Servers congestion

So the congestion/queue on most populated servers were supposed to be a temporary thing for expansion launch to aleviate server load, now we have less players than Stormblood (according to bancho census). Why exactly do we still have servers locked to visit? I understand if its for creation, but it makes no sense for visiting. I think its time to lift the restrictions, they only make player experience worse. Its not like its protecting us from ddos every other day anyways...

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

The status was actually created when Stormblood was about to release. So it checks out even if we have Stormblood level players (which I don't really agree with, the baseline back then was more like 500-600k while currently that stat is above 800k).

Even before Stormblood, we had certain worlds that were overly congested like Balmung and probably Gilgamesh, and they were a big reason for the creation of the status.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The status was actually created when Stormblood was about to release. So it checks out even if we have Stormblood level players (which I don't really agree with, the baseline back then was more like 500-600k while currently that stat is above 800k).

Even before Stormblood, we had certain worlds that were overly congested like Balmung and probably Gilgamesh, and they were a big reason for the creation of the status.

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there was no world/dc visit in stormblood

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

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they could've easily fixed that if they put balmung and sargatanas/gilgamesh in dynamis( like back when they split aether and primal and created crystal)

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

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As a Dynamis native (I wanted a house), this will never happen sadly. When they created Dynamis, they should've put an already popular server on it.

Oh you mean the limits on how many can World Visit and how many can DC Travel. It wasn't even created at the launch itself. On launch, we were DC traveling like crazy for hunts and there were no observable issues with it. Maybe there was a server crash somewhere that we didn't think anything about though.

I do think that by not having some sort of limit, it's possible that an individual world could become too congested at peak hours. Even if the game's overall population is at the lowest levels in almost a decade, it doesn't change that most of the population could be congregating on Balmung. If the population on that one world is too much, it could crash the server or cause major problems, so a cap makes sense to protect it from that.

I think the issue with the cap is that it is a specific cap for Data Center traveling and a specific cap for World Visiting, and these caps don't necessarily scale in line with the population that reside there.

I suspect that this cap might also have been to try and force players to make PFs on their home data centers again. And it does seem to have worked to an extent.

I'm sure people are still flooding into Aether and Balmung at night to either raid or RP. If it's not to the same scale as before where the entirety of Aether was getting locked down after 6 PM because of how many people were going there, then lifting the restrictions makes sense to me. If it's still getting flooded then that's ultimately the congestion that's trying to be circumvented.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I do think that by not having some sort of limit, it's possible that an individual world could become too congested at peak hours. Even if the game's overall population is at the lowest levels in almost a decade, it doesn't change that most of the population could be congregating on Balmung. If the population on that one world is too much, it could crash the server or cause major problems, so a cap makes sense to protect it from that.

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There's also the reality that even if the "troughs" are lower now than in past expansions, the "spikes" are still significant and caps have to be made with those spikes in mind. For a couple weeks now since the release of 7.4, some of the Hunt trains for example have gone back to being announced server-specific instead of DC-wide because the trains exploded in size again and were pushing 200 people like they were at the start of DT.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

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Having lived there for 3 years, I can tell you right now that this is never happening.

Xbox launch didn't help.
Dawntrail launch didn't help.
None of the major content updates helped, and Cosmic Exploration actually caused our 2nd exodus of players (the 1st being the Dawntrail lockdown) when we lost long-time gatherers and crafters.

I started playing on Maduin December 2022, by the time I left December 2025 for Excalibur, there was LESS people than when I began one month after Dynamis opened. It's a lost cause.
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Originally Posted by Eorinn

they could've easily fixed that if they put balmung and sargatanas/gilgamesh in dynamis( like back when they split aether and primal and created crystal)

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Unfortunately, the backlash from them "seeding" Crystal was so bad they apologized and promised to never do it again, so when Dynamis was made it was left to fend for its self.

The terrible irony is that we KNOW seeding a data center works in creating a sustainable population, because Crystal is the 2nd most populated NA data center and is often as locked up as Aether for transfers (visiting less so, but Balmung and Mateus are often blocked up during peak hours).

We know they won't do server merges, and they have nothing that can truly incentivize deeply rooted players from Aether/Primal/Crystal to move, on top of Primal still being open for new players too and its a much better destination for them if they want to actually get anything done (if they're forced to DC travel there anyway from Dynamis, why not just re-roll to Primal and skip the extra steps?)

Not even housing is enough reason to stay or join because I threw away two Mediums because it wasn't worth it to me anymore, and I doubt I'm the only one that's been abandoning ship this last year as players drop out making it even harder to find people to do stuff with.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

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Dynamis could be at least somewhat healthy on its own if it was actually locked up, at least until people start transferring characters to Primal or Crystal. The problem is the community would much prefer it as a bedroom community, somewhere to park their house and drop by to renew while they leave to another DC to actually play the game. That's a problem that compounds itself, because people that would otherwise wait another 5-10 minutes to queue are stuck waiting for an hour plus, so they leave, too.

They just need to admit that Dynamis was a failed venture. It's not going to get better because Dynamis mains don't want it to get better. I really hope the devs admit the sorry state of Dynamis and especially OCE at some point and what their plans are to try to make it better.

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Originally Posted by Drimn

Dynamis could be at least somewhat healthy on its own if it was actually locked up, at least until people start transferring characters to Primal or Crystal. The problem is the community would much prefer it as a bedroom community, somewhere to park their house and drop by to renew while they leave to another DC to actually play the game. That's a problem that compounds itself, because people that would otherwise wait another 5-10 minutes to queue are stuck waiting for an hour plus, so they leave, too.

They just need to admit that Dynamis was a failed venture. It's not going to get better because Dynamis mains don't want it to get better. I really hope the devs admit the sorry state of Dynamis and especially OCE at some point and what their plans are to try to make it better.

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A little harsh. I transferred to Kraken on day 1 of the world opening and have only traveled for content once in the years I've been there. I do want it to get better, and refuse to travel. Now if just 15% of Dynamis tried that, I think we would be OK. Alas, no one else seems to have the time for that.

SE, please create a cross DC content queuing system.

The only way to fix the situation is cross DC PF/DF, everyone keeps citing Dynamis, but Dynamis is just the extreme example, even Primal players, an allegedly healthy DC, have been complaining about how much harder it is to raid since EW launch, and even if you magically equalized the population of every single world server, so long as DC travel exists and any given Data Center is considered "THE DC to do <thing>", then the problem will continue on indefinitely.

I live on Dynamis (transferred because I wanted a Medium house), and I do most of my gameplay there. Queue times for roulettes are often long, but usually bearable, and queueing for individual duties from the current patch generally works okay. Queueing for duties that aren’t current is something of a lost cause though, and my Dynamis friends and I have to DC travel to Crystal or Primal to do most such content because.

I would attribute a lot of that to new characters being funneled to Dynamis: my general impression of the data center is that it’s a lot of new characters with a smaller salting of high level ones who have a lot of stuff unlocked. So even if data center travel weren’t possible, queueing for optional duties in later expansions would still go poorly. I’m okay to shepherd sprouts through Sastasha in return for some daily tomestones and materia tokens, but I would be happier if the Duty Finder would just pool all 32 North American world servers together and fill parties with people from everywhere. Then first-timers would get their queues to pop, and experienced players would get more variety in their roulettes.

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Originally Posted by Drimn

Dynamis could be at least somewhat healthy on its own if it was actually locked up, at least until people start transferring characters to Primal or Crystal.

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The risk of being locked down again was a contributing factor to me finally giving in and moving out though. I was there for the first one during Dawntrail launch, and I pretty much got NOTHING done, least of all PVP, while it was in effect because even forcing Dynamis locals to play with each other still revealed how anemic our total player count was, to say nothing of those who rolled alts elsewhere instead (and never came back to their original Dynamis main) or just immediately transferred away after it was over because they weren't going to deal with that again.

Hell, I almost left myself right then (and I probably should have, there were still Aether and Crystal worlds open at the time), but I kept buying into the idea that Dynamis would improve "any day now" and well... I gave it over another year, only DC traveling for PVP and coming back to do PVE, and it didn't help. I was also going through Stormblood and Shadowbringers at the time, which I largely sucked at, so even though I was on Maduin the whole time I wasn't actually queuing for much if I didn't have to (and due to the strict player requirement, I had to break down and travel to complete Seat of Sacrifice because 7 other people just weren't showing up, sync or unsync).

Maybe its a different story for those who managed to find/bring friends or got into an active FC, but I didn't have either of those so it just made an already empty world feel lonelier. In fact, according to one census website, Maduin is the least populated world of Dynamis and therefore ALL of NA, so I had it extra rough it seems.

Your queueing situation would have been the same on any Dynamis world, queueing is datacenter-wide. I cleared the MSQ and almost all side content before I moved, so I haven’t had so acute a need to queue for old content, but for anyone struggling (or bored) on Dyna I have noticed there’s a reasonably healthy Party Finder culture. If you put up a PF for a duty, you’ll probably get takers. I’ve taken to checking the Dyna PF listings to find interesting normal difficulty fights for the sake of variety.

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Originally Posted by GraceHorizon

Your queueing situation would have been the same on any Dynamis world, queueing is datacenter-wide. I cleared the MSQ and almost all side content before I moved, so I haven’t had so acute a need to queue for old content, but for anyone struggling (or bored) on Dyna I have noticed there’s a reasonably healthy Party Finder culture. If you put up a PF for a duty, you’ll probably get takers. I’ve taken to checking the Dyna PF listings to find interesting normal difficulty fights for the sake of variety.

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Queuing is data center-wide, yes, but you kind of need other people on your own world for things like FCs or even Eternal Bonding if one goes that route, and even just making friends off-world wasn't always viable because people tended to only friend people from their own world for convenience's sake, or how it was rare to run into any active cross-world linkshells (most people don't even know they or fellowships exist). At best you might run into somebody trying to drop a Discord link, but even putting aside not wanting to join dozens of channels for mostly the same content on the same data center, it was still a regular habit for people to group up with only people from their own world because some folks were as anti-wander as they were anti-travel. There's also the endless venues I suppose, but I don't RP so there was no reason to go anywhere near them (and its debatable how many of the people in them actually play versus chatting all day, not that there's anything wrong with that).

Quite often I was the ONLY person from Maduin in some circles, never got into an FC that lasted long/had barely anyone logging in, and any friends I made outside of Maduin were always hard to grab and do anything with that they weren't already doing with people they knew from their home world, and I didn't really have any friends from Maduin at all that didn't up permanently grayed out after a while or I noticed they were on another data center 24/7 (almost always Aether or Crystal), suggesting they had possibly moved. Some people also took the advice to bring friends/family/partners when they started on Dynamis to make things easier, and I'm not going to interject as a third-wheel in whatever progress they were working on together. (Meanwhile my own siblings had abandoned the game years ago.)

Admittedly, I don't have a FC/friends/groups on Primal yet either, but at least I don't have to travel for queues anymore. Other people are welcome to stick with Dynamis hoping it pays off, but I paid my dues trying to make it work and I was done with it.