Snapshot of PF activity on North American data centers

[PyaKura]

Don't get me wrong, SE is equally responsible for not fully thinking through DC travel before implementing it, but even if you concede that everyone clustering on one DC is a no brainer and nothing but beneficial, which I do not think is the case at all, that doesn't absolve the community of any responsibility for its current predicament. People are responsible for their own actions. They weren't mind controlled or coerced into their behavior by anything other than their own short sighted self interest. If everyone decided to stop dogpiling on Aether tomorrow, the problem would cease to exist.

People are going to go wherever is the most convenient for them, can you really blame them? This is far from being a FFXIV-specific issue and you can observe the same phenomenon in everything that's put at the public's disposal. People will always flock to the more convenient option they have available, because why wouldn't they? It falls to those who have the power to make changes to make things better. The average user is only good at pointing out issues, but they're pretty bad at providing solutions.

When people were complaining about the playerbase split, they were pointing out an issue they had with the game. SE provided a solution which seemed perfectly fine at first glance. No one outside of the development team was supposed to know how exactly it was going to work beforehand. People saw the DC-travel feature and they can infer what it'll do - allow travel between DCs. But that's about it. I don't think it's even remotely reasonable to expect the average player to think about the consequences of such a feature: how seamless is it to travel from a DC to another? Will I be able to use my retainers and FC buffs? Can I still talk to my friends across DCs? What would happen if we all move to the same DC for raiding?

How are you supposed to question the specifics of a solution provided to you by a team of professional behind closed doors before having it in hands? All the playerbase could do was trust SE to provide a good solution to the issue they were bringing up.

[NanaWiloh]

This strikes me as a very odd take. It's like saying "it's not my fault I drank bleach, it's your fault for leaving it on the table!" Are you arguing that the community collectively has the mind of a three year old and can't control themselves or use any level of critical thinking?

Don't get me wrong, SE is equally responsible for not fully thinking through DC travel before implementing it, but even if you concede that everyone clustering on one DC is a no brainer and nothing but beneficial, which I do not think is the case at all, that doesn't absolve the community of any responsibility for its current predicament. People are responsible for their own actions. They weren't mind controlled or coerced into their behavior by anything other than their own short sighted self interest. If everyone decided to stop dogpiling on Aether tomorrow, the problem would cease to exist.



Water can't stop and think "hmm maybe what I'm doing is stupid in the long run."



Your social ineptitude is your own problem.

SE has learned and still is learning, as for the player base. Well its still laying on the railroad tracks getting hit by the train.

[Stormpeaks]

This strikes me as a very odd take. It's like saying "it's not my fault I drank bleach, it's your fault for leaving it on the table!" Are you arguing that the community collectively has the mind of a three year old and can't control themselves or use any level of critical thinking?

Don't get me wrong, SE is equally responsible for not fully thinking through DC travel before implementing it, but even if you concede that everyone clustering on one DC is a no brainer and nothing but beneficial, which I do not think is the case at all, that doesn't absolve the community of any responsibility for its current predicament. People are responsible for their own actions. They weren't mind controlled or coerced into their behavior by anything other than their own short sighted self interest. If everyone decided to stop dogpiling on Aether tomorrow, the problem would cease to exist.



Water can't stop and think "hmm maybe what I'm doing is stupid in the long run."



Your social ineptitude is your own problem.

All of this tbh lol. 100% agree, especially the last part

[Renathras]

It isn't "bad faith" at all, the same point occurred to me.

Not only that, but we're currently still in the cloud server stress test period, so that could also affect the populations, and possibly to varying degrees.

So it's an interesting exercise, I would repeat it a few times, as it's been said- this is *one* snapshot in time, and compare the numbers, before drawing any conclusions.

Agreed. The Cloud Server part was what I thought of right off the bat.

I'm with you that the idea of doing it has merit, but it shouldn't use such an unusual weekend, and ideally do several in a row to see what the average is, as well as snapshots from other days of the week (e.g. Monday night with people trying to do things before rollover or Tuesday night with people trying to do reset day clears).

.

As to the what's the point of the servers:

I personally like being on medium-pop server/DC, and as someone else said:

I missed this post before, but I think you overestimate just how many people do PF stuff as their main activity. How many PFs are running isn't the sole indicator of how healthy a DC is.

I mostly do DF and Hunt Trains, and both seem pretty active here. Primal has a really active and engaged Hunt community, and I've also seen Eureka being pretty active of late. Just because people aren't doing stuff in PF doesn't really mean the DC itself is dead. It just means no one's really doing much PF stuff. and is that REALLY a shock? We're in the lulliest part of an expansion that's already been notable for its lulls. The total number of non-Other PFs posted across all the DCs there is 162. I remember when Primal ALONE had over 100 in just High End Duties. Not everyone, but many people, have already done what they want to PF out of the content in the game right now. Right now it's off-time on a Wednesday night and I see, on Primal, right now, 50 total, 14 regular and 36 other. Even post DC travel, I've seen it much higher, like when patches are released with new Extremes and stuff to do.

Note that I'm not saying DC travel ISN'T a problem, but I am saying I'm not sure this data is as conclusive as one might think.

EDIT:

As an additional note that I don't think I've seen anyone mention (though I could've missed it): Open PF listings are not indicative of groups that have formed via PF and are actively entering and completing duties. Once they fill up they don't show up in PF anymore.

Actually...this is PROBABLY a really good point.

Suppose Primal has a ton of PF groups actively doing content, but because there are so few of them AT ANY ONE TIME in the listings, they're immediately filling. So say someone puts a P9S group up and it fills almost instantly, then someone else puts one up, it fills, etc. There are now 5, 10, 50 groups running it, but only 1 in PF at any given time.

Meanwhile, on Aether, there are a hundred listings for P9S all up, but all of them are missing a healer, so none of them are actually starting up and going into the content/leaving the listing once filled.

This is less a measure of "PF activity" and more a measure of "PF groups failing to fill" at any given time, is it not?

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO, instead of a world visit system I feel like they should have invested in a way to consolidate PF/DF and the instancing servers to accommodate people from different worlds/data centers being able to be matched together.

[AmiableApkallu]

Suppose Primal has a ton of PF groups actively doing content, but because there are so few of them AT ANY ONE TIME in the listings, they're immediately filling. So say someone puts a P9S group up and it fills almost instantly, then someone else puts one up, it fills, etc. There are now 5, 10, 50 groups running it, but only 1 in PF at any given time.

Meanwhile, on Aether, there are a hundred listings for P9S all up, but all of them are missing a healer, so none of them are actually starting up and going into the content/leaving the listing once filled.

This is less a measure of "PF activity" and more a measure of "PF groups failing to fill" at any given time, is it not?

The thing I actually want to know is the answer to, "At this very moment, how long should I expect it to take for me to join/fill a party for XYZ?" The only way to answer that is to take a look at listings over time: the rate at which new listing go up, and the time it takes each one to fill or to be taken down.

Without putting that effort in, all I can do is look at the listings that currently exist and try to intuit what the answer might be. If I see zero listings, is that because no one's creating listing or because they're filling so quickly I never get to see them? If I see 100 listings, is that because things are hopping, or is there some subtle reason why they're piling up like that?

[Niadissa]

Granted, it is just before 9am Pacific time on a weekday, but i've never had more than a few minute queue to get into almost any current content. today, as a healer on Lamia i'm sitting at 38 minutes and counting trying to get into Thaleia with 2/3T, 4/6H, and 11/15D, don't know if this is end of expansion die off, or data center travel (probably a combination of the two). I've noticed this gradually over the last month that queues are getting longer (somehow I still have a que to login to the game though)

Went through each of the Regions doing a player search, and at around 8am was only just over 700 people on lamia. Not the most accurate count I'm sure, but probably the best way that is available to us to check. No zone hit the cap on player search.

[Aldath]

You can feel this in all aspects of Dynamis. DF is dead, PF takes hours to fill normal mode duties, Bozja, Eureka, Hunts, etc all didn't have a chance to develop their own communities and instead groups from Crystal and Aether just use Dynamis as overflow.

It's really bleak to be on that DC right now. We need a reason to be on our home DC and to organize things as a DC.

I had to wait 34 minutes in queue for Orbonne, as a Healer, on a Saturday evening.

[CidHeiral]

People are going to go wherever is the most convenient for them, can you really blame them?

Yes. It is only more convenient to queue on Aether now because the community made it artificially less convenient to play on the other DCs.

I don't think it's even remotely reasonable to expect the average player to think about the consequences of such a feature

The average person is perfectly capable of thinking before taking an action. Sorry but I don't buy this argument I keep seeing of "I got mine, F how it effects anyone else, but you can't blame me 'cuz I'm a big dumb baby, teehee!"

[Volgia]

Yes. It is only more convenient to queue on Aether now because the community made it artificially less convenient to play on the other DCs.

To me it's the other way around, unlimited Data Center travel was such a tidal wave of a change that raiding in your own server and convincing people to stay became the artificial choice. I'd rather play on my server and I intend to make my utmost best to PF on my own DC; but given that this happened across regions (NA with Aether, JP with Mana and EU with Light) I think it's more heavily on the developer's side to do something now.