"People just want to play with their friends."

[Risvertasashi]

Remember that line? FFXIV allows PS3, PS4, and PC players to play together. And it would allow XBox players to do the same, if only Microsoft were less about lock in.

This is a request to let players play with their friends.

For all XIV's cross platform compatibility, we still have the very restrictive "world" model. People still struggle to get on the crowded servers where their friends are (Witness all the Balmung threads, among others).

Then there's also the problems of:

• What if you have friends scattered across several servers? Unless you have the time to maintain multiple characters, you can't play with most of them, ever.
• What if you're established on a high population server? If you want to bring in friends, it can be very difficult for them to get on your server, but transferring to a smaller one leaves behind everyone else you know
• What if you make friends in a DF party? Once more, you will (most likely) never see them again.

These kind of 'hard' world restrictions are antiquated in the MMO realm and games on far smaller budgets and of lesser quality manage to avoid these restrictions. Yet in XIV, we are stuck with them.

Minimal request:
Allow parties to be formed with members from multiple servers (and preferably not restricted by worldgroups/data centers). Allow these party members to enter instances together.
(In DF instances, please include information about what server each member is from to facilitate this.)

Ideal request:

• In addition to the above, allow "guesting" into other worlds. For example: If Alice (Jenova) wants to play with Bob (Balmung), allow Alice to join Bob's party and temporarily adventure in Balmung, doing things such as FATEs*, Hunts*, and quests together. With Heavensward on the horizon and hints at more non-instanced content, I think this is especially important.
• Allow the PF to work across worlds, and thereby help progression across all levels of advancement--especially for small servers or players with unusual schedules.

* Obviously, some sort of restriction should be in place to prevent rapid world hopping in pursuit of content.

I realize that XIV was probably not architected with these features in mind and so it will be a difficult request. Nonetheless, the DF exists. I think these features would be well worth pursuing: it would help relieve congestion on the high population servers, help players complete party content on the low population servers. All around, it allow players to connect with existing friends and make new ones in frequently undertaken content such as roulettes.

Thank you for reading and your consideration.

Heavensward & Beyond

Congratulations on the successful launch of FFXIV's first expansion. With it, we've seen the inclusion of a instance system for zones--rudimentary, but working. However, we are still unable to communicate and form parties with players in other worlds.

I'd like to ask if such a feature would be possible in 4.0 or beyond.

Thank you once more for reading and your consideration.

[Priya]

While this would be awesome, and was one of the best things Blizz did in WoW (I never felt tied to a server because my friends preferred it), SE doesn't even let us TALK to our friendlist during an instance. I'd say we're a long ways off from cross server anything outside DF.

[Verlyn]

^ Maybe so, but we should Like and support this request all the same. We need to communicate to Square Enix that this sort of thing needs to be a priority.
The current socialization systems/instancing in this game is very restrictive. It makes it difficult-to-impossible to form any kind of social connection to anyone in the duty finder and very difficult to play with friends.

If we want this to happen, it needs to generate a lot of supportive replies and Likes. Show them we want this.

[Martin_Arcainess]

Also one thing you got to think about is how much more stress to the server this would add? You would need a constant connection to all worlds in the same data center to do things like check PF across the whole server. Props not much, or alot I duno I aint a sever tec but gotta also think the tec side of things.

[Kiara]

Agreed. I've posted several times to ask about the possibility of:

* Allow Cross Server Friends List and Cross Server Parties (w/ Friends).

It would go a long way to creating a larger Community feel, and engender greater player happiness. Many MMOs allow this now. I really hope the Dev Team considers this for 3.0, please.

[Verlyn]

Also one thing you got to think about is how much more stress to the server this would add? You would need a constant connection to all worlds in the same data center to do things like check PF across the whole server. Props not much, or alot I duno I aint a sever tec but gotta also think the tec side of things.

The technical side of things isn't really our issue, but other games currently deal with whatever challenges these features pose just fine besides.

[DoctorPepper]

I second this thread, the ability to communicate and play with other servers, even if it's restricted to specific data centers, would be amazing.

There are times when party finder is slow or when you meet some cool people in DF that the features listed above would make the game much more enjoyable to me. Having the ability to look at a data center wide party finder during slow periods on my own server would be wonderful and cross server communication/play would encourage me to actually interact with other people I meet in DF rather than just go zombie mode.

I understand this is probably a long way away for this game but I really hope the dev team takes a serious look at making these features possible. I think they would benefit this game greatly and would bring in many additional subs.

[kyuven]

If this does happen, it won't happen any time soon. It took WoW years to develop anything even close to approximating this (to the point they may even have patents and/or trademarks on the process for doing so), and most other games that don't use megaservers would have their developers cry in a corner if this was asked of them.
The only game I can think of that used/uses actual cross-server (and even cross game, believe it or not. EQ1 players can/could communicate with EQ2 players) communication are the EverQuest games, and that's because all of their (chat) servers are in a single data center and use the same basic software. In other words, they specifically planned for this ahead of time and had the entire process in development.
FFXIV...didn't. So it will take time. A LOT of time. Like, this may be a 4.0 or later thing.

[Aerin92]

This is an excellent idea! During the chaos of ARR's release a few of my friends have been separated from the rest of our group and aren't willing to make the switch to the server most of us are on. It's pretty frustrating.

[hallena]

If this does happen, it won't happen any time soon. It took WoW years to develop anything even close to approximating this (to the point they may even have patents and/or trademarks on the process for doing so), and most other games that don't use megaservers would have their developers cry in a corner if this was asked of them.
The only game I can think of that used/uses actual cross-server (and even cross game, believe it or not. EQ1 players can/could communicate with EQ2 players) communication are the EverQuest games, and that's because all of their (chat) servers are in a single data center and use the same basic software. In other words, they specifically planned for this ahead of time and had the entire process in development.
FFXIV...didn't. So it will take time. A LOT of time. Like, this may be a 4.0 or later thing.

Never played Guild wars 2?