DC Travel and its decimation of non-Aether NA PF

[Zebraoracle]

That's exactly it really.

I'm inclined to agree tbh. Going into PF solo on Aether actively makes me want to quit raiding. I'm not great at the game myself (no one look at my BLM parses for this tier, I'm first time BLM after being a forever healer main and some of those deaths aren't even my fault!), but freaking hell. My experience with E10S pretty much made me quit raiding in ShB entirely. "We do wall orbs this way" "We do it this other way" "Well WE do it THIS THIRD WAY" "No we do it this 190559385th other way!"

One of my friends thinks I'm crazy for only wanting to raid with a static and I'm just like... yeah throwing myself at the wall that is PF makes me want to NOT raid, soooooo...

[Knot_D]

JP is actually worse. I don't have all the tweets and discussions about it on hand, but reports are the non-raiding DCs make Crystal look like PF paradise. It's fostering a lot of resentment and it's actually so bad now, that the main raiding DC is kicking people from parties if they aren't from the raiding DC. It's - No Elemental, No Gaia, No Meteor, No ENG.

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Good thing is because it's so bad on JP, we might actually see drastic changes.

Edit: Quick Link just to get you started here.

I can confirm JP server, especially Mana Data Center is so bad on first week savage since this Data Center is mostly for raiding that it caused congestion to server travel. I don't really check for the PF but that "No Elemental" stuff is not that common as what people say, rare even. JP Only is there for sure.

[Tsumdere]

I can confirm JP server, especially Mana Data Center is so bad on first week savage since this Data Center is mostly for raiding that it caused congestion to server travel. I don't really check for the PF but that "No Elemental" stuff is not that common as what people say, rare even. JP Only is there for sure.

Oh, thanks for clarification. I had only seen a lot of the posts going around Twitter with screenshots showing a collection of those PFs. Did not know it was a rare occurrence!

[Aravell]

JP is actually worse. I don't have all the tweets and discussions about it on hand, but reports are the non-raiding DCs make Crystal look like PF paradise. It's fostering a lot of resentment and it's actually so bad now, that the main raiding DC is kicking people from parties if they aren't from the raiding DC. It's - No Elemental, No Gaia, No Meteor, No ENG.

I want to clarify that it's not nearly as bad on JP as it is on NA. A lot of people do travel to Mana for raiding, but the other DCs aren't exactly dead. Elemental still has a healthy amount of PFs, a bit less than before DC travel, but not enough to die completely.

[thevanguard]

The last one.

Although at the more quiet hours when most people sleep, it is definitely useful to all go to one data center and combine all the 2-3 person parties together.

Aether has better raiders 2 years ago and onwards. The best raiders mostly congregated on Gilgamesh, then Sargatanas and Jenova. Over the expansions though that slowly stopped mattering. However the top raiders rarely play in PF, and if they do it's mostly for parse parties, so Aether's PF wasn't actually better.

[ForteNightshade]

DC travel seems to have caused more problems than anything. Party finder is a nightmare now, the new servers are dead, etc.

Without DC travel a good number of players never would have transferred to begin with. There simply isn't an incentive to essentially build a new DC for players. Couple that with a very poorly timed release and Dynamis was doomed from the start.

I consider DC travel to be a failed experiment with a net-negative effect on the game. I loathe everything about it, from the logistics of using it to the way it has destroyed our PF (on Crystal) and harmed FC chat.

What was the purpose of it to begin with? I always thought it was supposed to be about allowing people to play with their friends. Well, just make it so you can’t initiate DF or PF, or create a party on another DC. If you’re really visiting friends this is a non-issue because they can invite you and set everything up.

What would that accomplish? It just means one person out of seven needs to be from Aether to queue into say, P9S. Such a change would do absolutely nothing. If you mean to make it so you simply couldn't queue with non-Aether players on Aether then you've defeated the entire purpose of DC travel.

[Jeeqbit]

Aether has better raiders 2 years ago and onwards. The best raiders mostly congregated on Gilgamesh, then Sargatanas and Jenova. Over the expansions though that slowly stopped mattering. However the top raiders rarely play in PF, and if they do it's mostly for parse parties, so Aether's PF wasn't actually better.

I meant PF tbh. I'm sure most people who stuck to statics and mainly raided either went to Aether or made an alt either on Aether or Crystal if they still wanted a presence on Crystal, until we got DC travel.

Most of the statics on Crystal seemed to be either WoW refugees, relatively newer players post-DC split or the remainder of the veterans that decided to stay behind on Crystal despite the smaller population and suffering. But not as relevant now we can just travel around data centers for statics.

[Coatl]

I've yet to be convinced that Aether has an inherently better raiding scene, it just has a larger population.

It's....the same thing though. Who cares how good a group of people are if you can't even find enough people to enter the instance. Go to any non-aether DC and look at how many high duty PFs there are up at any given time, then go back to Aether and compare. The difference is night and day.

Unfortunately I don't really see a long term solution besides cross-DC PF being introduced.

[Ivtrix]

It was "that's the raiding DC we should go there".

Crystal PF was in some ways, actually better. The community was much smaller and you could effectively cull out all the bad people (edit: and by this I mean you could quickly find people you enjoyed playing with that were at your skill level) and only ever play with people at your speed. I PF'd through all of Verse, all of Promise, UWU, and all of Asphodelos and it was smoother than anything I've experienced in Aether.

It was also full of good players who didn't feel the need to swap to "the raiding DC" during the split because they were confident in their abilities to clear and to foster a new raiding scene.

It was slowly becoming a very decent raiding scene with Ultimate PFs actually clearing and everything. Its weakness was the population and the constant parroting of "if you want to raid, join Aether".

Also, Crystal adopted Sharingan LR first.

This is a massive cope. Just because we did sharingan LR first doesn’t mean that the people on this DC could execute it.

Being able to travel to other DCs without having to make alts is a godsend

[Nav_Fae]

Aether has better raiders 2 years ago and onwards. The best raiders mostly congregated on Gilgamesh, then Sargatanas and Jenova. Over the expansions though that slowly stopped mattering. However the top raiders rarely play in PF, and if they do it's mostly for parse parties, so Aether's PF wasn't actually better.

This. This is a truth many people seem to forget about. Good players don't need PF because they have each other. And it's been this way for years. I was on Gilgamesh back in 2.X and the good players back then had a private linkshell they kept to themselves to filter out bads from PF. I know in the modern day there are a few discords that serve the same purpose. I remember My Happy being in that linkshell. The only reason I knew that Linkshell existed was because someone had accidently sent me the wrong linkshell invite for a hunting link, then kicked me with "ops". Then proceeded to explain why I couldn't be in that Linkshell. lol but yeah whenever people go "X's PF is better", it's an urban myth that many people have bought into. The good players have statics. They only PF for parse or to gear their alts. And if you play bad, you are probably on their blacklist never to be paired with them again. (Most raiders I know will blacklist people just for causing a single wipe). People also underestimate just how petty good players are when they do happen to be in PF.