Elemental Party Finder Raiding Scene Severely Affected After Data Center Travel

Since the introduction of Data Center Travel, the Party Finder's raiding scene on Elemental has been steadily declining, and it has now reached a very concerning state.

After DC Travel was implemented, the majority of JP players from Elemental moved to Mana. At first, Elemental PF became smaller, but it was still manageable. However, over time, many English-speaking players also started traveling to Mana because the Party Finder there is consistently very active (often over 100 listings).

As a result, the number of players pugging on Elemental has dropped drastically.

Currently, for high-end content:

- Each raid floor often has fewer than 10 PF listings

- Party Finders can take over 2 hours just to fill

- Filling a party now takes longer than actually progressing the fight

This severely damages motivation for raiders who rely on party finder. Many players want to raid but simply give up after waiting too long for parties to fill.

While it is possible to raid on Mana, nearly 100% of PF listings there are in Japanese. This creates another major issue:

- EN players cannot clearly communicate their progress

- It’s difficult to understand PF descriptions, expectations, or mistakes

- Progression becomes much harder without shared language

This situation makes the current tier especially frustrating. On Elemental, PF takes too long to fill. On Mana, language barriers make raiding difficult unless you understand Japanese.

Because of this, many of my friends who regularly raid have already lost motivation and are considering quitting the game entirely. I hope the FFXIV team can see and acknowledge this issue, because if left unaddressed, it risks severely harming the raiding community and long-term player retention on Elemental.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

This is a well known issue.

JP goes to Mana to raid (Yoshi-P has acknowledged this around 2 years ago at this point).

NA goes to Aether to raid.

EU goes to Light to raid.

Materia just hopes people will play on Materia. Speaking of this, have you tried DC traveling to Materia for raiding?

Materia has the same problem, the party finder is a lot lesser now than Elemental.

Currently, most Elemental raider travel to Mana as most of us using JP strategy, but it's hard for other player who cannot understand Japanese.

Uh, what's the reason we don't have region-wide party finder yet?

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Originally Posted by Alicie

Uh, what's the reason we don't have region-wide party finder yet?

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YoshiP said no one time and they're sticking with it until it's too damaging for the game's rep, like with the glamour unlock.

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Originally Posted by Alicie

Uh, what's the reason we don't have region-wide party finder yet?

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1.5 years ago, statement that it was nearly impossible
- said easiest solution to raid congestion was disabling travel
- best case option was a long shot that he estimated to take 1-1.5 years if it even worked, no update so assumed failure
- other case option was to spend all developer time working only on that and it would still take like 3 years if it worked, no update yet and we know that they're working on housing/glamour tech stuff so likely longer even if it worked
- devs were considering incentivizing playing on certain dc's but realized it'd still cause dc travel and congestion that they didn't want
- yoshi p gave headache motions

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

1.5 years ago, statement that it was nearly impossible

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It's not that it's impossible, but rather that it is genuinely complicated. It is fair to have a headache about it, because there are lots of ways to go about it, and you have to sort of decide how you want to design it.

I have thought about ways to do it. And honestly? When thinking about the least friction ways to do it, within the current system, there are ways they could probably do it without it taking much development effort.

It's actually not as much about the development effort as it is about the testing. They can't release something like that and it go wrong, cripple player data or their ability to login ever again, etc. They have to be absolutely certain it works under extreme pressure, like they did with World Visit and DC Travel. You cannot mess up a feature like that, because it is player data on the line - think the recent loss of CWLS data they had to restore. That isn't too bad, but if it was any other player data, players would be really upset. It also needs to not take forever to queue across DCs for a duty, so their travel would probably need to be prioritized in front of regular travelers.

For all the ways it could be implemented, it's hard to say whether they would manage under their specific technical constraints, but there are ways around those as well. So I mean, you can get a headache thinking about it but that headache only needs to exist for 1 day while drawing up the design and working out how to navigate any technical constraints.

I really think the major delays on solving this are:
- Just literally not having time to focus on it because they are working on other things. Development resources, the usual excuse.
- Needing to actually sit on the feature for a long time to see if it breaks under pressure.
- Needing to wait for a low activity period (such as a patch lull before expansion release), when potential bugs won't disrupt major activity ie. Savage raiding.

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

1.5 years ago, statement that it was nearly impossible
- said easiest solution to raid congestion was disabling travel
- best case option was a long shot that he estimated to take 1-1.5 years if it even worked, no update so assumed failure
- other case option was to spend all developer time working only on that and it would still take like 3 years if it worked, no update yet and we know that they're working on housing/glamour tech stuff so likely longer even if it worked
- devs were considering incentivizing playing on certain dc's but realized it'd still cause dc travel and congestion that they didn't want
- yoshi p gave headache motions

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Lmao 3 years, does FFXIV's development team consists of two 16-year old boys who just started their IT education?
In 3 years you can make and release brand new game from scratch

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

For all the ways it could be implemented, it's hard to say whether they would manage under their specific technical constraints, but there are ways around those as well.

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Tell me if you know additional information/otherwise:
From what I remember someone describing they said that the character data is saved on the data center itself hardware wise. So my character would be on the hardware assigned to Dynamis, which allows me to communicate with everyone on Dynamis as all of our information is on the same hardware. DC Travel was essentially a cloning/transfer of character data from one piece of hardware for a data center, to another piece of hardware for a data center so that it can interact with other character data there, but no longer have access to the original data center's data of other players. The queue system that requires character data would need to have access to every data center's character data at the same time. This would likely require having 4 copies of a character's data put onto each data center's hardware, or, doubling the data from the 4 hardware's from copying it to some external, new hardware that handles everything? and then that data would have to be able to update the original data still on one of the 4 original hardwares? I would assume if it's anything like that, my question would be wouldn't it fall into the same area as the housing/glamour plates restriction rn where the amount of data stored by the servers in general was said to be able to cause a massive strain on maintenance downtime and make it last a ridiculous amount longer because the server couldn't recall info fast enough. If 50% of housing items was I think they said double/tripling estimated maintenance downtime, wouldn't doubling/quadrupling all of the character data in the game which includes a massive amount of people that don't have housing, I would assume that could push maintenance downtimes to a full 1-2 days.

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Originally Posted by Alicie

Lmao 3 years, does FFXIV's development team consists of two 16-year old boys who just started their IT education?

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It might as well. They (read: usually Yoshida speaking on their behalf) frequently just say that something's impossible because they tried it a handful of times, and it didn't work. It's why we still have to go to inns and squadron barracks to access the glamour dresser.

To me, the IT and software development parts of FFXIV smack of serious underresourcing, compounded by technical debt from ARR being rushed. What I think happened is that rapid, low quality work on 2.0 has left them with a game that’s difficult to maintain and extend, leading to seemingly pointless restrictions like not having cross-datacenter duty finder and party finder, limited allowable places where glamour dressers can be located, etc. You can overcome bad legacy code — I’ve been part of a development team that’s done it — but it takes more budget to hire a bigger staff to go back and redo things correctly. I also wonder whether they might be suffering a loss of institutional knowledge at this point since it’s been 12 years since 2.0 and the developers who originally did the work and could explain it to others may have gone on to other jobs or retired.

Now I can’t be too hard on the 2.0 code because we wouldn’t have FFXIV without it, but ideally what you do in this situation is get the initial product out the door, then make enough money off it to hire a bigger team and start reworking it into a better long term product. I do definitely like some of the things Square Enix has done with our subscription revenue — Dawntrail is pretty and the glams this expansion are _fire_, which takes real time and effort, so kudos to the art department — but I think the software development and IT departments need some of that budget too.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

It's not a situation likely to be properly addressed by the developers because it's an entirely player-created problem, Yoshi-P did not declare Mana (or Aether and Light) as "the raiding servers" nor did they probably account for a portion of English players to start characters there versus NA, EU, or OCE.

At best, they'll shut down transfers/new character creation for Mana and add congestion barriers the same way they do Aether to make data center travel more difficult, but they can't make people stop labeling data centers as "the one and only" for certain content and then upholding those labels.

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They did with PVP as if you wanna play ranked you need to go Gaia data center for Japan data center.

I don't think this is a right choice but looking how dire the situation is on Elemental and I'm sure on other Japan data center that not on Mana, I think it's probably the best choice so far. My friend has been waiting to progress their M10S but they can't find people as most skilled player already clear this tier or already at M12S, while other player with same level as them go to Mana just to trap all JP player.

If they make Mana or other Data Center as "the raiding servers", maybe EN Player (which mostly SEA player) can post their raiding in English in that Data Center and don't need to worry to get blacklist by Japanese player. Currently, all Mana's PF is in Japanese so it's hard to know what we join and a lot harder to communicate about our progress and mistake.

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Originally Posted by NaughtyFoxz

They did with PVP as if you wanna play ranked you need to go Gaia data center for Japan data center.
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Added context:
I think the only reason they even did this change was because of NA and EU primarily. JP never had ranked pvp queue issues often going hours long per day including holidays while EU didn't have crystal/diamond matches for half the season with the pvp discord deciding to make announcements for the final week'ish to get queue's popping again. They have a good chunk of the top 30's/top 100's that even have alts they keep in plat/diamond just to help the queue's pop. NA only had 1 data center that would pop consistently most days throughout the season, and the other 2 data centers would be dead for half the season like EU. People used to semi-joke calling it a cabal because if the main ppl from the pvp discord like say on Primal didn't decide to queue, their friends also wouldn't queue due to low match quality so you'd look up and over half the leaderboard didn't even queue so the leaderboard would freeze for several weeks without a single +1 match count. Dynamis required a pvp discord for every night queue's outside of the first week to have plat+ matches pop, unranked to gold was hit or miss if they got enough each night. In the later seasons I had some people ask me to use my alt service accounts to see how many people were missing in ranked queue to see if it was worth it to even DM friends to try to force it to pop. People used to even fake screenshots of queue popping just to trick people into hopping in to queue and it eventually got made against the pvp discord rules because ppl were obviously pissed waiting in queue for no reason. NA and EU were on their last legs with ~25-30% of the leaderboard being alt characters when I was tracking it so Square Enix was forced to do something soon'ish + the pvp community was that small so it wouldn't cause a congestion problem like it would if they did the same for raiding.