Suggestion: Cross DC Partyfinder Per Region

[Catwho]

I don't think the system as it currently exists could really enable cross DC parties... Since the different DCs would need to send over character data, you'd need everyone in the party to go through the wait with DC travel at least once...

We're already doing that anyway. Since Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis are dead, everyone travels to Aether before checking Party Finder, or listing parties.

Having the PF itself be cross data center, it could allow the instances to be distributed to the home DC of the person who listed to the party, instead of hammering only Aether. Prior to Duty Start, everyone would need to travel to that Data center, or the process could be automated into a temporary Duty Lobby, sort of like a PSO2 lobby area, where you're not really on the DC proper but are able to access the instance with the party leader.

[TaleraRistain]

We're already doing that anyway. Since Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis are dead, everyone travels to Aether before checking Party Finder, or listing parties.

Having the PF itself be cross data center, it could allow the instances to be distributed to the home DC of the person who listed to the party, instead of hammering only Aether. Prior to Duty Start, everyone would need to travel to that Data center, or the process could be automated into a temporary Duty Lobby, sort of like a PSO2 lobby area, where you're not really on the DC proper but are able to access the instance with the party leader.

It would have to be some sort of lobby area. Can you imagine waiting in a PF for it to fill, getting that last person, and now everyone has to organize logging out and DC hopping and only then can things get started?

[Avatre]

It would have to be some sort of lobby area. Can you imagine waiting in a PF for it to fill, getting that last person, and now everyone has to organize logging out and DC hopping and only then can things get started?

And then that person/set of people that wait until the last second to withdraw...making it pop 10+ times because it keeps happening.

[TaleraRistain]

And then that person/set of people that wait until the last second to withdraw...making it pop 10+ times because it keeps happening.

Or you get in, wipe a couple times, back into PF, and back to organizing everyone together in the same spot before you can start again.

[Ravenblade1979]

I half wonder if anyone thought on the logistics of the instanced system. It already gets strained at times. This would add to it big time.

Also how you expect this to even work. As is, we travel to other dcs using character select screen. They would need to redo that whole system just for this.

Also do you think they would keep the instanced servers or utilize using one player as the host DC for the instance would happen?

What happens if said instance suffers a crash or a ddos? Are the rest of the players going to arrive back in their own DC and world or be stuck in limbo unable to play as the system never got the chance to put them back where it belongs?

[Menriq]

I half wonder if anyone thought on the logistics of the instanced system. It already gets strained at times. This would add to it big time.

Also how you expect this to even work. As is, we travel to other dcs using character select screen. They would need to redo that whole system just for this.

Also do you think they would keep the instanced servers or utilize using one player as the host DC for the instance would happen?

What happens if said instance suffers a crash or a ddos? Are the rest of the players going to arrive back in their own DC and world or be stuck in limbo unable to play as the system never got the chance to put them back where it belongs?

Being a software developer / architect, I have actually thought about this. I'd love to tackle the problem, but alas, I'd need to know their tech stack to even begin start looking into where the bottlenecks are, what possible solutions there are, etc.

[DrForester]

Just nuke DC travel all together.. .call it a mistake and revert the changes

This is an absolutely unrealistic thing to ever expect. It would shatter raid statics and would piss off the fanbase to no end.

The only practical solution now is cross-DC party/duty finder, and I really hope the devs are working on it and can implement it ASAP. I think it's too much to hope it will be in place for Dawntrail launch (imagine they would have announced it by now).

[KisaiTenshi]

We could use the break on aether. Rest of the dcs can utilize their own and liven theirs again.

See, there is no actual need for cross DC pf. What's needed is for players to stay on their own DC and keep them lively.

Half true.

What is needed is to make it less of an ordeal to "permanently" switch servers and DC's. If I move to X server from Y server, that should take ME, my retainers, and all my money/tomes/gear/etc to that server without question. This should be as easy as "data center server" transfer is now.

However you realize why this is, is because the retainer system would completely destabilize server economies. All the crafters would just jump server to stripmine the economy of smaller servers, and people would have to jump around servers to price shop, which is the problem 1.0 had with having to manually check every place and retainer.

Perhaps that can be solved too, by making the market actually global. It would make purchasing things VERY much slower, but then you wouldn't have to jump servers to do any of it. However that would in fact make it impossible to be a new crafter in the game as all the materials would then be horded, or players would engage in a lot of price arbitration, making leveling crafting much harder.

Honestly the ideal situation is to just nuke the party finder. Replace it with a priority chain, where the game uses your friend list, linkshells, and free company, and "previous recommended players today" to decide how to form the party, and if you want a private party, set a password on your party. If nobody has "I want to do (DUTY)" set, then it considers PUG's from those queued to those duties, and then the roulette. The main problem with PF right now is that it's mostly filled with spam, so people don't use it.

There should be no incentive to switch data centers or servers unless that's where people want to be in a FC. Unfortunately certain servers on certain DC's get known as the "big hangout" server for a certain thing and players don't want to move because moving their house isn't possible.

So between the housing system and the retainers, that's why people can't freely/permanently change servers. The fixes to both of those is not straight forward without changing how both of those work. Perhaps the correct fix to that is to change how housing works in the first place and only allow the retainers to be summoned in your house or inn room that operates as a "out-of-server" instance. The outside of the house still exists on it's home server, but the inside can be accessed from any "inn" on any server then. You can't summon your retainers outside your home unless you're on your home server.

At any rate, the other way to solve, everything, is to just create dynamic instances inside one virtual "game" server. So all players in non-combat areas are in the same instance until that instance is full, and then it forks another instance, and this gets reset every maintenance. In combat areas, the instances would instead be handed out by latency to all players in that instance. So players with sub-10ms to each other get priority, then sub-32, 64, 96. This would automatically stick players in the same party in the same instance, but would prioritize players in each instance by their geographic routing table essentially. Players playing on poor connections (eg starlink, dial up) end up at the bottom and dropped onto whatever instance is lowest for them.

Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of good solutions that don't involve erasing the boundaries between the servers.

[Ravenblade1979]

This is an absolutely unrealistic thing to ever expect. It would shatter raid statics and would piss off the fanbase to no end.

The only practical solution now is cross-DC party/duty finder, and I really hope the devs are working on it and can implement it ASAP. I think it's too much to hope it will be in place for Dawntrail launch (imagine they would have announced it by now).

That's not a solution. A solution would be for primal and crystal to make their own dcs lively again and leave us on aether alone.

I'm actually glad dawntrail is soon too. 1 or 2 glorious weeks of no world or DC travel (if they do what they did in endwalker).

[Ravenblade1979]

This is an absolutely unrealistic thing to ever expect. It would shatter raid statics and would piss off the fanbase to no end.

The only practical solution now is cross-DC party/duty finder, and I really hope the devs are working on it and can implement it ASAP. I think it's too much to hope it will be in place for Dawntrail launch (imagine they would have announced it by now).

Also I don't think it would kill raids. New statics would form. To think otherwise shows your extreme lack of faith in your own DC.