Community Petition: "Get out of Ul'dah"

[Req]

it represents a piss poor and lazy design choice. no starter City should be a Trade hub. there should have been a 4th non starter city and each city should have continued on its own Main Story without converging everyone on the server to one location.

Then everyone would just be clumped up in the 4th city. Its not like we have a huge influx of new players every day that is causing the lag. Its a bunch of people with all level 50s that have nothing better to do than cast holy and flare on themselves while chatting to their linkshell, or simply going to sleep leaving their game on.

[Valmonte]

Then everyone would just be clumped up in the 4th city. Its not like we have a huge influx of new players every day that is causing the lag. Its a bunch of people with all level 50s that have nothing better to do than cast holy and flare on themselves while chatting to their linkshell, or simply going to sleep leaving their game on.

point is you where forced into uldah after level 20, with no incentive to leave. they could have stopped this from happening by simply allowing the Main Quest to continue from the respective city.

[Asiaine]

The 'lag' the 'full wards'; these reprsent the concepts of a busy and bustling city.
If the city really is big and overly populated, it would be hard to travel around (always running into people, crowded streets, having to slow down to move). This is one aspect we are 'experiencing'. (Perhaps unintentional, or perhaps too relalistic).

Also, if a city is big, commercial real estate is at a premium and hard to get. We are experiencing that by the fact that the wards are fullish. (Perhaps another unintended side effect, or perhaps an intentional realistic side effect).

But mabye I can help sum up why we go to Ul'dah to begin with:
1) Market wards -- Very inconvenient to repeat the same search in 3 different cities to see what you can find. Will make shopping more annoying than it is already. We need a mechanism to be able to search what is available anywhere and everywhere (albeit there can be a surcharge if buying from out of city).

This will encourage people to sell in their home towns (since anyone can still find/buy it from there). And there could be tax discounts for selling local goods.

2) Parties -- Right now the main way of finding pick up groups for any content (XP, AF, Quests, Dungeons, Iffy, etc) is through shout. Some of this may be helped with 'Content Manager' in the future, but a local-world-specific content manager now would be great. In other words, a more useful easy to understand search mechanism. Right now a lot of people do not know this feature exists, let alone use it. Something very simple, such as:
Menu -> Search -> Experience Points Party -> Seek Party -> (Multi Select Jobs Interested In)
Menu -> Search -> Experience Points Party -> Seek Adventurers -> (Search Criteria)
Menu -> Search -> Quests -> Seek Party -> (Multi select quests)
Menu -> Search -> Quests -> Seek Adventurers -> (Search Criteria)
Menu -> Search -> Primal Battles -> Seek Party -> (Multi Select Battles)
Menu -> Search -> Primal Battles -> Seek Adventurers -> (Search Criteria)

And of course /cmd options
/cmd sea {Ifrit Bleeds, We Can Kill It}

Super easy and straight forward to use, and the ability to select MULTIPLE things we are interested in signing up for. For example, I would sign up for interest in: DH, DH2, CC, Moogle, Mammoth

3) The crowds -- Some of us just like being around a lot of other people and enjoying bustling activity. This is great for those that do, and we should not seek to change this

4) Habbit -- We come to Ul'dah becaue we always come to Ul'dah and we tell anyone new to also come to Ul'dah. That will change over time if the #1 and #2 can be addressed.



If a good solution can be found for #1 and #2 (hopefully in a soon patch), then this will help solve a lot of the issues in Ul'dah, and allow us to more freely enjoy the other cities ^.^


Thank you.

[Req]

point is you where forced into uldah after level 20, with no incentive to leave. they could have stopped this from happening by simply allowing the Main Quest to continue from the respective city.

The problem is there have been many incentives to leave uldah. Back when leves were a big thing broken water leves were huge, but then after everyone started doing them SE basically nerfed the living hell out of the Uldah leves and made the gridania ones much easier to accomplish for maximum SP gain. Did they stop people from teleporting to uldah, just so they could teleport back to gridania a day later to do their leves?

Then again with both moogle and ifrit, the quest giver was in gridania for the biggest content of both 1.19 and 1.20. For 2 patches people would rather teleport back to uldah from gridania after completing each quest the final time for the night just so they could spend more anima the next day to get back to the content they wanted to do.

Whether or not the quest line brought people to uldah is irrelevant. Its in a prime position that is damn near right in the middle of both towns distance wise, and people would have set up camp there regardless because it is human nature. If they had released ishgard with the servers in their current conditions we would just be having the same exact issues there.

Unfortunately the only way for this to ever be fixed is for people to either A) Realize that they are hurting themselves by piling up on top of eachother or B) SE giving us incentives that we absolutely cannot afford to not have for spreading out. The likelyhood of either of those happening is so slim that we will all have to hold out for secret option C) hopefully 2.0 will fix the lag/marketwards/inn issues and overcrowding will no longer be a problem with the new game engine.

[Rowyne]

I agree with the suggestions above. People need Incentive to be elsewhere. Not everyone has the desire to be stuck in the same town.

I believe global chat channels and linked wards would go a long way to spreading people out. Even if it doesn't cause the mass exodus we'd want, I think it would certainly make a dent, and be a good start to fixing the congestion issue.

^This. Global chat channels and linked wards, please. I want to be able to hang out in Gridania without feeling like I'm missing out.

[Jynx]

I believe global chat channels and linked wards would go a long way to spreading people out.

I don't believe that, people will congregate in mass wether you want them to or not unless you uterly force them to move. SE should work on having a system capable of handling large crowds instead of trying to stop-gap it. No matter how interesting another city is everyone will congregate in one area in the end. People want a hub, they will make it wherever they feel the most people will be.

Making chat channels will do nothing but incentivise RMT to rev up spam-bots.

[Issac]

I don't care if Ul'dah is central. It's ugly as all hell and the area around it is boring as well. The region's only saving grace is the BGM.

Limsa is better. Migrate there.

[GreyJorildyn]

I don't believe that, people will congregate in mass wether you want them to or not unless you uterly force them to move.

It's never been that way in any other mmo I've played. People are out in the field playing, rather than sitting around town doing nothing (ie. crafting their lives away). What makes FFXIV so special that "everyone will congregate in one area in the end"? I'm waiting for an enlightening support argument to this, and I've yet to see one. "FF players are just like that" is not a good argument. Furthermore, adding functionality to encourage players to spread out is hardly a "stop-gap" >.>

Chat channels will do a lot more than just get spam-bots going. Oh I'm sorry, SE might actually have to have someone monitor these channels for spam and other nonsense like every other MMO company does. This isn't really difficult, don't make it out to be lol

[Asiaine]

It's never been that way in any other mmo I've played. People are out in the field playing, rather than sitting around town doing nothing (ie. crafting their lives away). What makes FFXIV so special that "everyone will congregate in one area in the end"? I'm waiting for an enlightening support argument to this, and I've yet to see one. "FF players are just like that" is not a good argument.

Some of the reasons:
Crafting
A lot of supplies are sold in town so we sit next to the seller to buy them. Additionally we need to sell our stuff to NPCs or put them up in wards or deal with our retainers... A lot easier if we are near them. This reflects the aspect that crafting is a 'city' event, which is why we are in the city.

Sociable
A lot of us are sociable and just like to be able to see friends, and LSMates, and run around together, play, jump and cheer each other on. Or maybe that's just me ^.^;


Transportation Hub
Ul'Dah is a good gathering point and natural hub to reach a fair bit of end game content. The same could be said for Gridania, but not as much for Limsa Lominsa (no Primal Battles, Dungeons (DH, DH2, CC) are near Limsa Lominsa). So it was a 50/50 between Ul'Dah and Gridania... and Ul'Dah is a lot easier to navigate than Gridania (both cities and outlying areas), so it won.

[GreyJorildyn]

You can solve your crafting paragraph by linking all wards or making a global auction house.

Social aspect is understandable. You could meet them all on the battlefield too

Navigation is one aspect that Ul'dah "wins" at yes, but that's part of map design just being bad. A good reason to gather in Ul'dah, yes, but favorites being anywhere you want, and people selecting up to three, you can get anywhere in a short time. Airship travel connects all towns too, making them equally accessible. It's only from the point of view of "we sit in Ul'dah", that makes all the other towns require travel time.

My point is why fight a feature that will improve your game play. Why not petition for it, rather than against it. If you don't like the feature, don't use it. Why you wouldn't use a feature that improves your life is beyond me, but to each their own I suppose. But don't fight against it because you "don't like it". RMT can spam shout just as easily as they could spam global channel, but of course the counter-argument to that is "but then they could do it from anywhere in the world", which really only strengthens the points for it (from the pov of accessibility), even if it is a decent reason "against" it, as it were. There are GM calls and we can use them to report flooding, spamming now just as easily as we could if there was a global chat channel. Remember there's always blacklist too, since people seem so fond of navigating endless menus already.