REGION-WIDE Duty Finder & Party Finder: Urgently needed in NA & EU

[Shistar]

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

You're right, I completely forgot that JP was split into 4 DCs like NA. I didn't mention them at all in the original post because I can't read Japanese and don't go to that part of the forums, so talking about their situation would be lying on my part.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia. Japanese players are quite hostile to English speaking players often putting the phrase "Do you speak Japanese?" In their PF's and kicking anyone who doesn't. English speaking players from Elemental literally cannot say a single word while PFing on the regions "raiding hub" and if they MUST speak have to rely on Google translate and pray no one discovers the secret that they are not Japanese.
Imagine if this happened on EU with all the languages.

[...] square Enix confirmed they limited [the cross-region visits] feature because of possible "culture clashes" on various DC's.

Long story short we will never get cross region PF or full cross region DC travel because Japanese players do not want to mingle with the rest of the game even within their DC region. This is mind boggling considering players outside Japan make up majority of this games profits and playerbase but SE are incapable of not catering to JP players first and foremost, just look at the ping problem being an apparent non issue.

I'll have you know EU is doing just fine on the language front lol
We try to speak English whenever possible, but it wouldn't be the first time if I had to pull up a translator tool to explain mechs to a french player in an Ultimate. We mostly make use of the auto-translate feature or use translators in more complicated content, and often times parties are diverse enough to have at least one other player who can assist in translation if needed. In my 5 years of playing, I don't think I ever experienced a language issue that couldn't be resolved with basic communication.

If Japanese players wish to be xenophobic, they're free to miss out on features that would only benefit them while the rest of us who are not averse to basic communication get use out of them. Even if it was implemented they'd only benefit from it, as they can continue to test players on their Japanese skills while simultaneously drawing from a larger pool of JP players for their PFs.

As mentioned by other users in this thread, they can also lock their PF to their own world if they're worried about this. Features to lock your PF to your DC could be implemented as well if SE is interested in the JP playerbase's comfort. I don't think it affects any of us, so why not?

It keeps getting suggested, but I don't think it can be done except for maybe the European servers, mostly because there's only 2 of them. And even there it would likely be an extra inconvenience to the players.

The same was thought about cross-DC travel, yet here we are!
And because DF and PF didn't follow suit, we've got an interesting problem on our hands...

I think having EU as a testing grounds without having to worry about cultural clashes for this would be pretty cool. If it works well, they can scale it up further so NA and possibly JP can make use out of it.

You'd need people to send over their characters data to the other DCs, essentially doing just the same things as what happens with a DC Travel, in order to begin queueing with multiple DCs. As I said, with Europe only having 2 servers, it wouldn't be as bad. NA and Japan having 4 servers, they'd need to do essentially 3 DC travels back to back in order for it to work.
And in order to ensure the data is properly synced, it would likely need to be done once per login.

I am afraid I don't follow, where are these multiple DC travels coming from? I was thinking it'd make more sense to have one central server per region managing duties, pulling people in and out as needed. Although it may take an extra 10 seconds to enter the duty as the server gathers everybody and gets them ready to travel, it'd only be one trip to enter the duty and one trip to go back to your world, wouldn't it? I'm not very tech-savvy so I'd appreciate more detail on this if I'm completely missing the mark.

I think the idea other users suggested of the game automatically choosing the least congested DC and transferring everyone over there would be good too. As I said, this is the part where I can't really be of help since I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I love seeing everyone's opinion on it.

Ranked PvP being only on one DC before Region DF/PF is such a terrible decision too. Want to do ranked? F your retainers, F being able to talk to anyone in your LS or FC!

You're so right, I completely forgot about ranked! Region-wide DF would completely alleviate this issue. So many things I missed in the OP that you are suggesting that would be immediately fixed if we had this feature...