[Discussion] Do data centers need to be merged/allow cross play?

[Palibun]

Today i decided i would try and solo nidhogg for some scales since i really wanted the seeing hoard sword for drk. After about 30 mins of trying to solo it and dying to the adds a decided to just party up. Sure i'd have to fight for the scales, but it should be easier and faster, but boy was a wrong-



In my ENTIRE time of waiting a single tank never joined, i waited 40 mins before finally giving up. I was even playing healer which should've sped it up.
Now the question has been on my mind for awhile as i watch more and more areas turn into ghost towns on my sever as ShB goes along, which many of the players i see just being afk, but this experience just cemented the thought into my mind: do the NA data centers need to be merged?
Now im sure theres many counter arguments to this idea that are pretty valid, but really, many of the games queue problems could be solved by allowing all severs to play with each other. In that case maybe there just needs to be cross data center play, idk, either way theres a problem here if a healer is waiting 40 mins for a boss in the quote on quote 'second biggest mmo in the world and WoW killer' (sorry for the snark XD). Imagine just being a new player trying to complete the content, these queue times i feel are the reason many players quit (that or ARR's torturous msq)

What does everyone else think? Is this a problem on your sever/data center? Do you think 3 data centers in unnecessary for how underpopulated many of the severs are?

[MistakeNot]

Was this an EX trial?
If so, then your experience only shows that people don't use the Duty Finder to find groups for those. You can't draw any conclusions about the population based on that.

[Esmoire]

I think they said they wanted to do cross-DC somewhere, right? That big brain drawing Yoshi-P had to do on a piece of parchment? I'd imagine it's something we'll get eventually, and I can definitely see the technical hurdles involved. I imagine, some day, next expansion or the one after that, we'll at least get to buddy up with players on datacentres in the same region.

I will say I don't think the worlds are underpopulated at all. It's hard because some worlds have a different distribution of levelling players VS max players, so a lot of our strongest worlds are actually pretty quiet between content releases.

[Rasikko]

Yes he did say that, but I wouldn't count on that happening any time soon. I imagine the programming for that to be harder to pull off than it was for world visit.

[MariaArvana]

On the NA datacenters, very few people directly queue for EX trials due to the nature of them being very wipe-festy if people don't learn quick/don't know what they're doing/etc. They instead go to the PF since it allows them to unsync the fights and blitz them in a few minutes while giving little care to adhering to mechanics outside of instant kills due to being 10/20/30 levels higher and 100+ ilvls above the content.

EX primal queue times are a very, very bad metric to use in regards to how populated the game is, since outside of the rare person direct queueing them, the only people that inadvertedly get put into one are people coming through mentor roulette.

Also, Nidhogg can be 2/3 manned quite reasonably if all players are on their game and know what to expect. So you could go into PF or grab 2-3 friends and do some decently quick farms.

[Palibun]

Was this an EX trial?
If so, then your experience only shows that people don't use the Duty Finder to find groups for those. You can't draw any conclusions about the population based on that.

While i was queued for ex and yeah, that is probably half of it (didn't know that people dont usually queue for ex's, i tend to run them with the fc, maybe i'll try pf tomorrow), part of me still wonders as even healer roulette queues have gotten longer. This could just be due to the fact that it's the holidays, and that finals are going on rn (which hey, maybe it is), i just still figured i'd ask what other people thought since everywhere i look Jenova at least seems kinda more dead than usual, and i've seen more than a few people mention it.

Again i could be totally wrong and these past few days could just be a fluke, im just curious that if this is a big problem what do people think would fix it, especially considering NA did only used to have two severs. I find it especially interesting since, at least to me, just primal and aether felt 100% fine and crystal felt kinda pointless, unless there was some issue i just never experienced.

[hynaku]

I think they need to merge some of them. Like other day I waited 25 minutes in queue for Heaven on High floors 21 to 30. This was at 11am pst. which always seen queues of less than 5 minutes. Last frontline queue had was 85 minutes.

[JamieRose]

What's the point of having separate data centers within regions? It just means I have to move servers to play with my friend on Siren but that means I could no longer play with my friend on Coeurl.

Seems like a needless decision to me. Considering that this game still charges a monthly fee and collects microtransactions on top of that......that they could swing a way for people on every data center in a region to play with each other.

[FirstnameLastname]

Nidhogg is doable as WAR and SCH - if you can get one friend to join you unsynced you will be ace.

[DumdogsWorld]

I understand the vast technical limitations and challenges of making cross-data-center play possible when involving data centers from different physical locations IRL. Square Enix does not want to get ISPs and all of their related issues involved for communication between the data centers.

However, I fail to see why they can not do this for data centers that are located in the same building IRL. Wouldn't it be as simple as just using a wire at that point? Why can't Crystal play with Aether?