What do you think will happen to a failed data center?

[Hazama999]

So far my experience in Dynamis has been... interesting.
Y'see, I transferred to Halicarnassus from Balmung. Prior to that, I was used to absolute insta-pop tank/healer queues. While playing such roles still speeds it up quite a bit, it can still be a bit of a wait. Personally, don't really mind it very much. I'm never desperate to cap, haven't been since HW era. It's just the pattern I'm noticing.

[Shibi]

I can't speak for Dynamis as I have no first hand experience on that DC, but Materia isn't nearly as dead as people claim it is.

I have experience on both thanks to my FC. Materia is very busy compared to the tumbleweeds of Deadamis.

Not that it matters much, but it was a 3 and a half months of house delay for Materia housing. That's still a long time though for everyone in OCE to be homeless. I remember I did make a complaint that they should of opened up a few wards, and open up the rest when 6.1 releases.

We had the zero bug on top. While not directly part of the initial brain-dead decision to delay housing 90 days, it pushed housing out a lot more and was another SE screw up, so I include that dead zone in the entire window, and think so rightly. Housing and FC halls were not there for most people until June, and it hurt the DC a lot.

But yeah. The game is passed its peak and a good majority have moved on. Materia was not even suppose to be released on January, and it was definitely a rushed release to fix the congestion issues with NA and JP data centers. They should of not done it during the time people were trying to clear the raid tier. It was awfully planned. If they wanted to release more data centers and worlds, they should of done it during X.5. It's during the time where we get back a lot of the casual players who are anticipating the next expansion as well.

Well, the servers were installed and in place, pretty much ready to go as we saw from the photos in mid 2021 (from memory), pre-EW release. SE could have hired trusted local engineers to finish the job before November 2021, plus not done the braindead housing rubbish they chose.

Most good system administrators have done far more complex remote international rollouts with many millions of dollars on the line, and some have also done work that required negative or even positive vetting. I didn't and still don't get the SE decision to wait until their in-house engineers could fly out, that didn't make sense.

[LianaThorne]

If we're really going to play the "which DC is more dead" game then all you need to do is look at private housing to see that. Dynamis has all mansions either sold or about to be sold today and the mediums are starting to vanish. Materia still has dozens of mansions, including mine which I will be refunding as soon as I'm able to. According to PaissaDB, Zurvan alone has 4 pages of private mansions still available after almost a year of being live.
Materia doesn't work for anyone who doesn't actually live in Australia and follow their time zones. A friend of a friend who plays on OCE told me it's so dead that they've been slowly buying up an entire ward of FC houses because no one is buying them otherwise (and they literally live in Australia).

You can try to make it look as pretty as you want but the reality speaks for itself.

[Lunalepsy]

We've had this discussion quite a few times. I do agree with people pointing out that cross data center travel, will not help with long queues in the duty finder. I still however, think it's beneficial for players to have the option to exhaust the content outside their data center if they can't do it in their main one.

A data center needs numbers. But people will ditch a data center if it's not active enough, but are likely to come back to it during an expansion launch release to not deal with the login wars in an active data center.

But say if a data center still fails in the end. Not enough hype and interest during expansion release, which means not a good enough boost in numbers, that people just end up transferring back after the expansion craze is done. How do you think Yoshi P and the team will handle the situation?

There is no way they will delete the worlds. That would result in a major backlash, especially from people who still made a community there and want to keep their houses. I think the data center will be deleted, but all the words on that can be merged with another data center, likely split.

So what if they deleted the data center, but merged the words to another one. Could be a culture clash, but everyone could still keep their communities and their houses.

These are just predictions. I'm thinking about scenarios that could seem possible and what could be the best solution for a data center that is a confirmed failure. But what's your take on it?

edit: Had to edit the post to keep the discussion more focused here. But it seems no one has a theory of their own at the moment.

It will crash and burn. No hidden science!

[Oizen]

Materia isn't actually as bad as most people make it out to be simply because we have developed to where if we need help we post a PF and you can generally get a decent response rate. We have quite a few people that love joining as helpers. Queue's can be hit and miss, though that mostly depends on the hours at which you play.

Content is possible to do for most players, and to say that isn't is simply wrong.

I can't speak for Dynamis as I have no first hand experience on that DC, but Materia isn't nearly as dead as people claim it is.

Dynamis is in a really odd spot imo, and the release of Data Center Travel I feel has honestly made it feel more dead than it probably actually is.

I've noticed this on all the data centers really, DC Travel killed Crystal's PF, they don't even get clear parties for p8.
I saw a sharp reduction in Primal's PF as well, not as bad as Crystals but a notable decline regardless.
Aether on the other hand, its PF has gotten absolutely massive, and I see so many <Traveler> tags when I join it.

I feel like as a result, Dynamis has almost no chance for running content because people are so used to "well I gotta dc travel to do that" mentality now.
I mean on the upside, it means Dynamis players aren't really hurt for missing content. DC Travel is nice and should stay. On the other, the actaul Dynamis servers are ghost towns

[Lubu_Mykono]

It will die during the 2nd half of the expansion when people aren't playing.
Someone will come in and buy whole wards then the returning players will complain of no housing when x.0 launches.
Happened before, will happen again.