Better incentives for staying on your DC

[Amarande]

People jumping over to other datacenters will always hurt Dynamis. They need to just add what I suggested months ago. Cross datacenter queuing. It makes this thread irrelevant and fixes the problem.

It might make the thread irrelevant, but the problem is fixed at too high a price.

Consider right now you have at least a couple of choices as Aether and Crystal have vastly different atmospheres in particular. With this proposal, there would be just one North American player pool, and I've seen how this plays out in practice: when communities are merged, the "hardcore tryhard" crowd INVARIABLY bullies out the more laid back community to the point that the latter no longer exists, and everyone feels forced to adopt that "keep up with the Joneses" mentality just to play the game with all the conflict aggravation that entails.

Look how WoW has evolved since it went from separate server communities to choose from to a regionwide group finder: you might get a group faster (well, IF you have enough of that hardcore push mindset in you, otherwise you just get gatekept and fed homilies about "not being entitled to a group" like, we got groups just fine before we were thrown into the same pool against our will, unless you were on the deadest of dead realms ...), but the atmosphere has been unified to basically that one single acceptable mindset for an entire continent.

Or the hunt community, where every world used to have its own, now there is a single acceptable culture per entire datacenter (typically built around getting the serious players their Nuts and Tomestones as efficiently as possible) leaving the kind of people that chose most Worlds out of luck, to say nothing of the old days (as recent as early 4.x really) where FCs would see an A rank and get together to pick it off.

It's a bit sad, because it does impact overworld stuff in a big way. Like there's less people to do Fates, though the Fates do scale down.

This is probably an advantage though. FATEs are easy enough that you don't need more than one or two people for most, and if anything tend to work better that way (especially now that getting Gold credit is much more important than ever, especially for catch up players, who need 66 Golds per zone to even unlock all the gemstone items).

I'm on Maduin, which is usually seen as perhaps the least active world? And I still often find myself at least world traveling when I need bicolor gems because finding uncontested (because if it's already going, there's a good chance you aren't getting Gold by the time you make it, if you even do) FATEs on this server is surprisingly difficult.

Unless you make it extremely overpowered, but even then you'll have plenty of omnis that just don't care, while the amount of buffs you'd have to give would be on the extreme/game breaking side.

If you wanted to really do something then you'd have to go in the opposite direction and add consequences instead. Roulettes already give solid rewards, nerf the road to 80 buff off your main DC and whatever else. No one wants this though.

This seems to be a chronic problem with XIV: there's not really much wiggle room to give out meaningful carrots, since EXP grows on trees (except maybe at the ten-level breakpoints, anyways), Gil is so downplayed compared to most games (and given how much trouble we have with RMT here even with that fact, probably should stay that way), and it's already super easy to cap your weekly Tomestones, while there's barely any wiggle room in the ilvl schedule to add extra gear incentives without problem.

About all that's left is bonus uncapped Tomestones, but those are pretty easy to farm anyways.

Which leaves sticks, and nobody likes sticks.

[Mcg55ss]

There's no incentive that can convince people to stay and do things like roulettes on their home DC. Unless you make it extremely overpowered, but even then you'll have plenty of omnis that just don't care, while the amount of buffs you'd have to give would be on the extreme/game breaking side.

If you wanted to really do something then you'd have to go in the opposite direction and add consequences instead. Roulettes already give solid rewards, nerf the road to 80 buff off your main DC and whatever else. No one wants this though.

The real solution is just cross DC parties and queues. That's literally the only thing that's acceptable. And it needs to happen because it's not just Dynamis that's going to struggle. Eventually people are going to develop their own notions of which DCs within each region they think have good queue times, and which don't. It doesn't matter if it's accurate or not, but once that happens everyone will travel to the "quickest" DC in their region, leaving queues in other DCs struggling, even if that DC has a healthy population of people.

I see this alot but problem is i saw what cross groups led to in WoW. Before you had a reputation and really a few could risk damaging it most wouldn't dare for fear of being blacklisted in that game to the point you had to start over on another server, once cross realm groups became introduced the care for each other went out and only mattered is how fast could u get me through the content. It was one of the leading causes of why WoW is a toxic cesspool now in almost every form from leveling dungeons where u can get new players to mythic +. It bred the whole you'll never see this person again so if they pull the wrong or unoptimal trash pack to clear the dungeon you should berate and tell them since you'll never see them again no punishment. Now i know FFXIV has punishment for harrassment and berating a lot more strict than WoW but still cross DC ques would worry me about that path as i lived it and saw how server communities went from knowing almost everyone in the server both factions, who wqas scary in pvp and who was a pve die hard to slowly died completely to the point now there really is no communities in any server in the game just in the guilds you join and even that is slowly dieing due to the lack of need for a guild for mythic +.

[Seraphor]

Incentives for staying on your home DC will only cause people to make the overpopulated DC's their home DC, which defeats the purpose of releasing a new DC.

[Mcg55ss]

Incentives for staying on your home DC will only cause people to make the overpopulated DC's their home DC, which defeats the purpose of releasing a new DC.

people are already doing this....the just go to another DC then just DC travel to the overpopulated DC.

[Azuri]

No amount of incentives will help when your options are "play the game" or "sit in queue waiting to play the game". It doesn't matter if you triple the reward. Just waiting for 30 minutes to run an AR roulette will never be "fun".

[Seraphor]

people are already doing this....the just go to another DC then just DC travel to the overpopulated DC.

Yes. That's the point...

They're still making the new less-populated DC their home DC. And the ability to play on the overpopulated DC's is the incentive for that.

The main results of this are:
1. They can only buy a house on their home DC.
2. When servers becomes congested during an expansion launch, they will be forced to play on their home DC.

These are the core problems faced by overpopulated DCs, congested housing wards with massive demand for certain plots, and massive lobby queues as too many people try to enter the congested servers.

Eventually, as more people make the underpopulated DC's their 'home', and crucially when the next expansion launches, forcing them to play there for several weeks until the rush calms down, this will get more and more people on these DC's spending more and more time there instead of their old favourite DCs. The new DC will gradually gain a better sustained playerbase, and the incentive to move DC's for better queues will disappear.

[Ardeth]

It might make the thread irrelevant, but the problem is fixed at too high a price.

Consider right now you have at least a couple of choices as Aether and Crystal have vastly different atmospheres in particular. With this proposal, there would be just one North American player pool, and I've seen how this plays out in practice: when communities are merged, the "hardcore tryhard" crowd INVARIABLY bullies out the more laid back community to the point that the latter no longer exists, and everyone feels forced to adopt that "keep up with the Joneses" mentality just to play the game with all the conflict aggravation that entails.

Look how WoW has evolved since it went from separate server communities to choose from to a regionwide group finder: you might get a group faster (well, IF you have enough of that hardcore push mindset in you, otherwise you just get gatekept and fed homilies about "not being entitled to a group" like, we got groups just fine before we were thrown into the same pool against our will, unless you were on the deadest of dead realms ...), but the atmosphere has been unified to basically that one single acceptable mindset for an entire continent.

Or the hunt community, where every world used to have its own, now there is a single acceptable culture per entire datacenter (typically built around getting the serious players their Nuts and Tomestones as efficiently as possible) leaving the kind of people that chose most Worlds out of luck, to say nothing of the old days (as recent as early 4.x really) where FCs would see an A rank and get together to pick it off.

The idea of a server having an "identity" is a corpse in a grave at this point.

On my server Maduin I'm constantly seeing ads for other datacenters. What you're trying to protect is dead. And it's not coming back.

Cross dc queuing. The issue of what server I am on evaporates. My 30 min queues go away. People abandoning Dynamis for better queues evaporates. Omg a solution.

[Mcg55ss]

The idea of a server having an "identity" is a corpse in a grave at this point.

On my server Maduin I'm constantly seeing ads for other datacenters. What you're trying to protect is dead. And it's not coming back.

Cross dc queuing. The issue of what server I am on evaporates. My 30 min queues go away. People abandoning Dynamis for better queues evaporates. Omg a solution.

it does but just as i pointed above it kinda also in the ends diminishes the server community over time as i pointed out, it ends up slowly killing the community and the server slowly becomes more and more isolated and less communitative...example is WoW prior to WotLK and after.

[Ardeth]

it does but just as I pointed above it kinda also in the ends diminishes the server community over time as i pointed out, it ends up slowly killing the community and the server slowly becomes more and more isolated and less communitative...example is WoW prior to WotLK and after.

I mean at this point what community? There are hundreds of people in Limsa who I will never speak to. My duty finder runs pull from 3 other servers. More than half the time I'm playing with randoms from those other servers. I'm never going to see them again. What community are you guys protecting? Because 90% of what I do involves people who aren't a part of it. Or is my data center my community? Do you see how easily that line got blurred? Let's take Crystal. I used to play on there. I left because of the toxicity. It wasn't elitism just people being jerks. Random strangers who I will never see again being toxic. So I went to Aether and I encountered the exact same people. The same level of passive-aggressive toxicity. The kind that can't tell me that I'm bad because they are afraid of the ban hammer.

The point is I don't see it. You guys are trying to stop something that happened the second I could queue with others from my data center.

It's gone.

So let's embrace the future and fix the damn problem.

[Kalania]

Ok first im on Dynamis is where i notice this issue (also i know we are new, i know we have half the servers and all that). Right now the FC i am in has about 73 members but we have ~27% of those player who log on are already on another DC and haven't been on Dynamis in weeks (possibly month or longer). I realize if a lot of FC have this that is a lot of potential players that really are not on our server at all in the end. I understand it incentives for newer players and fresh ones to come to server like this (road to 80, the feathers and such which is why i am in a group of 4 friends came here) My thing is OTHER than just buying a house (which seems to be the main reason most more veteran players came to this server) do you think FFXIV should give players of newer servers / less populated more incentives to stay on their DC and do stuff here vs it creating a thing where despite you being on a DC you really never do any actually activities or engagement in that DC (dungeon, pvp, alliance raid and so on). Idk just was something i was wondering as a newer player (been playing since Nov so just have 1 job at 90 so far) but it just seems yea getting people to move to the DC isn't super bad just cuz you put housing fishing hook out there but the problem becomes more engagement in that DC and keeping players there to help invest in its growth and community vs just being a extension of houses for another datacenter

Having the same problem with our FC on Seraph...there's like 15 people off server on another DC all the time but like 2-3 people on max....and we are not a small guild. It's very frustrating for our guild leader and officers as they event plan.