Aether congestion has made raiding with friends impossible

[Ascend]

Hey all,

This is actually my first-ever post on the FFXIV forums, which should probably say something on its own. I’ve never felt the need to post before, but I’m honestly at a loss for what to do at this point.

For roughly the past two months, I haven’t been able to access Aether at all due to congestion. I’m used to occasional lockouts or peak-hour issues, but this has been effectively 24/7. There hasn’t been a single minute where Data Center Travel to Aether was available for me.

The problem is simple: I can’t raid with my friends anymore.

My group is on Aether, and in practice their Party Finder listings are most effective there when trying to find players. Posting PF elsewhere hasn’t been reliable, and because of that I’ve had a hard time participating in the raid content I mainly play the game for—not due to time, effort, or interest, but because there isn’t a practical way for me to join in right now.

Checking Server Status doesn’t really help either. There’s no sense of when this might change, which makes it hard to plan or even stay motivated. At this point, I genuinely don’t see much of a reason to keep logging in if I can’t raid with the people I play the game with.

I just wanted to put this out there as feedback, because the combination of long-term Aether congestion, PF centralization, and limited DC Travel has created a situation where raid-focused, social players can be locked out indefinitely with no clear path forward.

I hope this feedback is useful, and I appreciate anyone taking the time to read it.

Thank you.

[GraceHorizon]

We really need Party Finder and Duty Finder (and cross-world linkshells, everything that works within datacenters) to work across datacenters within a region. That would solve OP’s problem, give us good queue times on all servers, broadly open up the game and make it more convenient. Square Enix, please, why can’t we remove the division into separate logical datacenters within the same region?

[Aidorouge]

Checking Server Status doesn’t really help either. There’s no sense of when this might change, which makes it hard to plan or even stay motivated.

They sometimes change Server Status after patch drops, even minor ones, so there's a chance after January 27th. But... it's a pretty small chance I'll admit, especially with them being adamant about keeping new people away from Aether and Crystal right now.

Beyond that I don't really have any useful advice, because the idea that people are just supposed to go to other data centers and make PFs there instead of Aether/stay on their own data centers and make PFs rarely seems to work out and people just keep piling into Aether anyway.

[VeyaAkemi]

Personally, so far I been able to make it to Aether reliably, but always by staying up until very late, which isn't a big deal I usually stay up until then naturally anyhow, and hopping over, then staying parked in Aether until it is time to do things, even while I am making it work it is such a big frustration to be deprived of home stuff for hours, sometimes days.

[TeresaFortell]

In addition to this, even if you are on Aether, the worlds can be congested due to the influx of people coming to Aether to raid in PFs, which means that travel between worlds in Aether would be unavailable, making cross-world hunt, treasure hunting, and house visits impossible during peak hours. Overall, it creates a situation where Aether players can't visit other worlds in it, and other DC players can't travel to it.

[Espon]

I feel as though they greatly reduced the player cap on each world to combat the massive DDoS attacks that happened at the start of Savage's release. How was that supposed to help? Beats me, but it's makes it impossible to travel to any world on Aether, even if you already have a character there.

Even late in the afternoon I cannot travel to other worlds. This is worse than when Dawntrail launched. SE honestly cannot tell me that there's more players playing than at the start of Dawntrail, or even at the end of Shadowbringers when that big influx of player from WoW came over.

[Jeeqbit]

The best I can suggest is that your static come to raid with you instead. If the static is not a full static, perhaps recruiting is needed.

Another thing that could potentially help is PUG discord servers (many do exist) where you can @ ping to say a party is up on another data center. It's about the only thing you can really do to draw attention to the fact there are parties elsewhere than Aether.

I feel as though they greatly reduced the player cap on each world to combat the massive DDoS attacks that happened at the start of Savage's release.

No, it's just that a lot of people returned for Savage in general.

In addition to this, shortly after Dawntrail release, they added caps to how many people can World Visit and how many people can Data Center Travel.

The cap for World Visit and Data Center Travel are greatly, greatly reduced when the world has "Congested" status.

In practice, you probably won't notice these caps unless it is actually very busy, like it is when Savage releases and the world is congested by homeworlders alone, nevermind all the visitors and travelers.

[Aidorouge]

In addition to this, even if you are on Aether, the worlds can be congested due to the influx of people coming to Aether to raid in PFs, which means that travel between worlds in Aether would be unavailable, making cross-world hunt, treasure hunting, and house visits impossible during peak hours. Overall, it creates a situation where Aether players can't visit other worlds in it, and other DC players can't travel to it.

I imagine it makes Wondrous Tails even more annoying than it is already when an entire data center is devoid of any new players to get Second Chance points from, and of course if one has friends/family that want to start playing with people they know on Aether... welp, either the Aether group in that equation has to be willing to data center travel elsewhere all the time (which as mentioned, rarely happens), or said Aether group has to be willing to collectively transfer to their new companion's allowed world. But it's been proven for the last 3 years that barely anyone is ever going to move to Dynamis, or even Primal, at this point. (If anything Dynamis keeps finding new reasons to drive more people out and into Primal right now.)

I feel like the hardlock congestion is Square-Enix's way of putting their foot down on the matter. If people will not voluntarily disperse (whether via transfers or making PFs elsewhere), they'll make crowding onto Aether as inconvenient as possible until people get fed up enough to relocate one way or another.

[Gloriam]

Honestly, they should have split Aether in half the last time they made a new NA DC like they did with one of the JP DCs. Aether is far too congested and if it's just going to lead to the entire data center being on lock down for new character creation for months at a time, they should have done something about it awhile ago.

I've been sitting here stuck on my home server for 4+ hours because every server on Aether is congested and I cannot travel. There are 215 high end PFs up right now. If it's to the point where I can't even do anything during prime hours, then I'd rather just not log in until the raid tier calms down a bit - when I teleport into any of the city states all I see is <Traveler> everywhere.

[Jojoya]

Have everyone meet on Primal or Dynamis instead?

Considering you're on Balmung, they won't be able to go to you just as you can't go to them. But if they're your friends then you're keeping contact with each other through outside channels. Set a day and time to meet on the other data centers.