I play on a Japanese datacentre. This is fine, because I can speak Japanese; some other players who don't speak Japanese manage by playing with close-knit groups of friends or congregating on Tonberry with other people from the English-speaking countries closer to the Japanese servers. Again, this is fine.
What I have noticed recently now we have cross-world Party Finder, however, is that there are quite a lot of new players starting out on Japanese worlds with no friends and no interest in learning Japanese. This leads to them being unable to make groups for anything or communicate and a lot of them just quit, which is a huge shame as they aren't bad people. The rest create empty Party Finders with no descriptions which sit in the list for hours and hours on end, or end up blacklisted by the community for appearing rude (they don't mean to be rude, but not talking to people has that effect).
I spent quite a long time discussing the issue with someone on another server recently when I entered his Party Finder and he told me he'd picked his world simply because it had the coolest name. He then hit a wall because he couldn't do anything which required party coordination and became really lonely. I helped him find some other players and we did one fight together, which he really enjoyed. A happy ending.
I checked his Lodestone today; he hasn't played since that day. It's a shame that he became so socially isolated just because of one impulsive decision back at the start and new players don't always like the idea of starting over from scratch or paying for a transfer so early into their FFXIV experience.
Can we have a popup warning for people trying to create their first character on a datacentre that doesn't match their client language settings in any way? Just a simple warning message that can be immediately dismissed, nothing more. I love being able to hop between different regions but it's really not clear how isolated you can end up if you pick the wrong world from the start, and new players are particularly vulnerable to this mistake.