[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[CidHeiral]

This isn't supposed to be a good thing lol. Players are suffering (I know the exact wording there sounds hyperbolic, but a better way to phrase it isn't coming to me at the moment) because of the devs not knowing how to handle their game and implementing features that blatantly degrade what was an acceptable player experience before now.

Please don't defend this. They took a feature that people liked - aside from some pf issues - and made it tentatively unusable at best.

I'll agree that the Crystal and Primal pf issues are somewhat valid, but you can't attribute the Dynamis issues to DC travel.

This is a very disingenuous downplaying of the issue. There was nothing "acceptable" about what DC travel (or more accurately how players chose to use DC travel) was doing to the game. You're painting it like "oh well maybe a couple people here and there had a teensie weensie issue with PF sometimes" when in reality PF was completely destroyed on every DC that wasn't the anointed DC of that region, which is to say nothing of the countless negative ripple effects into other areas of the game.

Not only that, but the troubles of Dynamis were 100% because of DC travel. The census has consistently shown that Dynamis has plenty of players to do content with, they just never stayed on their home DC because of DC travel. It was a self fulfilling prophecy, just like the Aether raiding thing.

Was this the best way to go about solving the issue? That's debatable, but something had to give eventually. I'm sure the devs were acutely aware of the shitstorm this change would cause but decided the change was less damage to the community than what the community was doing to itself with its DC dogpile shenanigans. It's unfortunate that people are having trouble playing with their friends now but as others have said, if the community used DC travel responsibly no action would have been needed. It's not the first time everyone has had to deal with a tool being removed or restricted due to some people misusing it and it certainly won't be the last.

[Qorani]

You cannot seriously be arguing that Dynamis's PF and population issues are because of DC travel. You know what would happen to Dynamis if DC travel stopped working or never happened? People would have left. You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf when they could just go back to any of the other data centers. The reason that some people were even on Dynamis was because they could go there with relatively low risk.

[VoidsentStatus]

It's not the first time everyone has had to deal with a tool being removed or restricted due to some people misusing it and it certainly won't be the last.

This was my viewpoint. My old game had a lot of features and content they just removed from the game entirely if it was too inconvenient to fix. We used to be able to go between US and EU servers on PS4 like what PC could. But the method that we could do it that involved having 2 clients on the console that interacted with another helpful feature they implemented called Linkdead. Originally if you DC'd from content, you would reconnect into open world and have to be re-invited to the instance instead of just dying and respawning mid-raid. The code for linkdead that was helpful to everyone that ran pve and pvp content, also allowed for an exploit that allowed people to freeze the account wide currencies we had, and we could use EU to reset the currency values after spending them. They removed linkdead from the game entirely and it didn't return even after 5+ years, and EU server on console got made to instantly freeze/crash your console. No longer able to play with EU people like PC could. If there was a raid that was bugged or getting abused by speed hackers, they'd take it away from the menu entirely like what Square did the pvp maps. I'm used to content/features getting ripped and not having an ETA on returning.

[VoidsentStatus]

You know what would happen to Dynamis if DC travel stopped working or never happened? People would have left. You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf.

So, this is exactly what Materia is. Materia has an even lower population than Dynamis does and they literally created community discords and organized with Elemental from JP (where most of them came from) to host events and get content done because it didn't happen naturally. They still have FC's and venues, statics, gpose studios, streamers, etc. The people I know from there, actually got pissed off when Square Enix opened up Cross Region travel because most venue people from NA and EU disrespected the culture they had from JP, shouting and advertising everywhere including in Novice Network when spam isn't part of what they do. Everything was loud and annoying after people showed up and a decent amount of natives avoided the new crowded public areas because the entire vibe of what they were used to for years had changed. I had to reach out on discord to find out why my friends weren't in Limsa where they normally were. Materia isn't dying, it's just not growing because OCE is a small section of the community. I expected Square Enix to funnel Xbox entirely into Dynamis when it came out because that would've pumped the queue's for lower content and given them the buffs they needed along with housing opportunities, but I guess funneling travelers was a better idea to them.

[CidHeiral]

You can't tell me that people would be willing to stay in an extremely low population DC and hope that more people show up to help their queues and pf when they could just go back to any of the other data centers.

I'm not sure why you're so mind blown by this concept. Launching new servers to accommodate a growing population is nothing new to the genre. Server communities grow organically over time as new players make their first characters and old players transfer for any number of reasons. The only unusual wrinkle in this case was the introduction of DC travel which killed the DC before it ever had a chance to naturally grow that community due to everyone spending all their time elsewhere.

[TheLemstar]

I do not care about any arguments any of you have to give in favor of this change. We've been having unrestricted DC travel for years at this point, and restricting it to the point where it basically becomes worthless is just going to alienate players that have spent the last two years building connections on other servers, including statics. SE made their choice to implement this system. They cannot roll it back without severe consequences.

[xanatosdc]

Pretty much what Lemstar said. There is nothing positive about this change. It is GUTTING the social scene. In a social game.

They have to roll this back, if they care about their player base at all. The fact that there's been nothing but silence on the VERY OBVIOUS issues since Tuesday speaks volumes.

[KuroMaboroshi]

There is nothing positive about this change. It is GUTTING the social scene. In a social game.

That's a very "don't care, got mine" take.
The fundamental dilemma here is that different parts of the community need very different things.

The non-gameplay social part of the game, including stuffe like RP, need DC travel to be freely possible, otherwise you are tearing apart communities that have formed over the past expansion.
The gameplay part of the game needs DC travel to be limited at least for now, else you end up with dead datacentres with long queue times and just flatly being unable to do certain content on them, savage and ultimate raids in particular; and thereby forcing anyone who still subjects themselves to DC travel and becoming a part of the problem to a plethora of disadvantages over people actually "native" to a given DC.
Both of these cause frustration and anger and do hurt the game. Which one causes more damage, I have no data to say.

And until they can either implement Cross-DC Party Finder, or remove DC-travel limitations such as no FC buffs, no retainers, etc., all you can do is pick one side and brave the fallout and negative consequences for the game that come with it.
Of course, Square made it a lot worse by exposing a functional problem in the DC travel system with this measure, with people getting stuck "between" DCs, which is a bug they ought to fix as quickly as they can.

In trying to regulate DC travel, Square went for using a system they already had in place, that being the DC travel capacity. There are perhaps other stop-gap solution that shouldn't be too difficult to implement until they can fix the more fundamental issues in 2-3 years that I'd like to see them try. Something that doesn't require a rework of server architecture and could be accomplished with a single extra check somewhere, and is less obstructive to the non-gameplay parts of the game.
Preventing people from making PFs on other DCs (but still being able to join them) might be a decent start. Maybe also preventing a party from queuing if more than 50% of its members come from a different DC than the one they are queueing on. There are options left that I hope they explore.

For what it's worth, even though the current state of the fix is a buggy mess, I am glad they are attempting to resolve the situation, cause the pre-DT state of PF was absolutely untenable.

[xanatosdc]

Except I can't even do the "gameplay" part of the game now because half the people I play with are not from my DC. I'm not just talking about RP.

[Rueby]

Can someone explain to me what happened? I'm reading the lodestone post and I'm confused.