[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[RaenBlackMage]

I don't really know things from before DC travel... I only joined shortly before it was available. However... since then, I have made friends across multiple data centers. I've raided with some, farmed content with others, and spent far more time simply dropping in on them to visit and hang out, catching up and spending time with them. Deep Dungeons being a favorite to just grab a group of friends and hop in.

Even if the use of PF was disabled for me, I would like to be able to drop in on my friends again- and have them able to drop in on me as well. For me, FF XIV is where my friends are. I live in an area without many readily available social opportunities, so for me the Massively Multiplayer part of MMO fills that niche quite nicely. But being effectively cut off from half my friends- friends who I at least could see on Dynamis before this all went down- hurts.

What I would like most is free Data Center travel and cross-DC PFs. However, I would take free data center travel and PFs only allowed on uncongested worlds/ by people on their native worlds over this, and I would be quite happy with the EW way of doing things as well. I didn't mind hopping to Aether when I wanted to PF harder content. For me, it became an opportunity to pop in on my Aether friends, as well as to take a look at their Market Boards for anything I wanted to spend my gil on.

I do feel that the social value of cross-DC travel is more important- for me, the friendships that I have cultivated over the past few years are the real reason I keep paying my subscription. The gameplay has been quite fun, and the story amazing as I spent the past few years slowly working my way from ARR to EW. But it's the friends I've made across that time- and on different Data Centers- that kept me playing.

[ObscuraFi]

I don't really know things from before DC travel... I only joined shortly before it was available..

So, small history lesson:

When the current version of the game first started in 2013, world visit wasn't even a thing. You were stuck to the world you selected. That is the reason why certain worlds developed reputations for a set type of community like Balmung and roleplay because that is where everyone interested in that thing went.

Over time, years later, Oct 2019, world visit on the same data center became a thing. Some period around here and also from years in the past, including in the original version of the game in 2012, there were several instances where worlds got shifted and or merged. Different data centers got created. So, people got split up, housing was lost etc. etc. The Legacy tag next to a world is for worlds that existed before ARR in 2012. (ARR is called 2.0 because the original game 1.0 failed significantly, Yoshi-P brought the game back with hard work which is why he is considered the savior, and lore wise the entire world got nuked.)

Notable examples include that Crystal and Light DC did not exist before April 2019 and got worlds shifted over to it instead of them being created like what happened with Dynamis.

Fast forward 2022, EW releases with cross-data center travel, login queue happens to be clogged as hell so they create new worlds and data centers, being Dynamis for NA, Meteor for JP and also adding Materia for OCE ppl for ping reasons.

This is also when we find out world visit issues because the world visit queue was set to be behind the login queue. So if the login queue was busy enough, you couldn't even world hop. World hopping was not coded to be guaranteed.

Another issue that stemmed from server congestion is the afk timer itself. That used to didn't exist. In Bozja there used to didn't be a timer where you'd get kicked out after 10min in instance. That was added to help with congestion and they were begging people to log out instead of being afk in game. And with Dawntrail they doubled down on that issue and updated it to cover some of the other ways people tried to dodge the afk kick timer. Every time the playerbase doesn't listen to what Square says, another feature gets added that inconveniences other players or they force Square Enix's hand to force the situation like with Dawntrail launch. They could've launched DT with the current system we have now, but they didn't even want to give people the chance. They already know the playerbase tries to dodge afk timers and if they got over to Aether and dodged it, they would've made the situation worse than it needed to be.

That is the primary reason I told people the current system is a privelege. Square Enix has a track record of shifting data centers around and not having a problem demolishing thousands of houses. Square Enix has congested entire data centers several times beforehand and left them that way for months, some worlds being congested for 6+ months at a time without being able to create characters there to be with friends. Where you are, who you're able to see, even the resources on that given world aren't a given to stay all the time.