Suggestion: Cross DC Partyfinder Per Region

[Khryseis_Astra]

Why would people choose to stunt their experience to kind of sort of boost participation on their own server.

I mean, the amount of times I’ve gone to Aether and ended up in a full Crystal party is insane. lol

I always check my own DC’s PF first. And I started a lot of my own PFs as I was going through the EW Extremes… I had never DC traveled before and I was trying to avoid it. lol (Because quite frankly, it struck me as silly that these DC designations were becoming a thing.) And I did end up getting all but one cat on Crystal, but the last I had to totem out on. So I got impatient with PFs not filling and finally DC traveled for that one. So many Crystal parties on Aether! We could’ve all stayed home and got it done! lol

[KisaiTenshi]

So it's not a "we don't bother fixing this issue ever", just a "it's complicated, the obvious approach would take forever, but we know it's an issue and are going to think about other solutions."

It's just a very expensive engineering process. Just to give us cross-DC travel is difficult because it has to make a copy of your character in both the DC login gateway and the server. Where as "in-DC" can simply copy the character that's in the same DC already. To do cross-server parties are already extremely limited, a cross-DC party would be a problem because presently it doesn't do that. When you move data centers temporarily, you are using a copy of your character in the same way there is a copy of your character in a dungeon instance. When the instance closes, it syncs that back. When you tell it to send your character back, it syncs it back to your homeworld / DC.

There's a certain level of fragility that already exists here. If it takes a minute to change data centers and another minute to change servers. Imagine how much of a pain it will be to have a cross-DC PF that requires everyone waiting 3 minutes to start a duty, as it has to temporarily create an instance and copy everyone to it, and when that instance ends it has to copy everyone back, taking another 3 minutes. The way they're doing things now, this is just not really viable.

They need to rip the bandaid off and merge all the parts of the game that require people to travel in the first place. Merge the housing areas, merge the retainers, merge the marketboards, merge the players by giving them a "reflection name" to avoid name collisions, do the same for the FC's so every FC exists on every server and DC. Allow players to be temporary members of other FC's when they're not on their home server. Once there is no more reason to switch servers, and everyone can play with each other, capacity issues can be solved by profiling who hangs out with who and silently push them into servers together.

A lot of this is just asking for capacity and data loss problems if done for the wrong reasons. Getting people to stay on their DC and server they created their character on wouldn't be an issue if people didn't want to hang out with each other and were forced to create their character elsewhere because of ... capacity issues. Like all the recent people I know who want to play together are on Aether, and have basically decided to move to a different server because they can't get onto the server the person with the oldest account created theirs on. You can't incentivize older players to ditch their housing, FC and friends they already have just because their new friends can't get to their server.

And if the game is to continue to have growth, it has to find ways of removing the barriers.

[Etterna]

I wonder if disabling PF for travelers (like they do with pvp) will be the temporary solution they go with to the issue until regionwide PF gets added. I'd would make everyone use the pf on their home DC, and wouldn't affect cross-dc groups.

[Catwho]

I wonder if disabling PF for travelers (like they do with pvp) will be the temporary solution they go with to the issue until regionwide PF gets added. I'd would make everyone use the pf on their home DC, and wouldn't affect cross-dc groups.

This may be the solution at least for the first few months. If you have a pre-baked static and you join up with your friends on that other DC with a full party of 8, you're good to go.

But you can't roll onto another data center as a singler player and try to get into a PF there, or make a PF party there, since you're not a local. You can do that just fine on your home data center.

[WillIrishclover]

Yes and no, the question was asked a few times during the media tour and by the time Shenpai had her interview slot with Meoni in Germany, Yoshida mentioned some other ideas have come up the team and himself need to reflect about. He stated the 3 years thing as well, but also they are looking for other approaches to this topic because ofc players wouldn't want to wait three years.

https://youtu.be/6PIxQPKBf0E?feature=shared&t=1406
(Should the time stamp in the link not work: Question 5, 23:26)

So it's not a "we don't bother fixing this issue ever", just a "it's complicated, the obvious approach would take forever, but we know it's an issue and are going to think about other solutions."

I suppose the user base here in the forum present in these discussions is probably mostly playing on NA servers, but this issue exists in other regions as well, including JP and EU. Everyone is affected by it, they won't ignore it. It's just not that easy to fix the mess coming from opening this box of pandora.

yeah from really listening to the statement, Yoshi P seems to fully get this is a problem they have created, theres no denial or downplaying of the problem, its just the problem isn't an easy one to fix, and I cant see them walking back cross dc travel, not after they basically soft launched cross region dc travel with the OCE thing, nor can I see them limiting travellers from doing things.

Aint gonna be a quick solution here but I do think a solution of some kind will be found.

[GartredZW]

yeah from really listening to the statement, Yoshi P seems to fully get this is a problem they have created, theres no denial or downplaying of the problem, its just the problem isn't an easy one to fix, and I cant see them walking back cross dc travel, not after they basically soft launched cross region dc travel with the OCE thing, nor can I see them limiting travellers from doing things.

Aint gonna be a quick solution here but I do think a solution of some kind will be found.

This has been an issue since DC Travel was introduced. Nearly two years ago now. How hard of an issue is it that we still don't know when it's going to be fixed.
Here's an idea that would help at least in the short term, When you have the <<Traveler>> tag, the game treats you as if you're loot locked for the week. You can still go and help out some friends, but you won't get gear from it. Then even if you clear, you can still go back to your home DC to clear and get loot.

[Ardeth]

Not to but in, but I do think limiting loot when traveling is a good idea. Not you know a hunt train of some roulette, but in weekly lockout type situation to force people to actually participate on their home server.

The only real oversight I see is people leaving their dead server for a full server. Which honestly is harder to stop and harder to prove.

The issue is that people will always find a way to cheese it. They will always find some way to get the reward and screw everyone else in the process. It's human nature.

But I think making your home server matter more is a good start.

[mallleable]

A couple of short term solutions that might help would be to prevent travelers from making party finder listings when not on their home Data Center, they can still join parties created by locals. Or creating a Free Company buff that adds +5 or +10 to loot rolls depending on the level.

[Clouse_Cleyra]

Very old post, but its sadly how its impossible to do content in any other DC than Aether.
We need urgently a cross world PF that merge all regional servers.

[Shistar]

The same is slowly happening in EU. Chaos struggles to fill an EX or it simply doesn't on a bad day, and most things have you travel to Light unless it's a roulette or you have a lot of time on your hands. We're in dire need of a cross-DC party finder.

This has been an issue since DC Travel was introduced. Nearly two years ago now. How hard of an issue is it that we still don't know when it's going to be fixed.
Here's an idea that would help at least in the short term, When you have the <<Traveler>> tag, the game treats you as if you're loot locked for the week. You can still go and help out some friends, but you won't get gear from it. Then even if you clear, you can still go back to your home DC to clear and get loot.

If this happened, all statics would meet up in other DCs and clear as many times as possible for each player to get full loot that week (so, if NA has 4 DCs, that'd be 4 clears each week, jumping to another DC for each clear...), making it even faster to clear. Statics would want to grab as many people from different DCs as possible so they can gear faster, and regions with more DCs would inherently have an advantage over EU (only 2 DCs) and OCE (one DC) when it comes to how long it takes to gear up. People would absolutely abuse it just like this if it doesn't limit the amount of coffers it spawns (which, I have to admit, I am not sure if you were assuming it would, or if that player would still contribute towards spawning coffers but just not be able to loot anything from them)