[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[scatteringmyashes]

I'm very late to this thread and haven't read any of the previous posts, really, but I wanted to put my two cents in as someone who is getting really handicapped by these DC changes. My characters are ALL on Dynamis, with my main on Maduin, and my favorite thing to do in the game is sit and watch PF to see if there's any groups I can join. Specifically, I'm trying to farm the extremes for the wings and I'm progging the savage tier. I also have a static that has members from all NA data centers except Crystal.

Because of the changes, Dynamis PF is usually dead (I'm talking 40 listings on primetime Tuesday, less than 20 on off hours) and, the cherry on top, I can't even go to Aether to get into big parties. I had to go to Crystal which had a few parties, but even on a Saturday afternoon I had to give up after two hours of one or two clear parties disbanding immediately after. I was down to join other parties, but after two hours I couldn't find anything for what I was looking for. It's really killing my motivation to log on because of how much effort you have to put in for such little reward.

I miss when all the NA worlds were closed except for Dynamis, because then at least everyone had to come to the same world. As it is, Aether gets to hang out and do its thing and the rest of us are scrounging for scraps.

[VoidsentStatus]

I miss when all the NA worlds were closed except for Dynamis, because then at least everyone had to come to the same world. As it is, Aether gets to hang out and do its thing and the rest of us are scrounging for scraps.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and one of the things I realized was actually how Dynamis got indirectly screwed over compared to the growth of the other Data Centers when they were created. When worlds got added in the past, when Crystal DC first got created, etc., there was no DC Travel. You made a character there, ran content there. You didn't have this phenominon like Dynamis where people created a character there, and then expected to run content elsewhere. Every other addition in the past got to experience organic growth while Dynamis is always going to be nerfed a bit because people will join for the "wrong" reasons (from a dev standpoint). When I was looking at the numbers from the survey/lodestone datamine, I realized that the ratios are skewed even to reflect that. Crystal, Aether, and Primal all had similar players as home world at around 200k'ish, while Dynamis was at 70k. But you look at the PF and you see Primal at 100-125, Aether at 150, Crystal at 60-80'ish last I was checking. You have 25-200% differences in PF strength even with the same home characters. Crystal was known for RP so a smaller conversion rate of playerbase count->PF makes sense a bit. But you look at Dynamis and it should be 35% of what the others are, and the closest to 35% that we hit is 35% of Crystal, the low end of the main DC spectrum. We don't have the same conversion rate of home world players->PF that Primal and Aether have, we have a similar skew to Crystal who have more character creation bias than the others. Only difference is that Crystal had that organic growth period and started with players naturally from worlds that already existed instead of being empty by default.

On the note of scavenging for raid, I had a friend that cleared M1S on Dynamis, then did M2S and M3S on Primal, Primal didn't have good reclear parties for their time of trying, so they went to Crystal for reclears, Crystal reclears were better but didn't have good M4S parties, so they ended up on Aether to get M4S done. So went through Primal and Crystal PF and still couldn't find as much as what they did on Aether.

[VoidsentStatus]

.

Day 1 we didn't have issues with queue's besides like very specific things like frontlines and ranked pvp. The problem moreso came over time when the initial rush died down, especially when EW population dropped off globally. After that, expectations to DC Travel started and it never recovered, especially with players gouging the market. And everything snowballs into an exodus after that point.

On one hand, you could be stuck with long queue's, but on the other hand, if everyone lives on another DC 24/7 the problem would never be fixed. It's just shifting responsibility on someone else to fix the problem. Any new players would just be told to hop DC's as a regular thing. The reason for Dynamis's creation was to relieve stress and people going elsewhere to log in and interact consistently was against that concept anyway from a dev standpoint.

When it comes to lockdowns, I would've preferred them to not even allow travelers at all on Dynamis after a certain point or for us to be able to go to other DCs. I would've preferred if Xbox got forced to Dynamis. Because I don't want Dynamis dependant on travelers. If you live and die by travelers, your queue system hinges on traveler interest which is going to be inconsistent as hell. If you couldn't make purchases from other data centers, that would've forced people to go out and gather for Dynamis, if you couldn't sell and transfer sales from other DC's easily, that would force people to stock Dynamis and drop prices instead of selling on worlds with higher demands for consistent income. Interaction with other DC's can breathe temporary life into a DC, but consistent reliance on another DC, will kill the original worlds. When this game first launched, every individual world had their built up market, every individual world had their own queue's, their own hunts, their own venues, etc. because world visit didn't even exist originally. Once Dynamis is stable and self-reliant, then I would open it up. That's handling it from the current state because it's too late to rip people out of their houses and FC's on main data centers to combine existing worlds. If I wanted to handle things my way from the start, I would've did it like Crystal's creation and i've yet to see an interview saying why they chose not to go that route, unless there was massive backlash back in 2019 (before I started the game).

Most of the current influx of new people and transfers is on Kraken currently, and from the stats, what Seraph was to Hali/Madu/Marilith is what Kraken is doing to Golem/Rafflesia/Cuchu, which is another dev mistake along with these trash world names.

[VoidsentStatus]

.

I would've rather had them feel othered in their head (given there's PS and PC on Dynamis) than end up with no XP buff which makes leveling and getting the exciting part of your rotations significantly longer, constantly harassed for being sprouts like every bad player on the main data centers, RMT and venue ad spammed Day 1, seen housing was basically filled all the time with no hope for them to realistically compete, be unable to travel between worlds in certain situations like Dawntrail launch which was right around the corner, be unable to have others visit them consistently, and be naturally biased to making the population skew between data centers even worse even comparing the main 3.

Second paragraph I'm not responding to as that goes against the data presented that we have more new active characters than Aether, Crystal, and Primal individually. I also don't know what completely viable is supposed to mean given there are PvE and PvP areas both that are dead or on life support for Primal and Crystal as well especially compared to JP.