Re-merge Chaos and Light please

[CCheshire]

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

Don't worry, if they made DC travel inconvenient for everyone, then they will 100% transfer all to aether DC for good now.

[Absurdity]

Any remotely serious raiders will permatransfer of course, this'll just cause Chaos DC to become hypercasual where you will create character if you don't care much for raiding

Don't worry, if they made DC travel inconvenient for everyone, then they will 100% transfer all to aether DC for good now.

The outcome is basically the same, whether they keep DC travel as it is or make it a lot more inconvenient.
Either people keep DC travelling on mass to Aether/Light and leave their old server a ghost town, or the ones that really want to will pay for a server transfer to Aether/Light...and leave their old server a ghost town.

The cat was out of the bag when they introduced DC travel without considering the consequences, and it ain't going back in the bag.

"They should just make a cross-DC party finder."
I mean yeah, that would be nice but it has been over 2 years since DC travel was added and cross-DC PF is nowhere in sight. We don't actually know if they can do it in the first place.
And while we're twiddling our thumbs waiting for a solution that might not ever happen it is only going to get worse.

[Jokerz_93]

I’m a native from Light and I think that the fact that Light is more active than Chaos can be brought back to two factor or possibilities:

1- Chaos holds up legacy players (iirc) or the vast majority of EU players who started playing XIV back in the 2013z They grew sick of the game and left. Light players are mostly newly (I myself have been here around since 8 years) so still they have hope.
If SE doesn’t bring back its own game alive it’s just a matter of time before the same situation you see now on Chaos will be transferred here on Light.

2- I’ve been raiding for a while on Chaos due the fact my ex static was there. From what I recall Chaos “mentality” was more pointed towards creating pre formed parties from friends and groups of people who knew each other already and avoiding interacting with other people outside their circle.
Light’s is just a free-spirit mentality. You go where your heart is leading and meet whoever you meet in your path. Play together, be civil, have fun, clear the content see ya next week. (And sometimes we did).

So, these are my personal point of view of why Light has more activity than Chaos. Free to agree or disagree or to have different opinions.

I’m telling you this because I’d rather not to give my trust on SE implementing an “unified system” to solve the problem.
If so, there would be also the issue of player integration, but that’s not for today.
What is my suggestion is to start to implement on Chaos what has been already implemented on Light and see if it can work.
You should “export” what each of you of Chaos see as “good” and try it on your own Data Center, IF, and I mean as a goddamned big IF you want to start finding a path to a solution.
Or, if you don’t give a shit, you just jump on Light and respect how we do the thing, quietly so all we can have fun.

At the end of the day, be this problem or another it’s up to us find in solution, devs have shown us that they simply don’t give a fucking shit of their game.

[Valence]

There is no reason for Chaos to have all the ancient or legacy players and Light all the new ones. Chaos servers got split equally when SE decided to split DCs all across the board for ShB. Half of them ended up on the new Light DC while the other half remained on Chaos. It's not very different to what happened on NA: Aether got cracked in half and SE decided to move all the supermassive RP servers (that offered everything, raiding included) with absolutely dead worlds into the newly created Crystal DC. This I feel was also a mistake since Crystal from what I gather has been funneled as the RP DC over anything else, which forces players to travel to Aether/Primal for serious pve. I'm not speaking about the more recent Dynamis as this much like the OCE DC faced other challenges, namely the game not keeping its growth to meet population expectations.

If anything Chaos up until Endwalker was very slightly more active than Light until LPDU dramatically shifted the deal (and perhaps Syncademy to a smaller extent as well). When only one provider exists for a resource or service in need or very central to the playing experience, people are naturally going to flock more and more to the source of that service. Chaos should have offered its own LPDU (CPDU or whatever) if it wanted to keep its own activity, and hope both services would be equally valued and not one just dominating the other.

The dramatic difference between allowing server visit and DC travel is that the former didn't break the physical boundaries of the matchmaking and duty system that was already happening at the DC level. The latter literally shattered this by allowing players to overcome the very limitations that are still in place today with duty instancing (DF and PF) and that's the fundamental problem.

All in all, the game bleeding players combined with DC travel being allowed is essentially turning some DCs into the rust belt of XIV.

[ACE135]

And I guess when new players come to the game some of them will ask beforehand which server they should choose, and everyone would say they should choose any server on Light DC because there are more people.

[TaleraRistain]

If they can't make Party Finder cross-DC, another possible solution could be to prevent players from using Party Finder on data centres that aren't their own.

That way, the populations should go back to how they were - assuming people don't start paying for permanent transfers en masse, I guess.

That would be rather extreme but they could start with not being able to create a PF unless you're from the DC. A lot of PF I see on Aether aren't even started by Aether people. SE could monitor the effects of a small change like that first to see if it helps the issue while also not implementing barriers to players wanting to join friends, which was something that SE said DC travel was supposed to help with.

[Absurdity]

If anything Chaos up until Endwalker was very slightly more active than Light until LPDU dramatically shifted the deal (and perhaps Syncademy to a smaller extent as well). When only one provider exists for a resource or service in need or very central to the playing experience, people are naturally going to flock more and more to the source of that service. Chaos should have offered its own LPDU (CPDU or whatever) if it wanted to keep its own activity, and hope both services would be equally valued and not one just dominating the other.

I still remember this one quite well, as someone who went through the original Chaos server split and only stayed on Odin because my FC was still active at the time.
Pretty much all throughout Shadowbringers Chaos was known as the more active and successful DC when it came to raiding.

At some point, probably 5.3, I actually considered transferring to Chaos because my FC was dead at that point and the PF experience on Light during that tier was actually painful.
The patch lasted so long that the playerpool had degraded to the point that even weekly 2-chest clears were a dice roll and everyone remembers the disaster that was E8S Ilya Light Rampant.

[CCheshire]

The outcome is basically the same, whether they keep DC travel as it is or make it a lot more inconvenient.
Either people keep DC travelling on mass to Aether/Light and leave their old server a ghost town, or the ones that really want to will pay for a server transfer to Aether/Light...and leave their old server a ghost town.

The cat was out of the bag when they introduced DC travel without considering the consequences, and it ain't going back in the bag.

"They should just make a cross-DC party finder."
I mean yeah, that would be nice but it has been over 2 years since DC travel was added and cross-DC PF is nowhere in sight. We don't actually know if they can do it in the first place.
And while we're twiddling our thumbs waiting for a solution that might not ever happen it is only going to get worse.

Not really, as the said players who DC visit for raids still come back for their retainers, market sales, FC, FC houses, private houses, and friends on the same server tho. If they did a paid transfer, they would drain their old worlds badly enough it would make the market slower and empty along the main starter hubs to be desolate, causing more ppl to flee them to the bigger DC causing a domino effect or be trapped on the DC like Materia which has always been struggling to get new ppl to start there and remain there for good despite everyone can DC visit them for friends on different regions.

[Nurana]

I have liked being on chaos it was fun and i met many great people but many of those have moved to light for the simple reason it's dead here and they can do anything on light and i can't blame them there is little here to keep them from leaving i myself have thought many times about just transferring to light the only thing that still stops me are my houses
knowing how much i them and how hard it would be to get a house let alone a large is really the only thing stopping me at this point when it comes to friends you can always just visit through dc travel
i just think they didn't really think this all through and react to things way to slow to fix problems like this at this point the only real option i see is make pf dc wide though this still would not fix the imbalance it would be a great step forward

[Aidorouge]

That would be rather extreme but they could start with not being able to create a PF unless you're from the DC. A lot of PF I see on Aether aren't even started by Aether people. SE could monitor the effects of a small change like that first to see if it helps the issue while also not implementing barriers to players wanting to join friends, which was something that SE said DC travel was supposed to help with.

I'd rather they just upped the rewards for doing stuff on your own DC, something akin to "adventurer in need" but like, requesting locals instead. There needs to be incentive to make people stay, not punishments for traveling, because that just makes people want to circumvent said punishment by becoming a transfer instead.

Alternately, buff rewards based on data center status. Make playing on "Preferred+" actually feel, you know PREFERRED because one made the decision to join that data center to help it grow. Make the bonus apply to travelers too and you'd have folks from Aether/Primal/Crystal suddenly having a reason to visit the so-called "dead" data center when they're getting more for the time they spend over here, and who knows, maybe they'll find something that motivates them to transfer until eventually, data centers start leveling out.