Cross Data Center Party Finder will it happen?

[Amarande]

People keep sleeping on Crystal, but some of the best raiders in the world reside there - and not just on Gilgamesh. The trash is kept confined to two servers in that DC. Things are pretty great everywhere else.

Heh, I was actually attempting to praise Crystal and dunk on Aether in this case.

The fact that the best of the best are on Aether isn't really up for debate, even if Crystal has some nearly as good (and some top flight teams apparently quietly reside on Dynamis, presumably for the lower congestion and easier logins at peak hours ... but they are statics and keep quiet, while the Aether elite tend to be much more interested in controlling the culture of their player pool).

The point is that Aether routinely tends to give off a "high pressure" vibe while Crystal seems to allow you a certain degree of relaxation (at least, the degree that today's hectic sensory overload fests permit ... which only puts that much more of a premium on not throwing human stress into the mix).

But the "GCBTW" somehow sees this in the opposite way: Aether's high pressure, "do your job" sports-like atmosphere to be seen as an advantage and the "right" way to play (which should ideally be forcibly exported onto everyone else, who should be made to feel bad, disrespecting people's time, and borderline griefing if they aren't trying to reach progamer heights of efficiency), while Crystal constantly gets dunked on with "tales from Duty Finder" style jabs.

I don't remember multiplayer games (other than well known hellholes like Counterstrike, Dota, and League) having this universal pall of pressure even the ten years ago when ARR was current, and I'm not entirely sure what exactly to do about it, or if we should have to accept that in the long run we're going to be forced back to solo games and hoping enough people in our personal friends circles (which themselves seem in the mainstream like a quaint echo of the past at this point, too) to play without having to source any strangers from group finder tools for multiplayer. I don't even get why so many people think this change in the times is a good thing (TBH I assume a lot of folks like me don't, hence why jabs like "GCBTW" exist to begin with).

[Jojoya]

What are your thoughts on having this feature one day?
Will NA Finally Submit to EU & JP and learn how to read and understand the meaning/reading Macros or will NA Resist???

There are usually multiple ways to accomplish a goal if players take the time to communicate with each other and pay attention to what's happening. No need to resort to meta-macros that demand everyone do things a single specific way or else.

But then if you lack the ability to think on your own, I guess having a macro that programs you with the actions you need to do is helpful.

I guess that's the difference between NA and EU/JP. In NA, we're raised to be creative free thinkers that can work cooperatively. EU and JP have spent centuries crushed under the heels of monarchies and empires so they aren't comfortable unless someone else is telling them what to do.

[Raoabolic]

There are usually multiple ways to accomplish a goal if players take the time to communicate with each other and pay attention to what's happening. No need to resort to meta-macros that demand everyone do things a single specific way or else.

But then if you lack the ability to think on your own, I guess having a macro that programs you with the actions you need to do is helpful.

I guess that's the difference between NA and EU/JP. In NA, we're raised to be creative free thinkers that can work cooperatively. EU and JP have spent centuries crushed under the heels of monarchies and empires so they aren't comfortable unless someone else is telling them what to do.

I don't question my own ability to think. I wonder if the 7 other random people in the PF have that ability. Metamacros at least put everyone on the same page. If someone is crying about a standard that everyone has accepted then how did that strat become the standard?

[Ransu]

There are usually multiple ways to accomplish a goal if players take the time to communicate with each other and pay attention to what's happening. No need to resort to meta-macros that demand everyone do things a single specific way or else.

But then if you lack the ability to think on your own, I guess having a macro that programs you with the actions you need to do is helpful.

I guess that's the difference between NA and EU/JP. In NA, we're raised to be creative free thinkers that can work cooperatively. EU and JP have spent centuries crushed under the heels of monarchies and empires so they aren't comfortable unless someone else is telling them what to do.

JP's clear rates are significantly higher than NA's, so its safe to assume what they do is better considering the lack of consistency in strats on NA PF's.

@OP
Cross data center PF's are likely never going to happen. Even if they did find a workaround to make it possible, it will never be cross region.

[Amarande]

JP's clear rates are significantly higher than NA's, so its safe to assume what they do is better considering the lack of consistency in strats on NA PF's.

Or when you do have consistency, it's a strategy that's ill suited to pickup groups.

To my understanding, that is another thing that Japan is consistently better at - not only in having a consistent strategy that PUG players can expect, but also in choosing strategies that are suited to a group of average strangers.

NA not only doesn't have full consistency (although alternative strats aren't necessarily a bad thing, but for PUGs they should be announced in the description, and dagnabbit, the players joining the group should read the description: yes, people joining groups without doing so and then bungling it and blaming it on the leader not doing the things "the way PF does"), but also all too often obstinately insists on hyper-efficiency strats that are poorly suited to a pickup group environment.

Then after so often making things harder on everyone, they meme and blame the PF community as being (insert favorite epithet for player perceived as unskilled here) when it doesn't work.

If you call them out on it, either you see hands get thrown up "well, PF does it that way, it's too late to make changes" (see E8S for a particularly notable case in point) or you get polemics on how it has to be done this way and how it's the community's fault (usually, the claim is something similar to that the community is too bad at doing enough DPS so that the cheeky uptime strat that increases the rate of mechanical wipes is necessary as a counter and a safe strat would hit enrage too often).

I expect that this is also another example of the ... er ... damage caused by damage meter culture as well - both because of said "cheeky uptime strat" behavior usually being needed to stay competitive on fflogs, just as speedrunners in almost any other game usually end up having to increasingly break the game they're playing in the process, and because of the fact that the math in MMOs normally means the highest DPS figures require overall shorter kills (though this is muddied by XIV's rigid two minute burst paradigm). The difference is that most other speedrunning is a solo competition, though, while in this case the "speedrunners" tend to insist that the rest of the game's pickup group culture have a duty to help provide the environment their playstyle calls for and blast anyone who gets in their way in that regard.

[Kranel_San]

Will NA Finally Submit to EU & JP and learn how to read and understand the meaning/reading Macros or will NA Resist???

You ask the impossible

[Rueby]

Probably never because ping...I'd love to play with my friends in NA because honestly, NA is much more social and comfy while EU feels desolate and lonely lmao