Cross Data Center Party Finder?

[KisaiTenshi]

With the unfortunate news that Crystal will be made, which will consist of mostly Roleplayers and casual content players due to most raiders and crafters shifting back to Aether, my question is as follows:

I know its possible solely through the fact that they never thought world hopping and cross world PF would ever be a thing, yet here we are.

May we please have a Cross Data Center Party Finder implemented into the game by 5.0 or at the latest 5.2?

I ask this because many of my friends who raid are leaving, but my friends who do in house and spend the most time with me are staying. I cherish the FC I'm with but how am I supposed to decide between playing the game with my WIFE and friends, versus playing the game to my own desires with my old static and getting end-game content done at a reasonable pace? No one should be forced to decide.

Cross Data Center will never be a thing, it defeats the purpose of having servers in different regions, and puts load on services that simply can't handle "all players" logging in at the same time.

There still is a potential work-around that I'm surprised SE has not proposed. Allow a "echo clone" mode, that copies the state of your existing character, minus inventory (eg only gear currently equipped will be taken with you) to be able to temporarily exist on other servers/dc's:

Limitations:
- No loot rewards
- No money
- No gear changes, no repairs unless a player can repair it for you for free
- No shops
- No trading
- No Chocobo, no mounts (other than zone-specific mounts as MSQ rewards that won't be rewarded from a clear)
- No Link shells
- No FC access

Basically you're there to fill a slot in a party, or for RP reasons. Once you disconnect from the world, your temporary echo clone is deleted. This would of course not be permitted at all if the world has any queue. That circumvents the issue with having to synchronize any data between the DC's, it's just a one-way trip, and you can't bring anything to the world, or take anything from it. If you want the rewards, you have to have an actual character in that DC.

There's probably more data points I've missed, but the general problem with cross DC is that it would require synchronizing both DC's server clusters, not just the servers. With CRZ's (Cross Realm Zones), this is actually internal data sync, and if they're really planning on making the DC's one "super server", then it's very likely that they've decided to break up services to their own servers/virtual-servers inside the DC so that the only thing that a "world" really represents is a set of non-overlapping zones for capacity reasons. They could easily go "ok this new area, we're going to have five instances of it (one per world) only", and players are just bumped to other world's versions of that zone if the zone is full or have explicitly selected it when partied with players on other servers. Areas that are generally empty, would just collapse into one zone.

So I just don't see this happening if they physically move the DC's away from each other, as that would put a prohibitive cost on synchronization, where as if it's physically in the same DC, it costs them effectively nothing.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Cross Data Center will never be a thing, it defeats the purpose of having servers in different regions, and puts load on services that simply can't handle "all players" logging in at the same time.

Uhh, Yoshida has outright said this is something they want to do eventually. Furthermore, people aren't asking to connect to different regions, just all the Datacenters in their region. So Aether, Primal and Crystal players could all be in a party together. As Barraind mentioned, WoW did this already. If Blizzard figured it out, why can't Square Enix?