They announced how worlds would be shuffled.

[Barraind]

Our FC is on a crystal-bound server.

Currently weighing the costs of having to rebuild everything in the FC and everyones personal housing vs staying and losing the overwhelming majority of offworld contacts.

85-90% of my of my cross server pf groups are people staying on Aether.

Crystal is going to be not well off at all, there's no incentive for people to move there that didn't already want to go to balmung/mateus

[Dyvid]

Maybe SE's mistake was to introduce cross server anything until after the new data centers came online. Maybe world sharing is a mistake to begin with. Maybe SE should have just called it quits with 1.0 and not rebuild on top of it. Hind sight sucks and it is what it is. MMO's always break or merge servers over time and FFXIV isn't immune to this reality. People will accept it, change with it, or out right quit. I can only think of one meme that sums up how I feel about this though:




On a side note, we gamers always hate the developers whose games we love; SE, EA, Blizzard, Activision, etc... Nothing important to the debate really just funny to me at my older age.

[Imsoangry]

What a disaster. Most of the hype I had for a new expansion is gone. This will no doubt negatively affect party finder, raiding community, pvp, friendships, queue times - literally everything that I can think of. Wheter it helps with stability of potato EU servers - time will tell. Those are a mess for such a long time now, that most people silently accept all those lags, lobby errors and other crap that back in a day was pretty much non exsistant. Like it wasn't bad enough, you announce this after talking about that new feature that allows to visit other servers. What an irony. Massive letdown SE.

[hynaku]

Just better cause us to loose our houses. Just hope also does not cause my ping to get any worse than it is now from Being moved to another datacenter location.

[HyoMinPark]

Maybe SE's mistake was to introduce cross server anything until after the new data centers came online. Maybe world sharing is a mistake to begin with. Maybe SE should have just called it quits with 1.0 and not rebuild on top of it. Hind sight sucks and it is what it is. MMO's always break or merge servers over time and FFXIV isn't immune to this reality. People will accept it, change with it, or out right quit. I can only think of one meme that sums up how I feel about this though:

On a side note, we gamers always hate the developers whose games we love; SE, EA, Blizzard, Activision, etc... Nothing important to the debate really just funny to me at my older age.

Nice strawman. You’re missing the point of why people are so upset. Speaking for myself, my static started Alphascape late to clear UwU, and we haven’t cleared Final Omega yet. We also want to do parse runs, and now we’re on a timeline to get all of this done before this change is implemented in 4.5. We lose contact with half of one another, and, speaking for myself, my static have become my friends.

I hear it now: “Just free transfer over to their data center”, but what people saying this fail to realize is that I also have friends on my home server—friends that I have known since I started playing—that I also do not want to leave. One of them is even considering resubbing for 5.0, since they had to unsub at the beginning of SB because life things happened. So now I’m having to choose between raid and my static friends, and the friends that I have known since I started playing.

This isn’t even counting that I have a house on my server—a highly desired plot—that I don’t want to give up, despite reimbursement, because I worked really hard to even get it (and it took me until the most recent Housing addition to do so). Plus all my other friends that are cross-server and will be with me on what is left of Aether.

People are mad because they’re being forced to choose, and unless they’re extremely lucky, people are losing at least something by making a choice: static, friends, FC, housing, server community, etc..

[Nalien]

I'd rather have Chaos' weekly disconnection event than this in all honesty. Call me crazy, but it actually became a really fun meme, even if it was annoying as heck when it happens (and lets be real, it'll still happen regardless of this change). Splitting existing communities up like this shouldn't even be an option, SE is just taking the Massive Multiplayer out of MMO with this move. It's becoming more of a Minor Online RPG at this point, the population between patches was sparse enough as is...

[Vaati_Kigu]

Just a reminder for those who watch the live letter anyone else notice once they showed this the room went dead quite.

[Fyce]

genuine question here, for the people affected. I haven't seen a post from anybody saying that a solution is making an alt on the other datacenter to stay in contact. Why making an alt is not an option? With an alt, you can stay in touch, you can rejoin the statics leveling it up. I think it is worth it, if I really wanted to keep contact, and leveling an alt is pretty fast in this game

I actually already though about that yesterday. And I said to my mates on Discord "hey, if they shuffle servers, it'd actually be an incentive to make alts. But also, it'd be nice if they provided jump potions like, one set per account only usable on the next character you create."

But instead we got "free world transfer". That seems cheap, especially on Chaos, since we had DDoS issues almost everyday for a month with absolutly no compensation whatsoever, big routing issues with Level3, and the fact that Chaos is the only Datacenter in Europe, which means deeper roots on servers and a lot of cross-server friends. It was like a single big community that is going to be split in half.
And all we get is a free world transfer.
Yay...

I guess making an alt is still an option. But man does it hurts not to be backed up by SE on that one.

[Kurando]

Did we really think the status quo was going to stay though? I mean yeah it's understandable that players now have make choices, but adding new worlds to current NA centres wouldn't of made much difference in the grand scheme of thing, as it would of been the same Congested and Preferred worlds appearing in the update every day. Now adding new worlds (to EU) and also moving around current ones (NA) would have a bigger effect, but whether they will turn out as SE hope is a different story. Not completely behind the EU worlds being split though but having 12 worlds on one centre could be problematic...

[KisaiTenshi]

I guess People forgot about how 1.0 all servers were shuffled and people were like NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO back then too.

Yet the community came together and we managed to make something great of what transpired.

I'm not saying it to hurt anyone's feelings - I'm just saying take a step back away from the panicking - work it out with your friends and then come back and see if it's very negative or not.

1.0 was a different issue though. Most people who were on 1.0 and chose to move servers, chose the server they were to end up on.

What's happening here is that nobody is getting a choice, and there's no way to give people that choice since it's not new servers being rolled out. Had they done this with a "and we're introducing two new servers per DC", what would happen is that the people who want to stay together would all move to those servers, and the Balmung problem would just move to a new server.

When people go "well why doesn't SE just fix up their coding" , please. They've had 16 years (XI's launch) to learn from and fix this. Any amateur data analysis shows you exactly what's wrong with the game's netcode. What's happened in the last 4 years alone, is that SSD's have pushed disk performance 16x higher, so that moves the bottleneck back to the network, which means they need less "servers" in each data center cluster to keep going with the existing netcode. CPU's meanwhile have not gained more than 15% CPU power per core, and systems with higher core counts run at slower speeds per core.

So let's assume that the reason for breaking the DC's up is so they can upgrade the hardware and reduce the network bandwidth requirements for each DC in the process.