What is the latest information on cross regional server play?

[Nezerius]

The latest information from many weeks ago was that they were not planning on doing cross-region right now, due to "differences in values".

Materia has been a good test-bed in this regards with some players coming from NA servers, some coming from JP servers, and a small number from EU servers. I am sure SE have been watching how the two main communities mix on Materia with interest.

If it happens (it's a big if), I wouldn't expect it until after the JP NA and EU DCs are all expanded, so well towards the end of 2023.

They were definitely planning on doing cross-region, otherwise they wouldn't have already designed the system to allow for cross-region travel. However, they're holding back on enabling it because they want to monitor the player's opinions on it.
So it's hardly "a big if" scenario, and much closer to a when scenario.

[Shibi]

They were definitely planning on doing cross-region, otherwise they wouldn't have already designed the system to allow for cross-region travel. However, they're holding back on enabling it because they want to monitor the player's opinions on it.
So it's hardly "a big if" scenario, and much closer to a when scenario.

I still hold it's an if, Japan is just too different. But if it happens (maybe as an EU/OC/NA thing excluding JP) it will be late 2023 or into 2024 after the DC expansions are done. They don't want to be complicating that expansion process with cross-regional as well.

[Nezerius]

I still hold it's an if, Japan is just too different. But if it happens (maybe as an EU/OC/NA thing excluding JP) it will be late 2023 or into 2024 after the DC expansions are done. They don't want to be complicating that expansion process with cross-regional as well.

Again, they wouldn't have already designed the system to allow for cross-region travel, if they were gonna wait until late 2023/2024 to actually enable it. Nor would they have stated that they'll look at player opinions on whether to enable it or not. I also can't see how it would complicate the process of DC expansions, because the system still uses a queue system to actually travel to a different datacenter. Yoshi-P has also stated that players need to think of datacenter travel as a "longer stay" rather than the current world hopping with the world visit system.

What I could see them do is limit it to NA/EU and JP/OC at first, though.