Limited Cross Region DC Travel

[Jojoya]

Repeat with me:

They. Are. Opening. Access. For. Everyone. To. The. Newest. Region.

That 100% invalidates the economic concern and identifies it as an excuse.

Not really because we have no guarantee that travel to the JP worlds from NA or EU will be allowed at some point in the future.

For all we know, SE is only responding to player feedback pushing for something to be done to help Materia, which is OCE not JP. That data center has struggled since it was set up because the player population is so low and a lot of players that wanted it ended up transferring back to NA or EU. What happens with the economy there is a trivial concern compared to trying to improve the general game experience.

To be honest, I tend to agree that it's far more than economic concerns holding things back. SE could have set things up so players couldn't purchase items on other worlds if they really wanted to. If that was all that was holding things back, we would have had cross region travel by now.

I think the fear is the cultural differences disrupting things on the JP worlds if too many random NA and EU players went there. Their beliefs about what is socially acceptable behavior vary quite a bit from ours. JP players have been very resistant to cross region travel where most NA and EU players are fine with the idea.

I'd be fine if JP wants to remain isolated and left out of cross region travel. Let the rest of us play together.

[Abriael]

I think the fear is the cultural differences disrupting things on the JP worlds if too many random NA and EU players went there. Their beliefs about what is socially acceptable behavior vary quite a bit from ours. JP players have been very resistant to cross region travel where most NA and EU players are fine with the idea.

Players from all over the world including Japan have played together on FFXI and FFXIV 1.0 without the sky falling.

As someone who spends in Japan a quarter of the year for work, I'm fairly confident no sky would fall even in FFXIV 7.0.

[LianaThorne]

Players from all over the world including Japan have played together on FFXI and FFXIV 1.0 without the sky falling.

As someone who spends in Japan a quarter of the year for work, I'm fairly confident no sky would fall even in FFXIV 7.0.

I'm happy for you that you haven't ran into the very vocal communities of the game that want nothing to do with NA players, for example. Even on this forum I've seen several threads of people from the EU side of things saying that they'd kick people from groups if it became apparent from they were from NA (because apparently were all "self-obsessed Trump lovers who cant take criticism").

I've also personally been called a "stupid American" on the OCE servers on Day 1 of them opening up. Myself and others were curious to experience another region so we made alts, bought skips and joined up for an alliance raid as our own party. Our tank got aggro and proceeded to handle the boss the way he normally would (i.e. how a tank should handle bosses on the NA side of things). This infuriated several people who didn't want to do NA strats and resulted in basically flat out bullying towards anyone who was from NA (and no, before you accuse us of retaliating, we didn't. Tank even tried to apologize and explain how we literally didn't know but still got insulted for that lol). Probably the worst experience I've ever had in this game outside of my stalking incident.

It's also no secret that OCE was even created because JP didn't want to play with anyone who wasn't from JP and wanted to try to get the English speakers (OCE) out.

And let's not forget the recent postings of the JP member who is literally going around telling people to kill themselves for not greeting them properly.

I'm sure not everyone shares these viewpoints but I'm also not trying to put myself into toxic situations with people who don't want anything to do with me just because of where I live or will tell me to die if I don't study how to properly greet them prior to encountering them in a dungeon. At the very least they should improve their reporting system at the same time as this so issues that do arise can be handled quickly and efficiently compared to how they are now.

[LaylaTsarra]

I'm sure there are some who are toxic and this forum is certainly not the litmus test for the community. I play on all Data Centers have had a character on Japan for years and never had a problem. I play on Light and Chaos too and all the NA DC's and have never had any major problems.

The issue though will there be groups who want to troll especially in Japan. Hard to say but our cultures are certainly different. I would imagine the Raid community would be the hardest hit with DC travel and although I'm not a raider I've read that methods used in Japan are different than elsewhere. Given the raiding popularity in Japan it would be a major reason for people to DC travel there in my opinion.

After all is said and done something needs to be done with Materia. The current situation is terrible. These people pay subs like everyone else and running content there is abysmal. Many have left so the situation is getting worse instead of improving and I personally don't hold much hope for it changing with 7.0

[Ravenblade1979]

Face it. We need the cloud servers up officially. That was a blast

[Anienai]

Na i pass. Personal i dont need it

We have Coffee n Donuts!

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

What does this even mean, there has to be some inherent limitations to complete cross region travel or the entire playerbase is just going to fight for limited spots on aether, if you are absolutely chomping at the bit to see friends who are on other data centres you can meet in materia, ripping down all the walls just means we end up with aether and 8 pressure valves for aether which dynamis shows already doesn’t work

I think you're severely overestimating the amount of people that would want to go to Aether that aren't already on NA. This isn't just hopping from one DC to another that are physically in the same location IRL so there's zero ping difference, region travel has many more negatives to someone that isn't already on NA.

EU already has its "raiding center". Very few EU players are gonna be doubling/tripling their ping just to raid somewhere else when Light is already bustling with activity. I've played with multiple EU friends who have raided over here on NA with alts/transferred to be over here with friends and they've all had plenty of complaints regarding ping here, to the point VPN & plugins are basically mandatory to make it playable in high end content.

Same with JP. They certainly aren't going to be leaving their own DCs for raiding, considering the non-zero amount of JP players who have the "JP only" mindset. In fact if anything, NA people would be more tempted to get off aether and go to JP due to the neverending comments about how mythical, amazing and organized JP PF/DF is at clearing content compared to other regions.

The congregating of a single DC within each region happened because there's zero trade offs to not go there and only benefits. With region travel there will be much harsher negatives.
However, I do agree much consideration needs to be put into place before they just throw open the floodgates haphazardly, but for reasons completely unrelated to raiding, since ping issues effectively neutralizes that as a concern.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention timezone differences into the mix, where Aether's primetime raiding time is like, 1-2am for most of Europe. And in the dead of morning for anyone in the SEA region, further disincentivizing travelling to aether and just staying on your own "big" DC in your region since your own region will be far more populated at your usual primetime.

[ErysNight]

Dear SE,

I just wanted to add a positive plus for the idea of permanent cross DC travel.

If you have communities that are expressing xenophobia and racism, please feel free to keep them isolated in that. But the Cloud Beta was really fun and was such a great time that I've decided to expand to OCE and play with them more. Your recent announcement for Dawntrail was so exciting because I was able to make friends there and having the ability to visit from Aether NA would be great.

Please don't take just the feedback from one community (JP) as the only feedback that matters for this entire game. Let NA/EU and OCE continue to play together at a minimum!

[strawberrycake]

Seeing people acting like the world will implode if the JP EU and NA communities interact is hilarious. The JP players thats cause issues are too cliquish to really do any harm, and EU is heavily devided by language. These groups will avoid you quicker then you'd have to interact with them, and the worst they'll do is kick you from the party is they're feeling petty. But thats also just life, you deal with toxic and picky people. It's gonna happen here to.

[CidHeiral]

Imagine thinking that removing artificial barriers that should have never existed and giving people options would "destroy every DC that isn't Aether." Do you have any more scaremongering to share with us today?

Imagine saying imagine in every post because you can't imagine an original thought.

Anyone not being deliberately obtuse can log into any DC that isn't "the raiding DC" of their region and see for themselves that PF is dead for everything that isn't ERP clubs. Doubly so for Dynamis which is dead entirely due to DC travel.

I've had friends