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

[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.