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

[Shistar]

Why not just fuse together all servers on some datacenter? Those services can be scalated, right? RIGHT?

EU used to be a single region, split up into two DCs so all DCs would have the same amount of worlds - same like you guys got your worlds reorganized with Aether, Crystal and Primal all having the same amount of worlds. Something about server stability, but I wasn't there when it happened so maybe a veteran can provide better context.
The long and short of it is that no, we can't have 1 huge DC for each region because their infrastructure can't support that kind of thing. Besides, cross-DC DF and PF would continue to be useful no matter how much they remix the DCs since everyone would be able to continue playing with everyone.

Cloud servers can be escalated I think? We had Shadow in EU (with some banger world names too) but it got taken down after a while since they were no longer needed to handle congestion. I am hoping that they're looking into moving us into cloud servers and that would give us a better chance at being more unified as regions, but nothing has been announced so this is all just my hope for the (hopefully not too far) future.

[Jeeqbit]

EU used to be a single region, split up into two DCs so all DCs would have the same amount of worlds - same like you guys got your worlds reorganized with Aether, Crystal and Primal all having the same amount of worlds. Something about server stability, but I wasn't there when it happened so maybe a veteran can provide better context.

NA used to only have Primal and Aether. EU used to only have Chaos. But the game kept growing, and these data centers were overflowing beyond what they could technically handle.

To solve this problem, SE sundered Primal and Aether into Crystal, and sundered Chaos into Light, while adding new EU worlds. At the time, we did not have data center travel, so people's FCs broke apart and people quit. SE knew this would happen, but said "we're sorry, but we want to grow this game".

Now, you could argue that the game was growing then, but is now declining, and that's a fair argument, but SE can't know if it will start growing again. If they merge data centers somehow, and the game grows back to where it was, then they'd have to split them all over again. Splits and mergers massively affect players, so it's not an easy decision.

Why not just fuse together all servers on some datacenter? Those services can be scalated, right? RIGHT?

It'll have something to do with the maximum number of connections, ports or load going through an individual data center wire. They have to split the player load, and to achieve that they make separate data centers.

For real though, any idea if creating region wide PF is even possible? From a technical perspective.

It's technically possible, but there are challenges. Region PF itself would be quite easy or could utlize a cloud server. A region PF itself would be pointless without a region DF queue though, and that's the complicated part. They would need to figure out how to do DC travel seamlessly, or alternatively share the DF servers between data centers, and either way that would need a lot of QA testing and could have catastrophic bugs if there is an oversight.

First of all that's pretty xenophobic

That's your opinion. I am in the EU myself and even connect better with people from the EU due to having more similar cultures, climates and slang. Even in other EU countries people are way more on my wavelength than in NA. However, it's pretty common for people to want to be in an environment where people speak the same language to reduce the mental fatigue of navigating language barriers. There are fellowships and language-specific statics made for this purpose all the time, because they just want to be in a consistent environment instead of navigating languages.

I play since around 2018 and I have yet to see 'sitting through entire conversations in another language in high end duties'

It was pretty common for me in ShB and seemed rather normal. Not seeing it is most likely due to mentally filtering out other languages without realizing, because this is common in the EU region - for example if I see another language PF or static I'm probably just going to ignore it and forget I saw it, because I don't speak that language. As I said, it's not that hard to navigate, but when you have played in an entirely English region like NA and then switch to EU or JP, suddenly you have to be aware of the different language fluency which isn't even a passing thought in NA because virtually everyone is 100% fluent in English.

It's not language barrier. It's privacy. I can assure you that many people would join an in-game chat if there was one, but sharing your discord to 7 strangers who you never met before in game and who you may never talk to again is often out of the question for many.

That isn't the reason. People join discord in pugs all the time in NA so obviously the general population don't care about the privacy of their discord. The only thing that makes EU different is that it's obviously harder to do this due to there being many primary languages in any given party you join, so people don't waste their time attempting it.

[Hyperia]

I am expecting a cross DC or even a multi-region duty finder announced in 8.0 with a migration to cloud based servers to implement this and mitigate future DDoS attacks.

[Aidorouge]

NA used to only have Primal and Aether. EU used to only have Chaos. But the game kept growing, and these data centers were overflowing beyond what they could technically handle.

To solve this problem, SE sundered Primal and Aether into Crystal, and sundered Chaos into Light, while adding new EU worlds. At the time, we did not have data center travel, so people's FCs broke apart and people quit. SE knew this would happen, but said "we're sorry, but we want to grow this game".

Now, you could argue that the game was growing then, but is now declining, and that's a fair argument, but SE can't know if it will start growing again. If they merge data centers somehow, and the game grows back to where it was, then they'd have to split them all over again. Splits and mergers massively affect players, so it's not an easy decision.

The current situation isn't helping things either though, with people on Aether and Crystal wanting to bring new players in/wanting to consolidate their friends on an Aether or Crystal world and not being able to do it, to say nothing of how Dynamis is virtually a ghost town and where new players are better off being ushered into Primal or anyone looking to transfer should consider Primal over Dynamis.

Dynamis has just been one long run of mistakes to the point I don't think even cross-DC party & duty finder would help it because people are still going to want a populated world for actual interaction with others or to make friends/build FCs, to say nothing of the stuff that's world exclusive. Cosmic Exploration is practically a punishment for anyone on low population worlds, and caused an even bigger exodus from Dynamis than the Dawntrail lockdown did.

I myself am a Dynamis native looking to escape to Primal before the end of the month, I just need to wait a few more days to dump my defunct FC on the new leader. There's no incentive big enough to keep me here or wanting to return in the future, least of all housing where I sat on two Mediums for years but they remained hollow when there's no friends or FCmates to be made here. Hell, apparently Maduin is the least populated world of Dynamis, so that just made my stay here even worse.

[Avenheit]

disagree, OCE needs this feature more than any other data centre

[Hyperia]

How I would like to see this work:
* NA, EU and OCE are all placed in to a system where they can use cross PF, duty / raid finders and server visits.
* JP would be isolated where nobody from the other DC could go there but if they desire, they can join the others as an option.

This would allow all of us to be able to have better communities while meeting the JP desire to protect theirs.
We get what we want and they get what they want.

[shoebilldreams]

I play on EU and NA, though I've spent more time on EU. I've only rarely run into a language barrier on EU, and even those times weren't an issue in the end because there's always someone (often me) who speaks a bit of the other language, and auto-translate has my back for skill names and in-game terms. I think it's pretty rare to find EU players who don't speak at least a bit of at least one other language. Also, people could still mark the languages on their PF if they really feel they don't know enough of one of them to do a raid in it.

[Shistar]

With the new savage out, it is a great time to bump this thread!
Oh, how I would love to be able to raid from my home DC, Chaos, which is terribly dead because all of us end up in Light. Hell, my last UWU party was comprised of only Chaos players. It's ridiculous.


Region-wide DC, even if only tested in EU since it is smaller and then extended to NA and JP as issues are ironed out and SE has the chance to gather feedback, would do a lot to bring life back to quieter DCs.

disagree, OCE needs this feature more than any other data centre

My friend, the entirety of OCE is a singular DC. Nothing would change for them if they added this feature, unless you'd like to "append" them to NA or JP, which would cause them to lose the benefit of low ping.
Many things should be done for OCE and I will always support anything to bring players to it and make a functioning region, but I'm afraid this specific thread isn't dedicated to OCE's struggles. I'm sorry...

[Jeeqbit]

I'd suggest posting in this one: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-and-EU-Travel

Because it has the most posts of threads like this and that tends to have the best chance of getting developer attention (as much as things getting developer attention here are like a unicorn).

[Aidorouge]

My friend, the entirety of OCE is a singular DC. Nothing would change for them if they added this feature, unless you'd like to "append" them to NA or JP, which would cause them to lose the benefit of low ping.
Many things should be done for OCE and I will always support anything to bring players to it and make a functioning region, but I'm afraid this specific thread isn't dedicated to OCE's struggles. I'm sorry...

I think they may have misunderstood and are suggesting that OCE players be able to access the DF/PF of other regional data centers, because as it stands they're reliant on other people voyaging over to them and that just doesn't happen very often.