them. And even there it would likely be an extra inconvenience to the players.

You'd need people to send over their characters data to the other DCs, essentially doing just the same things as what happens with a DC Travel, in order to begin queueing with multiple DCs. As I said, with Europe only having 2 servers, it wouldn't be as bad. NA and Japan having 4 servers, they'd need to do essentially 3 DC travels back to back in order for it to work.

And in order to ensure the data is properly synced, it would likely need to be done once per login.

It's technically possible but also complicated. But so was DC travel and world visit themselves, and they achieved them.

In order to achieve sending people over they would ultimately have to DC travel at some point. It could be made seamless by disconnecting the player but making it look like they are still connected and in a cutscene.

What also complicates it is the scenario where a world is congested. In that scenario, the party leader may also need to be transferred to a different DC or world that is less congested.

Would a cloud server that functions as a PF lobby of sorts? Think something (hypothetical) like solution 9 but with multiple instances? Then we'd just transfer to it to PF (I guess?).. Or is this like a technical nightmare scenario?

I guess the drawback would be having to travel to this cloud server to PF... Hmmm

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Originally Posted by Rueby

Would a cloud server that functions as a PF lobby of sorts?

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I think that external servers are a good idea generally to divert resources from the game server itself since they seem to have such trouble with that. There are many features in the game that don't really connect to eachother and could be completely separated like that.

However, they could likely achieve showing other DC PF listings simply by having the server itself get a periodic update every minute of active PF listings on other data centers. They seem to do a similar thing with the Friends List but it's heavily rate limited so that they don't DDoS themselves.

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I guess the drawback would be having to travel to this cloud server to PF... Hmmm

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The location you actually do the content is the main issue. As I mentioned, the DC or world that the PF leader is on might be congested. However, an ideal solution would be for a server to figure out where the least congestion is and transfer everyone there for the content. So, Dynamis/Chaos. :p

The exact details are the difficult part. Does everyone have to logout manually? Can the transfer occur without it feeling like you logged out, such as while entering the duty? Can the time be reduced since it takes ages currently and closes the game sometimes due to login session expiring? How does the party reform - an external cloud server could hold cross-DC party data maybe? Where is the cross-DC party chat located, cloud server maybe? If it's cross-region PF/DF, which region is this cloud server in?

So I'm not saying it's impossible. It's just a technical challenge. Think of it like Cid achieving something technical in the MSQ, that nobody else has, because it's just not a simple thing to do, but can if someone goes through all the trouble and has the motivation and strong desire.

Ranked PvP being only on one DC before Region DF/PF is such a terrible decision too. Want to do ranked? F your retainers, F being able to talk to anyone in your LS or FC!

Well. If I remember correctly, they tested both "Cloud sevrers" and EU had a time limited Shadow DC with the DT release. Every instance you join is a specific instance on a game server, that fetched data from lobby server. I know all the data is junky, having a specific login, database, lobby and game servers. But don't tell me, it is beyond a scope of a company like Square, to make communication between Lobby servers (where your character data is stored) and game servers (the instances) more effective, that you could make a special "dummy" DC with instances between both DC's. Heck, I would even want it to be fully used for a duty finder, not just a PF, even tho PF needs it the most.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia.

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The solution seems pretty simple to me, just as we have it now with the option for Server only PF (I forgot it exists sometimes)- Cross Datacenter PF and Region PF would only be options.
I suppose this doesn't help too much with their problems of everybody going to Mana, though at least it means they won't have to play with Elemental if they don't want to.

They need to go back in time and change their minds about enabling DC visiting. The "culture issues" isn't just between JP and the rest of the world; there are smaller culture issues between NA DCs too. There are reasons some of us don't go to other DCs to use their PFs even if our DC PFs have been emptied.

Can't say I would be too pleased if, in my years of effort to avoid Aether, that Aether was simply unavoidably dumped on me.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia. Japanese players are quite hostile to English speaking players often putting the phrase "Do you speak Japanese?" In their PF's and kicking anyone who doesn't. English speaking players from Elemental literally cannot say a single word while PFing on the regions "raiding hub" and if they MUST speak have to rely on Google translate and pray no one discovers the secret that they are not Japanese.
Imagine if this happened on EU with all the languages.

Japanese players not wanting to interact with english speakers is the reason why the OCE datascenter exists even though SE knew the region didn't have the population to sustain itself because the Japanese players do not want non Japanese players on their servers and in their parties. Its also why cross DC travel is restricted to region only (NA > NA. EU > EU) square Enix confirmed they limited this feature because of possible "culture clashes" on various DC's.

Long story short we will never get cross region PF or full cross region DC travel because Japanese players do not want to mingle with the rest of the game even within their DC region. This is mind boggling considering players outside Japan make up majority of this games profits and playerbase but SE are incapable of not catering to JP players first and foremost, just look at the ping problem being an apparent non issue.

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Like you currently can restrict PF recruitment to current world only, go ahead and have an option to restrict it to current dc only as well. It's not an issue.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

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You're right, I completely forgot that JP was split into 4 DCs like NA. I didn't mention them at all in the original post because I can't read Japanese and don't go to that part of the forums, so talking about their situation would be lying on my part.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia. Japanese players are quite hostile to English speaking players often putting the phrase "Do you speak Japanese?" In their PF's and kicking anyone who doesn't. English speaking players from Elemental literally cannot say a single word while PFing on the regions "raiding hub" and if they MUST speak have to rely on Google translate and pray no one discovers the secret that they are not Japanese.
Imagine if this happened on EU with all the languages.

[...] square Enix confirmed they limited [the cross-region visits] feature because of possible "culture clashes" on various DC's.

Long story short we will never get cross region PF or full cross region DC travel because Japanese players do not want to mingle with the rest of the game even within their DC region. This is mind boggling considering players outside Japan make up majority of this games profits and playerbase but SE are incapable of not catering to JP players first and foremost, just look at the ping problem being an apparent non issue.

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I'll have you know EU is doing just fine on the language front lol
We try to speak English whenever possible, but it wouldn't be the first time if I had to pull up a translator tool to explain mechs to a french player in an Ultimate. We mostly make use of the auto-translate feature or use translators in more complicated content, and often times parties are diverse enough to have at least one other player who can assist in translation if needed. In my 5 years of playing, I don't think I ever experienced a language issue that couldn't be resolved with basic communication.

If Japanese players wish to be xenophobic, they're free to miss out on features that would only benefit them while the rest of us who are not averse to basic communication get use out of them. Even if it was implemented they'd only benefit from it, as they can continue to test players on their Japanese skills while simultaneously drawing from a larger pool of JP players for their PFs.

As mentioned by other users in this thread, they can also lock their PF to their own world if they're worried about this. Features to lock your PF to your DC could be implemented as well if SE is interested in the JP playerbase's comfort. I don't think it affects any of us, so why not?

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

It keeps getting suggested, but I don't think it can be done except for maybe the European servers, mostly because there's only 2 of them. And even there it would likely be an extra inconvenience to the players.

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The same was thought about cross-DC travel, yet here we are!
And because DF and PF didn't follow suit, we've got an interesting problem on our hands...

I think having EU as a testing grounds without having to worry about cultural clashes for this would be pretty cool. If it works well, they can scale it up further so NA and possibly JP can make use out of it.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

You'd need people to send over their characters data to the other DCs, essentially doing just the same things as what happens with a DC Travel, in order to begin queueing with multiple DCs. As I said, with Europe only having 2 servers, it wouldn't be as bad. NA and Japan having 4 servers, they'd need to do essentially 3 DC travels back to back in order for it to work.
And in order to ensure the data is properly synced, it would likely need to be done once per login.

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I am afraid I don't follow, where are these multiple DC travels coming from? I was thinking it'd make more sense to have one central server per region managing duties, pulling people in and out as needed. Although it may take an extra 10 seconds to enter the duty as the server gathers everybody and gets them ready to travel, it'd only be one trip to enter the duty and one trip to go back to your world, wouldn't it? I'm not very tech-savvy so I'd appreciate more detail on this if I'm completely missing the mark.

I think the idea other users suggested of the game automatically choosing the least congested DC and transferring everyone over there would be good too. As I said, this is the part where I can't really be of help since I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I love seeing everyone's opinion on it.

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Originally Posted by Doki

Ranked PvP being only on one DC before Region DF/PF is such a terrible decision too. Want to do ranked? F your retainers, F being able to talk to anyone in your LS or FC!

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You're so right, I completely forgot about ranked! Region-wide DF would completely alleviate this issue. So many things I missed in the OP that you are suggesting that would be immediately fixed if we had this feature...

Not sure why OCE was excluded in the title.

I'm from EU, and play in Chaos - Moogle... we don't have problems with languages or culture barriers :confused: you can choose the language you join the PF in-game, to have more possibilities to queue fast I have all languages and sometimes people write in dutch or french... it's okay, we have translating tools nowadays xD

It's very peculiar to me because EU has multiple countries and only 2 datacenters and we don't have so much problem with travelling or languages; I just discovered people go to Light to raid in this post and made me kinda sad xD DC travelling is slow and tiring...

Anyway, I hope there is a way to shorten the queues in party finder, that would be awesome (specially for dps...)

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Originally Posted by Xactly

Not sure why OCE was excluded in the title.

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OCE region is composed of a singular DC, Materia, so nothing would change for them if this feature was added. If OCE had more than one DC like EU, only then this feature would be relevant for them.

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Originally Posted by KhujaRela

I'm from EU, and play in Chaos - Moogle... we don't have problems with languages or culture barriers :confused: you can choose the language you join the PF in-game, to have more possibilities to queue fast I have all languages and sometimes people write in dutch or french... it's okay, we have translating tools nowadays xD

It's very peculiar to me because EU has multiple countries and only 2 datacenters and we don't have so much problem with travelling or languages; [...]

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Haha, right?
I would imagine that from an NA player's perspective, dealing with multiple languages can be chaotic because they're not used to it - but aside from French people refusing the communicate with the rest of us sometimes (?) I've never had a problem in my 5 years playing this game in EU.

Perhaps it is because we are around 1/3rd the size of NA that we have a more cooperative mentality towards communication; we have no choice, after all. Alienating others for not speaking our native language (when Europe has more languages than the officially supported ones, on top of that...) would be very silly of us if we intend to have enough people to run content.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

I am afraid I don't follow, where are these multiple DC travels coming from? I was thinking it'd make more sense to have one central server per region managing duties, pulling people in and out as needed. Although it may take an extra 10 seconds to enter the duty as the server gathers everybody and gets them ready to travel, it'd only be one trip to enter the duty and one trip to go back to your world, wouldn't it? I'm not very tech-savvy so I'd appreciate more detail on this if I'm completely missing the mark.

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Well, all the different DCs are on different physical machines, cross-world stuff works easier because all the worlds on the DC are all on the same server computer.
In order to play on a different DC, you need your character to exist on that DC. And so when you DC Travel, your character's data gets sent over to that machine.

It would probably be more than possible to create a cross-DC chat, but in order to play with people from a different DC everyone's characters would need to be sent to the same server. At best it would likely involve creating a separate DC that exists only for DF and PF that people would travel to, kinda like the Shadow DC that briefly existed in the Europe region at the start of dawntrail... Although it ultimately wouldn't really be any different from people just Traveling to the most active DC.

I understand they are working on it with ranked 5v5. I would imagine it is easy to port over once that is implemented

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

[...] At best it would likely involve creating a separate DC that exists only for DF and PF that people would travel to, kinda like the Shadow DC that briefly existed in the Europe region at the start of dawntrail... Although it ultimately wouldn't really be any different from people just Traveling to the most active DC.

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I understand now, thank you.
I think we would still greatly benefit from region-wide DF and PF if the travelling only happens once you queue into the duty. I imagine getting basic data across like character name, job and level wouldn't be extremely difficult but I didn't think about people being unable to chat while in a PF outside of duty... I wonder how they'd get around that without forcing us out of our home worlds.

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Originally Posted by Eastwall

I understand they are working on it with ranked 5v5. I would imagine it is easy to port over once that is implemented

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Really? I had no idea! When was this said?
I hope things go smoothly so we can hopefully get it for regular DF and PF too!

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Originally Posted by Shistar

I would imagine that from an NA player's perspective, dealing with multiple languages can be chaotic because they're not used to it

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It is off-putting, for sure. Because many EU players went to play in NA originally because there was no EU data center. There only used to be one EU data center called Chaos and it wasn't even located in the EU, and its population wasn't exactly great at the time. They moved it to EU in 2015.

So the appeal of starting on EU wasn't high when there was no benefit whatsoever. After the change, going to try out EU you were met with the realization that, as an English speaker, many don't speak that or don't speak it well on EU servers, and it's simpler to just play in the NA region where virtually everyone speaks English really well.

It's not that hard to navigate it due to auto-translate but it's still just more effort or extra steps, and sometimes you do have to sit through entire conversations in another language in party chat, even in High-End duties.

Visual guides and markers are more important to help cross the language barrier, because saying things like "M2" or "T1" makes it easy to explain your role in a fight without using words. And it seems less common to get a PF into discord voice in EU because of the varied languages.

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aside from French people refusing the communicate with the rest of us sometimes (?) I've never had a problem in my 5 years playing this game in EU.

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As you say, it is mainly French that tends to cause problems sometimes. It has always seemed more common for other language speakers to be multi-lingual. It's recognized enough that France has been improving it in schools in recent years but that won't affect MMO players for a good 10-20 years.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It is off-putting, for sure. [...] going to try out EU you were met with the realization that, as an English speaker, many don't speak that or don't speak it well on EU servers, and it's simpler to just play in the NA region where virtually everyone speaks English really well.
It's not that hard to navigate it due to auto-translate but it's still just more effort or extra steps, and sometimes you do have to sit through entire conversations in another language in party chat, even in High-End duties.

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Do you play in EU often? I've been only in EU since I began playing in 2020 and my experience was never that... yes, you may see people speaking in other languages in public spaces, especially in certain servers like Ragnarok (spanish), Shiva (german), Moogle (french) and so on... but if you talk to someone in English, they are extremely likely to swap to your language (if they weren't already talking in English to begin with) and all duties are treated as "English unless we find out all of us have a another language in common and we're being silly talking in English for no reason" zone. It is extremely rare to "have" to sit through an entire conversation with auto-translate and even then they're usually short-lived conversations, just trying to get the main point across and move on.

MMO players are generally older and the younger generation is also better educated, so the level of English is fairly decent all around. No, it's not perfect grammar or stellar pronunciation in VC but English is not my first language and we're communicating just fine! The vast majority of EU players can talk in English just fine, but often choose to be in FCs where their native language is favored. Public areas are also not English-only, but duties usually are.

I assume you were taking my quote to provide extra context for the people reading this thread later on, otherwise I find it a little odd you're explaining EU culture to an EU player... as an NA player? :confused: Even then and you being a veteran, as I said I have to disagree with the way you see EU players, as someone who actually plays here every day and deals with the players all the time. We have virtually zero communication issues if you ignore a very specific, very small subset of players that may only mildly inconvenience you in a casual roulette, where communication is not a matter of life and death either way.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

[...] And it seems less common to get a PF into discord voice in EU because of the varied languages.

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Yeah no, we don't do that afaik lol that sounds wild. I don't think I'd ever go into VC with a bunch of strangers from PF, only time I've seen this happen is if you join a static as a PF replacement and it's just an offer if they're feeling particularly friendly.. but it's an effective way to communicate when you know the vast majority of players in your region are guaranteed to understand what you're saying, accents aside.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Do you play in EU often? I've been only in EU since I began playing in 2020 and my experience was never that

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I did a lot of High-End stuff there in Shadowbringers and that was my experience all of the time. Half the time a party would have a lot of non-English conversation, or there would be fundamental struggles with working with people due to it, and it was virtually always with people that only spoke French. Also have joined random MINE content there sometimes.

Like I said it's not a major issue nor really that hard to deal with, but when you're used to not having to run into it at all, nor think about it at all, it makes you more likely to just switch back to NA.

My intent was to agree with your point that, from an NA player's perspective, dealing with multiple languages can be chaotic because they're not used to it.

However, in the context of a cross-region PF or DF, which this thread doesn't seem to actually be suggesting, it would ultimately be fine on the basis that the Japanese and EU regions figured out working across language barriers, so NA players will too if they enable a setting to cross regions.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I did a lot of High-End stuff there in Shadowbringers and that was my experience all of the time. Half the time a party would have a lot of non-English conversation, or there would be fundamental struggles with working with people due to it, and it was virtually always with people that only spoke French. Also have joined random MINE content there sometimes.

Like I said it's not a major issue nor really that hard to deal with, but when you're used to not having to run into it at all, nor think about it at all, it makes you more likely to just switch back to NA.

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I see, things seem to have changed a lot lately! I'm happy to say there's rarely any issues nowadays.
Cross-region would be crazy considering the servers are so far away and someone will get the short end of the stick with the ping, but it could be fun for memes.

Back to the top with this. We'd all benefit from it, so it is worth keeping visible.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

After the change, going to try out EU you were met with the realization that, as an English speaker, many don't speak that or don't speak it well on EU servers, and it's simpler to just play in the NA region where virtually everyone speaks English

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First of all that's pretty xenophobic and reminds me of all these memes of i learned english because you refuse to learn anything else. Majority of EU players speaks english just fine, and who doesn't usually stay within their group that uses their language. Admittedly there will be a non-english shout here and there in hubs but again, people who want isolation in their language gotta find these groups somehow. I don't see a problem.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's not that hard to navigate it due to auto-translate but it's still just more effort or extra steps, and sometimes you do have to sit through entire conversations in another language in party chat, even in High-End duties.

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I play since around 2018 and I have yet to see 'sitting through entire conversations in another language in high end duties', but dunno i also don't see a reason why i shouldn't switch to my native or 3rd language i am fluent in to help someone out when they struggle to understand a mechanic in english so WE CAN ACTUALLY CLEAR. Again. xenophobia much.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

And it seems less common to get a PF into discord voice in EU because of the varied languages.

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It's not language barrier. It's privacy. I can assure you that many people would join an in-game chat if there was one, but sharing your discord to 7 strangers who you never met before in game and who you may never talk to again is often out of the question for many.

Hard agree. And if you don't speak the language, that's what translators are for!

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Originally Posted by virianna

I play since around 2018 and I have yet to see 'sitting through entire conversations in another language in high end duties', but dunno i also don't see a reason why i shouldn't switch to my native or 3rd language i am fluent in to help someone out when they struggle to understand a mechanic in english so WE CAN ACTUALLY CLEAR. Again. xenophobia much.

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I gotta say, although it happened literally one time and never again, I did mention having the french player that knew zero English in my UWU prog group. Thankfully everyone was super patient and we got by with auto translate and some quick chat sentences, so if we can prog an Ultimate like that I think the language barrier will never be an issue (it never was, honestly, and we got nearly to the end of Ifrit like that if I remember right? So it was a very productive prog considering we had someone who got the mechs explained exclusively through poorly translated sentences on my part)

Honestly, having such a varied community has awakened my interest to pick up more languages. It's great to see some people having 3+ languages listed in their adventurer plates!

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Hard agree. And if you don't speak the language, that's what translators are for!



I gotta say, although it happened literally one time and never again, I did mention having the french player that knew zero English in my UWU prog group. Thankfully everyone was super patient and we got by with auto translate and some quick chat sentences, so if we can prog an Ultimate like that I think the language barrier will never be an issue (it never was, honestly, and we got nearly to the end of Ifrit like that if I remember right? So it was a very productive prog considering we had someone who got the mechs explained exclusively through poorly translated sentences on my part)

Honestly, having such a varied community has awakened my interest to pick up more languages. It's great to see some people having 3+ languages listed in their adventurer plates!

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Sadly JP players do not see it this way. "Do you speak Japanese" is a common phrase in Elemental PF and if you do not you're kicked. When PFing in Mana english speaking Elemental players are scared to type a single word because if they are found out as not being Japanese fluent they will be kicked from the PF.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

Sadly JP players do not see it this way. "Do you speak Japanese" is a common phrase in Elemental PF and if you do not you're kicked. When PFing in Mana english speaking Elemental players are scared to type a single word because if they are found out as not being Japanese fluent they will be kicked from the PF.

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It's nice to hear "JP only" still exists <_<

Chaos has been dead for eons. Both in PF and visually speaking. It's time for an EU merger into a super server.

For real though, any idea if creating region wide PF is even possible? From a technical perspective.

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Originally Posted by Hanzz96

Sadly JP players do not see it this way. "Do you speak Japanese" is a common phrase in Elemental PF and if you do not you're kicked. When PFing in Mana english speaking Elemental players are scared to type a single word because if they are found out as not being Japanese fluent they will be kicked from the PF.

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Again, the feature I'm suggesting doesn't impede them from continuing to play however they want! But we'd greatly benefit from having it.

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Originally Posted by arnisong

For real though, any idea if creating region wide PF is even possible? From a technical perspective.

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Users before were theorizing about a specific server that only manages duties, so you'd be transported there for your roulette/PF no matter where you come from, then taken back home once you're done. Obviously, still some details to iron out like how we'd be able to talk to each other while waiting in PF if players are from different DCs but not inside the duty together, but I do not think it is impossible if the devs were given clearance to work on it.

Why not just fuse together all servers on some datacenter? Those services can be scalated, right? RIGHT?

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Originally Posted by miraidensetsu

Why not just fuse together all servers on some datacenter? Those services can be scalated, right? RIGHT?

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EU used to be a single region, split up into two DCs so all DCs would have the same amount of worlds - same like you guys got your worlds reorganized with Aether, Crystal and Primal all having the same amount of worlds. Something about server stability, but I wasn't there when it happened so maybe a veteran can provide better context.
The long and short of it is that no, we can't have 1 huge DC for each region because their infrastructure can't support that kind of thing. Besides, cross-DC DF and PF would continue to be useful no matter how much they remix the DCs since everyone would be able to continue playing with everyone.

Cloud servers can be escalated I think? We had Shadow in EU (with some banger world names too) but it got taken down after a while since they were no longer needed to handle congestion. I am hoping that they're looking into moving us into cloud servers and that would give us a better chance at being more unified as regions, but nothing has been announced so this is all just my hope for the (hopefully not too far) future.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

EU used to be a single region, split up into two DCs so all DCs would have the same amount of worlds - same like you guys got your worlds reorganized with Aether, Crystal and Primal all having the same amount of worlds. Something about server stability, but I wasn't there when it happened so maybe a veteran can provide better context.

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NA used to only have Primal and Aether. EU used to only have Chaos. But the game kept growing, and these data centers were overflowing beyond what they could technically handle.

To solve this problem, SE sundered Primal and Aether into Crystal, and sundered Chaos into Light, while adding new EU worlds. At the time, we did not have data center travel, so people's FCs broke apart and people quit. SE knew this would happen, but said "we're sorry, but we want to grow this game".

Now, you could argue that the game was growing then, but is now declining, and that's a fair argument, but SE can't know if it will start growing again. If they merge data centers somehow, and the game grows back to where it was, then they'd have to split them all over again. Splits and mergers massively affect players, so it's not an easy decision.

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Originally Posted by miraidensetsu

Why not just fuse together all servers on some datacenter? Those services can be scalated, right? RIGHT?

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It'll have something to do with the maximum number of connections, ports or load going through an individual data center wire. They have to split the player load, and to achieve that they make separate data centers.

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Originally Posted by arnisong

For real though, any idea if creating region wide PF is even possible? From a technical perspective.

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It's technically possible, but there are challenges. Region PF itself would be quite easy or could utlize a cloud server. A region PF itself would be pointless without a region DF queue though, and that's the complicated part. They would need to figure out how to do DC travel seamlessly, or alternatively share the DF servers between data centers, and either way that would need a lot of QA testing and could have catastrophic bugs if there is an oversight.

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Originally Posted by virianna

First of all that's pretty xenophobic

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That's your opinion. I am in the EU myself and even connect better with people from the EU due to having more similar cultures, climates and slang. Even in other EU countries people are way more on my wavelength than in NA. However, it's pretty common for people to want to be in an environment where people speak the same language to reduce the mental fatigue of navigating language barriers. There are fellowships and language-specific statics made for this purpose all the time, because they just want to be in a consistent environment instead of navigating languages.

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I play since around 2018 and I have yet to see 'sitting through entire conversations in another language in high end duties'

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It was pretty common for me in ShB and seemed rather normal. Not seeing it is most likely due to mentally filtering out other languages without realizing, because this is common in the EU region - for example if I see another language PF or static I'm probably just going to ignore it and forget I saw it, because I don't speak that language. As I said, it's not that hard to navigate, but when you have played in an entirely English region like NA and then switch to EU or JP, suddenly you have to be aware of the different language fluency which isn't even a passing thought in NA because virtually everyone is 100% fluent in English.

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It's not language barrier. It's privacy. I can assure you that many people would join an in-game chat if there was one, but sharing your discord to 7 strangers who you never met before in game and who you may never talk to again is often out of the question for many.

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That isn't the reason. People join discord in pugs all the time in NA so obviously the general population don't care about the privacy of their discord. The only thing that makes EU different is that it's obviously harder to do this due to there being many primary languages in any given party you join, so people don't waste their time attempting it.

I am expecting a cross DC or even a multi-region duty finder announced in 8.0 with a migration to cloud based servers to implement this and mitigate future DDoS attacks.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

NA used to only have Primal and Aether. EU used to only have Chaos. But the game kept growing, and these data centers were overflowing beyond what they could technically handle.

To solve this problem, SE sundered Primal and Aether into Crystal, and sundered Chaos into Light, while adding new EU worlds. At the time, we did not have data center travel, so people's FCs broke apart and people quit. SE knew this would happen, but said "we're sorry, but we want to grow this game".

Now, you could argue that the game was growing then, but is now declining, and that's a fair argument, but SE can't know if it will start growing again. If they merge data centers somehow, and the game grows back to where it was, then they'd have to split them all over again. Splits and mergers massively affect players, so it's not an easy decision.

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The current situation isn't helping things either though, with people on Aether and Crystal wanting to bring new players in/wanting to consolidate their friends on an Aether or Crystal world and not being able to do it, to say nothing of how Dynamis is virtually a ghost town and where new players are better off being ushered into Primal or anyone looking to transfer should consider Primal over Dynamis.

Dynamis has just been one long run of mistakes to the point I don't think even cross-DC party & duty finder would help it because people are still going to want a populated world for actual interaction with others or to make friends/build FCs, to say nothing of the stuff that's world exclusive. Cosmic Exploration is practically a punishment for anyone on low population worlds, and caused an even bigger exodus from Dynamis than the Dawntrail lockdown did.

I myself am a Dynamis native looking to escape to Primal before the end of the month, I just need to wait a few more days to dump my defunct FC on the new leader. There's no incentive big enough to keep me here or wanting to return in the future, least of all housing where I sat on two Mediums for years but they remained hollow when there's no friends or FCmates to be made here. Hell, apparently Maduin is the least populated world of Dynamis, so that just made my stay here even worse.

disagree, OCE needs this feature more than any other data centre

How I would like to see this work:
* NA, EU and OCE are all placed in to a system where they can use cross PF, duty / raid finders and server visits.
* JP would be isolated where nobody from the other DC could go there but if they desire, they can join the others as an option.

This would allow all of us to be able to have better communities while meeting the JP desire to protect theirs.
We get what we want and they get what they want.

I play on EU and NA, though I've spent more time on EU. I've only rarely run into a language barrier on EU, and even those times weren't an issue in the end because there's always someone (often me) who speaks a bit of the other language, and auto-translate has my back for skill names and in-game terms. I think it's pretty rare to find EU players who don't speak at least a bit of at least one other language. Also, people could still mark the languages on their PF if they really feel they don't know enough of one of them to do a raid in it.