Cloud DC Proves Cross-Region Travel is OK

[Volgia]

If this is truly the route that most people want to take then we might as well nuke the different DCs and have everyone pushed into one mega server. There's no reason to not at that point. It isn't really fair to force people from 3 other DCs to travel to do content when prior to DC Travel being a thing, this wasn't an issue.

Regardless of if you want to blame the playerbase or not, the system opened up the door for people to abuse it and a lot of people did. Instead of Dyna having a chance to build its own identity and community, people were going to Aether on Day 1 to do content because they didn't want to exercise an ounce of patience or used the DC as housing with plans to still go back to their original DC anyway to do their day-to-day activities. There are now consistently 100+ PFs on Aether at most hours of the day while Crystal and Primal struggle to get half of that and Dyna can't even break over 10 most of the time.

If this wasn't an issue pre-DC travel and only became one after, then the reality needs to be looked at here that the fault is on both sides: the devs and the playerbase. You should not need to leave your own DC to get content done, period. If we're going to speak on efficiency/convienence, the most efficient/convienent thing is to queue on your DC instead of having to travel and sit in a queue and then sit in a PF party waiting for it to be filled (which could take exponentially longer now considering you're fighting 10+ ads for the same content at the same time).

So from the player side we can just dispell this idiotic idea that you need to go to Aether to raid, and from the devs side they have to incentivize people to stay in their DCs to play. something rather significant. I don't want DC travel to become inaccesible or punishing because I have a ton of friends from other DCs I like to play with. We can just take what we learned from Endwalker and bring it into DT.

[Tsumdere]

So from the player side we can just dispell this idiotic idea that you need to go to Aether to raid, and from the devs side they have to incentivize people to stay in their DCs to play. something rather significant. I don't want DC travel to become inaccesible or punishing because I have a ton of friends from other DCs I like to play with. We can just take what we learned from Endwalker and bring it into DT.

This idea will never be dispelled until either a prominent raiding group transfers or a famous person rolls on another DC. The sentiment that Aether was for raiders has always existed and was the reason that Crystal started out kneecapped (although Crystal had reached the point of perfectly fine until DC travel). And there is no incentives they could possibly give to stop making people come to Aether. They would either be so major that people would leave the other DCs to transfer to Aether, or so minor they would ignore them.

The only two things they can change to make any difference now is to allow cross-DC PF (good option) or nuke the system entirely (bad option).

[Canadane]

All these concerns about culture clashes seem unfounded.

Being in an instance is much different than living with.

[Jeeqbit]

Being in an instance is much different than living with.

Instance? I've been doing open world content with them and talking with them in CWLS.

[Renathras]

This is kind of true and false at the same time. People are congregating to Aether because it's now the "general content" DC, not just the "raid DC". Queues for normal content are noticeably longer on the other 2 DCs (I'm excluding Dyna for obvious reasons) compared to a year or so ago, in my opinion.

Wait, they are?

Healer ques are still instant for most 4 man content. As are Tank ques. And the times I play, DPS ques tend to be "less than 5 minutes" as well. Frontlines are always "less than 5 minutes". 24 man DPS ques are always "less than 5 minutes", and Trial/Normal Raid ques play roulette who gets the instant but everyone is "less than 5 minutes".

Specific quing for specific content is usually decent for most stuff, and about what it was before DC travel.

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I know people complain about it a lot, but in terms of normal content, it doesn't seem to be different. The only thing that seems to be really different is high end stuff (Ultimate, Savage, sometimes Extremes but sometimes not).

Keep in mind that normal ques wouldn't be changed by DC travel. Say 50% of Primal was going to Aether for ques. That 50% is PROBABLY proportional across the roles to what is left. Like let's say there are 200 players total, 50 tanks, 50 healers, 100 DPS, and 100 of those people go to Aether and 100 stay on Primal to que. The people that go are PROBABLY ~25 tanks, ~ 25 healers, and ~50 DPS. It won't split EXACTLY half, but will probably be pretty close. It's not like it will be every tank and healer and all the 100 DPSers staying behind.

So in terms of ques, it will probably still have the same general proportions of players, so que times would be more or less the same for roulettes. Where you might get a difference would be very specific DF ques for high end stuff...but people already don't often DF for something like Thordain Extreme as it is. You'd have a 5 hour que for that before and after DC travel, because no one uses DF to que for it, people use PF and form groups.

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EDIT:

NOTE: I'm not necessarily for or against DC travel or a world-server (though didn't see a problem with it during this test, at any rate), but I do think some of the complaints are unfounded "kitchen sink" arguments. "DC travel does this bad thing, and I don't like it, so I'm going to blame it on a bunch of other stuff happening, even stuff that...may not actually be happening but I'm going to say it is and use it as proof of why <thing I dislike> is bad."

It seems to be an issue for raiders trying to do high end content, but doesn't seem to be affecting the game more generally nor casual players, and the game already had a massive amount of RP and venue FCs before DC travel, so that's hardly new. FCs haven't been "raiding groups" for a while. Every FC I've ever been in, people often had statics with no one else in the FC and the types of things the FC did together were scheduled map days or occasionally running new members through stuff if they needed help (or were DPS and needed faster ques).

I'm sure they exist, but no FC I've ever been in was "we raid together as an FC".

If you're going to Aether, spending all your time there, and not planning or reaching out to your FC mates to do things together, that's kind of less on DC travel and more on you, is it not?

The BRAND NEW Datacenters is a separate issue, however, and likely would have existed whether or not we had DC travel, DC travel just made was was already likely...well, worse. But Dynamis would be a ghost town either way, it's just MORE of a ghost town.

[Jojoya]

Being in an instance is much different than living with.

Bad eggs are bad eggs regardless of what language they speak. It's not going to be significantly different from what we already experience in our isolated regions.

I think the biggest obstacle during the test is that the auto-translate dictionary has some holes that need filling and some phrases that may need some adjustment. Seeing someone join a trial PF with "Let's do it" when they're the third out of eight needed was strange. Here someone saying "Let's do it" would be interpreted as saying "Let's start now" (with only 3?). It's also hard to say that a hunt train is about to start when using auto-translate. I also couldn't find anything for S Rank, only "elite marks", which could be A or S.

Still, we could work around the limitations and it didn't seem to cause any serious misunderstandings.

[Orinori]

Big disagree on this one chief.

It might be perfectly fine to a normal person. For others like myself it's been more a headache.

It's fundamentally killed any normal FC that isn't a venue, clique of friends, or role playing in some degree. My social engagement has unironically gone down with visits.
I'm never really home anymore because I have to constantly travel to do any content at all including maps, hunts, ect. Which are actually more stressful to get into. Trying to find hunt linkshells and keep track of trains is stressful because of how conductors handle it.
RP has completely overtaken PF for the most part. In addition, you can't keep people in an FC anymore because they are always off server anyway. PvP queue times have taken a bit of a hit as well as far more premades in the likes of Frontlines. Which are stressful to play against if you aren't on their team. I can never tell what DC or server is best for stuff like Eureka, Bozja, Fate grinding, Deep Dungeon pairings, ect.

The sentiment atm is to just go to Aether for everything and anything. I have even considered giving up my house here on Goblin because I don't feel like I get to be home anymore. My retainers and my Island Sanctuary have fallen behind because it's inconvenient to return home. For certain types of people, this has probably improved their gaming experience but all it's done is ruin mine while making me feel like RP is the only thing I get invited to by friends.

PS: It's pushed Discord more as the main method to get anything done. Which isn't bad, but trying to even find what discord you even need for certain things can be a chore to track down. And the discord part is likely where the cross-DC stuff might start to get a bit complicated between regions.

I feel like a lot of the "DC Travel killed my server!" hublah is severely overplayed, Aether isn't anymore packed than it was, the same amount of PFs up, same amount of people in towns, no increased instances or channels. The game just doesn't have a lot of people playing it right now. We're 8 months away from anymore meaningful content and people have taken the community's favorite advice and left to play other games and do other things. Hopefully many of them return for Dawntrail next year, but until then nearly all servers despite the very few active ones will remain completely dead.

The fact that Aether DC travel has no queues, no login queue beyond the normal 10-40 on any server, there has been absolutely no channel/instance updates to address the supposedly multiple entire servers of people transferring over, and that this is all coinciding at the same time with one of the largest content draughts in the game's history leads me to believe that this issue has very little to do with DC travel.

[Bonoki]

I feel like a lot of the "DC Travel killed my server!" hublah is severely overplayed, Aether isn't anymore packed than it was, the same amount of PFs up, same amount of people in towns, no increased instances or channels. The game just doesn't have a lot of people playing it right now. We're 8 months away from anymore meaningful content and people have taken the community's favorite advice and left to play other games and do other things. Hopefully many of them return for Dawntrail next year, but until then nearly all servers despite the very few active ones will remain completely dead.

The fact that Aether DC travel has no queues, no login queue beyond the normal 10-40 on any server, there has been absolutely no channel/instance updates to address the supposedly multiple entire servers of people transferring over, and that this is all coinciding at the same time with one of the largest content draughts in the game's history leads me to believe that this issue has very little to do with DC travel.

Like how your post completely twists and dismisses the impact of DC visit into a depopulation due to lack of content issue despite the fact that we have been dealing with these issues through the whole expansion's lifespan even when the game had meaningful content to play. You really be acting like this is the first 8 month draught wait before an expansion anyone had to sit through in FFXIV.

[Orinori]

Like how your post completely twists and dismisses the impact of DC visit into a depopulation due to lack of content issue despite the fact that we have been dealing with these issues through the whole expansion's lifespan even when the game had meaningful content to play.

Dang thats pretty crazy then how every single "DC Travel ruined my server!" post started popping up right after 6.35, ya know, when the game's population started heavily declining. I forgot all the "DC Travel killed my server posts!" when the game's population was still healthy, almost as if they never happened in any meaningful capacity. Nice try though man.

[Bonoki]

Dang thats pretty crazy then how every single "DC Travel ruined my server!" post started popping up right after 6.35, ya know, when the game's population started heavily declining. I forgot all the "DC Travel killed my server posts!" when the game's population was still healthy, almost as if they never happened in any meaningful capacity. Nice try though man.

Yeah, it's not my fault you dont know what you're talking about.