Something needs to be done about Party Finder outside of Aether

[Defmetal]

The band-aid until a long-term fix would be to disable the party finder cross-dc, while still allowing party invites and duty finder. I don't want statics to have to break up

[NekoMataMata]

The band-aid until a long-term fix would be to disable the party finder cross-dc, while still allowing party invites and duty finder. I don't want statics to have to break up

Just be honest about your tactic.

This isn't a band-aid. This is making the problem worse for the sake of trying to get SE to realize that the issue exists. While it is a tactic that I appreciate, it won't work here.

Personally, I think you'd have better luck attempting to fill each world on Aether until they're all congested.

[Myrany]

Personally I'd love to see all cross world cross DC stuff gone for good. Let worlds develop their own personalities again. And yes I do play on Dynamis regularly and know well how much this would hurt short term. Long term things would spread out and settle into something workable. People are just too impatient to wait though so it will never happen.

[CidHeiral]

I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons why that happened to wow (I never even knew wow was a mega server now).

WoW isn't one big merged server, it's clusters of servers connected together. Throughout all of the game's ups and downs, server communities were alive and well until connecting servers and sharding came around.

Of course that's assuming their populations weren't dead, but the solution there would be to just merge them into entirely new servers as most MMOs do so they can form a new identity and community. Even FFXIV has done this in the past, that's how my own server Hyperion came into existence.

But how would this ruin the sense of community?

On a normal server if you're an asshole you get a reputation for being an asshole. You see this and that person hanging around their favorite spots. You form friendships with people you see regularly as you would in real life. I have a long list of friends I've made on Hyperion/Primal exactly that way.

On a megaserver you quickly realize it's almost impossible to see the same person twice. You lose all the little things that make a server feel alive because every player you meet is just another faceless body in the meat grinder. Everyone around you becomes a temporary means to an end, they may as well be NPCs. It's a very soulless experience.

I played WoW from vanilla beta onward for many, many years and witnessed all of this happen in real time. Back in the day I made friends on the opposite faction that I had no way of even communicating with, just from running into them frequently out in the world. I would go to Ironforge and /shout to announce my presence and they would come outside to a little clearing where we would duel each other. All that came to an end with the connected realms.

This is a lot of why people wanted classic servers for WoW. They missed that sense of community.

You act as if FFXIV actually creates community's in game (they don't).

FFXIV has a wonderful community that is very alive and easy to engage with, current content drought woes notwithstanding. If that hasn't been your experience that sounds like a you problem.

Everything community wise is driven via discord outside of the game.

Discord certainly helps organize certain things but to say people only ever meet and interact in Discord and not the actual game is absurd.

If anything I think making it a mega server would bring more life to the game.

It has the exact opposite effect.

Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

Zones in WoW are just as dead as this game, and that's factoring in all the little world events they have going on to motivate players to be out there. It's just the nature of MMOs. Even if you added fabulous events and rewards to every zone (which I would love), people would grind them, get what they want, and go back to being AFK in their favorite city.

You may say "but they would be alive for that little while!" to which I would say that's already the case. Join a hunt train, an S rank kill, make a FATE party, host/join an RP event, etc. There's an FC on my server that hosts RP get togethers at towns out in the world all the time.

Personally I'd love to see all cross world cross DC stuff gone for good. Let worlds develop their own personalities again. And yes I do play on Dynamis regularly and know well how much this would hurt short term. Long term things would spread out and settle into something workable. People are just too impatient to wait though so it will never happen.

I don't think the worlds have lost their personality overall but that is certainly the case with Dynamis. More accurately it was never given a chance to develop one to begin with because everyone bails to another DC to do everything. If DC travel didn't exist each server could have slowly grown its own community like any other server. The irony is if everyone on Dymanis stopped DC traveling tomorrow they would have plenty of people on the DC to run content without any issues.

[RokkuEkkusu]

I'd say this is more of a reap what you sow situation.

Back when cross world function was new back in 6.18, Primal Party Finder was still very active. This trend was constant all the way up to the first few weeks of 6.4's savage tier release. Weeks later in 6.4, people from Primal ended up going to Aether for Party Finder. It got to the point where even Bozja and SB Eureka became more active than Party Finder in Primal most of the time.

Why is this sudden trend for Primal data center happening now? I guess we'll never know.

[Avoidy]

Kinda crazy how cross-dc play was implemented without a cross-dc dutyfinder/partyfinder system to balance out this inevitable problem, I agree. Also shoutout to that dev who said in an interview that the economy wouldn't be affected even though they created an opportunity to hop to another DC, buy an item for cheap, and then come home and just sell it for more because why not. Which is exactly what loads of people did until the market on that specific item leveled out and approached a similar price on both datacenters. Sure sounds like the market's being affected to me! But hey, what do I know.

Idk it just feels like the whole cross-DC approach was done with really sweet intentions but didn't take into account the issues it would create or the fact that different DCs really do have different cultures. Crystal is basically a zoo that primal/aether players head to when they wanna see some wild action while eating popcorn, and before I quit, Ul'dah's chat was literally always some dudes from Aether or Primal being like "Balmung so lewd, balmung so wacky xDDD" while simultaneously being the source of the worst of the conversations. It's like visiting a zoo and throwing rocks at the monkey because you want him to dance. Meanwhile Aether is just, the place people go now to actually play the game. Which sucks btw because I recall logging in and seeing like half of my old guild "online" but on another DC for something as basic as their daily roulettes, because the impression was formed at some point that crystal can't play the game at any level and if you want a decent experience with randos you should just head to aether. Like are you kidding me guy? But that was how at least 2 people I knew felt, which sucked balls because most of my friends were "playing other games" and the ones that weren't, might as well have been gone since I couldn't communicate with them anyway. And idk what niche primal even has. And dynamis is literally the suburbs where anyone can own a home I guess.

Hell, dynamis. Now there's a topic. You wanna bring up a DC harmed by cross-DC play? Dynamis didn't even get to breathe on its own for a week because everyone who hopped over there immediately came back to crystal or aether or w/e and the place has been dead ever since. Really sucked for anyone who wanted to be on the bleeding edge of a new community, literally one of the funnest things you can be a part of in an mmo. It'll basically never happen again as long as cross-dc is a thing because the economy will always be subsidized by other DCs and the players have every reason to just dc hop to get everything done that they could ever want. I legit met a sprout who got baited into playing on Dynamis and I felt so bad for that guy because he was alone. He didn't want to DC hop either. Man wanted to play on his own DC, which I can respect. I'd check in on him every so often and help him with msq dungeons, but it was honestly rough as hell. We were just trying to do copperbell for his main scenario and even with me on a healer the queue still took ages. Eventually this tank joined us in what was honestly a really cute/organic mmo moment, and even then the wait to just find a single dps had us sitting around for several minutes. Was genuinely unreal, like everyone there has just given up and gone to other DCs. I wonder if that guy's still playing, but I kinda doubt it since the last time I saw him he just seemed sad that every town he'd been to was dead as hell. I sincerely hope he just remade on one of the big 3 because dynamis feels totally abandoned. They could at least fix the queue issues with a cross-dc pf/df; maybe in dawntrail they'll implement it, or maybe it'll be like all the other systems in this game that were implemented and then kinda forgotten about for years.

[Kyrj]

Man being on Dynamis is just.....I'd rather hug a cactus. Everything is just dead, Bozja, Euereka, EO, PotD, HoH, any trial between ARR and EW. Really is sad.

[Defmetal]

Man being on Dynamis is just.....I'd rather hug a cactus. Everything is just dead, Bozja, Euereka, EO, PotD, HoH, any trial between ARR and EW. Really is sad.

It's really tragic. I know the players are doing this to themselves but we're operating in the parameters SE set. They are in control of the situation and people are flocking to the path of least resistance which is to consolidate everything in one location.

[Fahad]

And here I am begging for Zurfan synced clear before I start SB ...

I am currently scouring Discord, Reddit ...etc to find a community that want to do old EX/Savage contents because I have 3 possibly 4 expansions to catch up to and I hate wasting a challenge and a good time by blazing through it unsynced. But it I doubt there are enough player base that is willing to re-learn old contents .

No matter what solutions they implement, it is the player base that needs to help new players not just with basics, but with hard contents . SE can only incentivize this. If player insist on only doing current EX/Savage contents, they will die quick.

Only thing comes to mind is giving elite players reward for synced clears with parties including first time bonus for 2.0 3.0 4.0 trials and raids. but they have to make it worth while.

Imagine someone having their name posted on the server and celebrated as a savior with public announcements. or getting rewarded a special mount, or item or gear glamour because they went back and helped a party of 5 people clear T9 synced . heck make it a point system, who helps people pass old contents the most is the leader this month/week.

[Astralrisk]

Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

A majority of the content in this game is mostly instanced, and the only open world content in this game that has a large player interaction beyond its initial launch is hunts. For the most part open world content is just incredibly barren as is, and having a mega server wouldn't fix it. Overall, I think having a mega server would just create more issues than it solves.