[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[KageTokage]

It's honestly a sad joke how often we've been having random server outages since post-release.

I made the mistake of going to Cuchlainn for a hunt mark and now I'm trapped and can't escape.

[xanatosdc]

It's honestly a sad joke how often we've been having random server outages since post-release.

I made the mistake of going to Cuchlainn for a hunt mark and now I'm trapped and can't escape.

But don't you realise, your experience doesn't count because it's probably somehow your own fault. Should've considered the moon phase before going there. /s

[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]

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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.

[PassinLay]

Man, talk about a revolving door, just five days ago I was talking about Exodus/Famfrit/Hyperion/Lamia as a possible transfer destination, but now they're considered Congested while Behemoth/Excalibur/Leviathan/Ultros are now the Standard ones, lol.

It also seems like I missed the shift on Crystal where Balmung... BALMUNG of all places is considered not Congested anymore.

That's actually the proof that this whole congestion thing is absolutely fake and just pretending on SE's part, not only are we back to pre-DT numbers activity wise according to steam with a sample of ~~40000 to 100000 players, but Mateus is now almost always congested in prime time/night time, while before it had 0 issues, and Balmung is basically almost free to transfer to at any time except at very prime time and even then queuing doesnt take that long.

It'd be good if SE would stop pretending that the game is booming with players and that they need this whole "congestion" thing, yet here we are.

[VoidsentStatus]

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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.

[VoidsentStatus]

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slow/non-existent queue's wouldn't exist for them because they're all ranking up together doing the same content. pre-EW, DC Travel is open for those that skipped including to Aether.Dawntrail release, Dynamis was flooded to hell for content. As for empy cities, the majority of them would've picked Seraph, Hali, or Kraken as they've been doing and told their xbox friends, "hey, come over here, there's more people". They're not going to pick a new classification world and expect it to be flooded like a main world. If they wanted to see population, they could DC Travel and see it, but most people don't care about how many people are around them when grinding MSQ. Double XP is more important than some extra AFK characters. And they don't have gil to care about the market to begin with. They'll barely have enough gil for teleport fees and vendor gear upgrades.

Active players was defined x level (60/70+), x progress on the character since y time period, x minions/mounts to indicate msq and content running, etc. Housing alts/roleplay alts/pvp alts wouldn't meet the parameters. These are actual playing characters.

And since you want to use PvP as an example, CC is a prime example of non-ideal circumstances. If they would've joined Primal or Crystal, they would've been subject to weeks without Ranked PvP matches at all, and casual queue's sometime dying off in the middle of the night. Which DC is actually popping for Ranked along the bigger maps, is controlled by the pvp community in the discords half the time, because they congregate to get pops. One reason people were on Primal already yesterday was because of an event.


Most of the main data centers including on EU have discords coordinating people and making pre-parties before hopping into the bigger maps in general outside of Mogtome events. Dynamis didn't have it's own PvP discord until after it was abandoned for Ranked CC by Revival (the main pvp discord), and we were mid-endwalker in a population drought because Dynamis was mostly new pvp alts and not main characters when it dropped. There was already an expectation togo pvp on your main. New players that are starting the game are more prone toward Dynamis, but they're not looking to run Frontlines for a good while because they're not doing side missions yet like that before MSQ, let alone pvp side missions and systems being a priority over job quests, extra pve content like raids/alliances/deep dungeons. And pvp in general is trash for XP compared to other things in the game. PvP is only used for XP by people looking to level a job they don't want to learn to play, but Dynamis is going to have people that don't even have those jobs unlocked or know how they play yet. There isn't a dedicated PvP community for Frontlines/Rival Wings and there's no leveling purpose to them.

[Dysvalence]

I'm an Aether native but my static spans most of NA, and we haven't been able to meet up on Aether at all this tier. That's been a major problem whenever we need PF subs since we start raiding past midnight and overall player counts are slim. The sad part is that this is something that DC travel used to fix and we're regressing.

Also being unable to world travel on another DC during restrictions is needlessly frustrating. Stopping direct cross DC travel to a single congested world is one thing but if people are trying to transfer while already on that DC there's nearly always a very specific reason for it and people won't simply stop trying to get there. I can sorta understand Balmung getting locked when S ranks spawn there but Seraph? Dynamis already has problems with minions they need all the people they can get. I hear it's even worse for people travelling to Aether where there's the risk of getting stuck on a world that has high MB prices or insufficient hunts/fate parties.

Honestly at this point I'm not sure why the devs haven't outright artificially designated Dyna as the raid server through rewards or restrictions or something. The whole point of travelling to Aether is to reach critical mass and doing so makes the most sense when people can actually get to their destination.

[VoidsentStatus]

And none of this changes the fact that I still have to DC hop to get *any* queues to pop

or how I got through all of my roulettes just fine on Behemoth within a 2+ hour period whereas if I had stayed on Maduin, I would have gotten half as much done in twice the amount of time.

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You shouldn't have to, but that's the way it's been for years. For every data center. PvP has been dead otherwise. You've never been able to run the big pvp maps in the morning or noon. It's always been a primetime activity. Same for Ranked PvP past the first few days. They don't have 40k+ members because they have good pvp guides inside the discord or good mentors, people go there just to get pings. Everything has a role for pings so people don't miss when pops are happening. And these discords existed for expansions before Dynamis was even made. It's always been that way. Same thing applies to the Hunt community that functions off of discord pings, 3rd party software in-game, and ppl shoutrunning at the last minute. Castrum in Bozja is dead and not reliably ran on every data center. Delubrum instances can't be queue'd up for even on Aether. Castrum is straight RNG, Delubrum is PF only, or discord pings only for you to get in. Delubrum Savage isn't even PF'able, that's Bozja discords only. Same for Eureka. And EU is even worse, Zepla came from EU to join Dynamis just so she could hop to the main 3 data centers we had because both Chaos and Light were dead for everything she wanted during EW. Same for JP where Arthas said NA had the convenience of having extreme PF savage hours compared to JP. JP has way more PF's than NA, but a shorter window to join them. NA has more degen hour/morning hour raiders than what JP does.

As for queue's, no, because I have no idea what could be causing your experience, other than you queue'ing on the historically slowest queue'ing role, in an expansion that has worser queue's than normal for them, on a new data center, past prime time. I already posted an imgur going through 6 roulette's in under 2 hours as healer with 75% insta-pops and I had wipes in the dungeons. And my tank queue's are barely a 5-7min wait on average if not insta as well for stuff like leveling. When you say **any** queue's, I have no idea what you're talking about at all. Like, actually post screenshots of when you're queue'ing and for what. Because this guy had the opposite experience that you did when he tried queue'ing earlier than prime time:


Not to mention, you aren't being given double xp, silver/gold chocobo feathers, faster login times, thousands of available housing, free travel to and from the data center, for you to still have the same queue times and conveniences as a main data center. You're not going to have your cake and eat it too.