Data Center Travel System - Can we remove restrictions now...?

[Rueby]

You are correct in your thinking. The restriction has no effect on native players. New characters and transfers are seen as native players but visiting players are not.

Thank you!

It's something like that, yes. Except it's world-specific. I believe it's more like:

5,000 native players per world (according to Lucky Bancho, worlds have up to 20,000 active non-trial players but they don't necessarily all login at the same time).

Which would make the capacity for travelers a lot lower than that.

They actually wrote a lodestone announcement explaining it at https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...4ade7369b03003

Yeah! The example I gave was with a server in mind! I thought it'd be much larger actually than I anticipated, but I suppose it makes sense.

I actually wasn't aware of that lodestone post since for the longest time I didn't want to go to Light to PF.

I can see both reasons being part of their decision.

Hopefully if they can make a regional DF data center it will solve everything, it'll just require making DC travel more seemless (so you don't have to logout). That will be very complicated but it's all about the magic of the game client - making it look normal to the player (such as by playing a cutscene of you moving through the stars).

I think in theory it'd solve alot of issues since plenty of this game is instanced content rather than open world, being able to access the DF/PF from your own server/DC without needing to hop around I think would prevent many people from having to DC hop. It'll give us a bigger pool of players to match up with in DF content as well which seems like a net positive? I'm not sure if the technicality is escaping me somehow.

But it'd allow people who want to roleplay or want to physically go seek their friends to hang out to actually go there without needing to deal with the congestion? I'm not sure. It seems like an all round good thing to have.

The reason DC travel is complicated of course is because it's actually copying all your data and moving it to another physical row of machines, potentially on the other side of the world in the case of region travel. So being actively logged in risks you trying to modify that data while it's being copy+pasted. Then the client needs to be made aware of the change of IP address of the server you're on. Being on the new server will require an entirely new session, temporary character number, etc.

It's just a lot simpler from the technical side to log out and login to the new data center, but if we are to join a "duty data center" it would be ideal if this was more seemless and happened within the game itself, despite the complexities involved in achieving it.

I just now thought about it, but it's really interesting...I'm curious if or when they implement it, I never looked at it as copy pasting, but honestly that describes it perfectly. It'd make sense why things like retainers, fc buffs, and other things are not? I'm guessing if there's alot of information to be dealt with, does it mean the risk of something going wrong might be there and/or longer transfer time? (I know you're speaking about the being logged in)

You mentioned you were there for the cloud server testing, how was it like? Did everyone play together? Like NA and EU and JP? How did no one like...lag? In terms of ping, I never heard of such a thing. I know for example the game feels significantly worse to me on NA and OCE. Is there anything I can read about that? Possible downsides and what not? Is it expensive for example etc...