How Square Enix can solve both data center travel and ping/routing issues for NA

[Jeeqbit]

Restrict access to party finder, duty finder, and other content when traveling.
This is almost as bad as removing data center travel. What good is being able to meet friends on other servers if you can't do anything together?

There is a better solution to this, which is:

Restrict access to the public High-End category in Party Finder for Travelers.

This would prevent people traveling to PUG, but would not prevent them from:

• Joining private static parties (so statics can remain cross-DC)
• Joining hunt parties
• Joining map parties
• Joining Other parties

Surely Cross-DC Party & Duty Finder would be easier to implement, and cheaper, than physically moving servers across a country and all the logistics issues(safety in transportation, required game downtime, possibly rent of physical locations, possible costs in hiring and paying additional maintenance teams, so on) that come with that, right?

I say this as someone with technical and programming knowledge - I actually think it would be easier to setup a new DC than to implement cross-DC PF and DF. Especially when they already tested an NA cloud DC.

Now sure, if it were me personally, I am sure I would find a way to make cross-DC PF and DF work relatively fast, but I'd have to admit some things:

• It's complex and messing up anything could result in character data loss. That they even dared to go ahead with World Visit and DC travel impressed me because it was very risky and complicated stuff behind the scenes.
• It's communication between multiple servers and regions, which can be complex, including from a security standpoint.
• It would need thoroughly testing due to its behind-the-scenes complexity.
• It's probably a lot more complicated for them due to spaghetti code, their hardware arrangements or their interpretation of their hardware situation.
• It's probably harder for them because they split jobs between different team members, whereas an indepedent developer could probably do certain things faster if they did it all alone, due to the task not having to be passed along to different teams at different stages of its development, which is a bit like a bill being passed around by politicians - it can make things take longer than they should (but in other cases it can speed them up so it's not always bad).

[mana-burner]

Surely Cross-DC Party & Duty Finder would be easier to implement, and cheaper, than physically moving servers across a country and all the logistics issues(safety in transportation, required game downtime, possibly rent of physical locations, possible costs in hiring and paying additional maintenance teams, so on) that come with that, right? sure there are technical limitations around it, your solution would infer a much greater financial strain on the studio, which Square would likely veto immediately as it would cut down profits

In the past, all NA and EU servers were located in Montreal. Then around Heavensward, they moved Chaos to Germany. Aether and Primal were also moved to California.
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...8c71cb4be72616
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...0716040e34a5b6
It might require a longer downtime but just like back then they can offer a day of playtime to each active subscription.

I can't give you the exact cost of everything but given the fact that they were able to do this back when the game wasn't as financially successful as it currently is and the fact that Yoshi'P said recently cross-datacenter party finder and duty finder would be a massive technical hurdle that would take years to tackle I think spreading out data centers is actually the easier and cheaper option.

plus, you are ignoring the possibility that the physical proximity of the server racks, and them being physically connected to each other, is why DC traveling is even possible, doing so over the internet could range from being significantly slower to outright impossible, at least under the system implemented.

We know this isn't true because anybody from NA, EU, or JP can travel to Materia, a data center located in Australia.

There is a better solution to this, which is:

Restrict access to the public High-End category in Party Finder for Travelers.

This would prevent people traveling to PUG, but would not prevent them from:

• Joining private static parties (so statics can remain cross-DC)
• Joining hunt parties
• Joining map parties
• Joining Other parties

This still isn't ideal. A lot of people solely play this game for high-end content. Someone might have friends on other DCs they want to practice savage or even farm a current extreme trial with but now they wouldn't be able to because they don't have 7 friends available and they can't fill the remaining slots in PF. Even for non-high-end raiders, restricting where players can do current extreme trials would be felt by most of the playerbase.

[Jeeqbit]

Someone might have friends on other DCs they want to practice savage or even farm a current extreme trial with but now they wouldn't be able to because they don't have 7 friends available and they can't fill the remaining slots in PF.

Usually, a static would DC travel to a given data center because the "leader" of the static resides on that data center. So all the friends need to do is get the "leader" that is "native" to that data center to recruit in PF, since the option would be available exclusively to them.

restricting where players can do current extreme trials would be felt by most of the playerbase.

In a positive way... people would be able to actually PF raid content on Primal, Crystal and Dynamis. I remember seeing people say how positive it was for Dynamis when they couldn't travel away to raid.

Aether really wouldn't miss an odd 100 raid PFs out of its 200 PFs in some cases.

Especially since that other 100 don't even load in the PF list so nobody even sees them, resulting in them not even filling.

[mana-burner]

Usually, a static would DC travel to a given data center because the "leader" of the static resides on that data center. So all the friends need to do is get the "leader" that is "native" to that data center to recruit in PF, since the option would be available exclusively to them.
In a positive way... people would be able to actually PF raid content on Primal, Crystal and Dynamis. I remember seeing people say how positive it was for Dynamis when they couldn't travel away to raid.

Aether really wouldn't miss an odd 100 raid PFs out of its 200 PFs in some cases.

Especially since that other 100 don't even load in the PF list so nobody even sees them, resulting in them not even filling.

If simple workarounds like this are possible then it's not going to have much of an effect because everyone will just use the workaround. For example, even if someone doesnt have a friend on another datacenter they could easily whisper party leaders asking them to personally invite them and then relist the party.

[Jeeqbit]

If simple workarounds like this are possible then it's not going to have much of an effect because everyone will just use the workaround.

Statics and people with friends will use the workaround, sure.

The entire point is to stop people just visiting another data center alone to PUG, which will help create a culture of pugging on other data centers again. Then this will in turn stop people traveling away due to no PFs.

For example, even if someone doesnt have a friend on another datacenter they could easily whisper party leaders asking them to personally invite them and then relist the party.

Well they could but I don't think all party leaders would bother with the hassle, especially since I think it would involve canceling the PF and world visiting to the same world to send the invite(?) I also think a very significant amount of the playerbase have anxiety that would prevent them sending the message (it already prevents a lot of people from raiding or pugging altogether).