Materia/Oceanican Data Center needs help please!

[Iscah]

I'm pretty sure that was just a once off to celebrate Materia launching and the release of Endwalker.

No, I've definitely seen them call for people to request tickets at least twice, because I've wondered about going at least that many times. And there would have been a gap in the middle with Covid blocking everything. We were very locked down for quite some time.

[DixieBellOCE]

Materia was an opportunistic cash grab to bring in more revenue from OCE players during the Shadowbringers/Endwalker hype (and the global revolt against Blizzard/WoW) who resubscribed or bought the game for the first time because now the region had its own server. The reality, as it plain to see, is that the devs don't care to actually support or grow the datacentre beyond trying to plug a gap in their revenues for that financial year so they can make more gacha nft shit. Further, if they really cared about the region, why not have a Fan Fest in OCE? On another note, the gaslight gatekeep girlbossing from the weirdos who ran the Materia Discord did not help and just encouraged people to transfer back to NA or JP.

Lmao the mods of that discord banned a solid 15-20 people i play with for asking what qualifications they have to run the official discord when they themselves were NA players that didn't even play on Materia.

[Supersnow845]

Materia has been hilariously mismanaged by both square enix and the materia/materia aside playerbase

I’ll admit I fled materia back to jenova so call me out on that if you will, I guess I shoulder a level of the blame but overall the data centre is an unmitigated disaster

Square launched it during the player boom and anti wow sentiment era then pushed out zero worthwhile content to attempt to keep people playing so people fled from all data centres and materia veterans had little choice but to flee to NA or JP if they wanted to do old grinds to fill the void (like having a playable eureka or MINE community), leaving the data centre floundering for people which further pushed the content towards low level content further annoying the remaining vets (be honest for those who are either on or spent a long time in materia how often did your alliance raid spit out anything besides CT, it’s a problem on all data centres but in 1.5 years there I literally never had a non CT raid pop)

Now this floundering population has led to the infamous materia “do it through PF”, the only instances in this game you should have to unsync PF just to get a basic clear should be coils and that’s because of coils unique nature, you should not need to unsync eden raids during Saturday night prime time because the roulettes don’t pop them, however the playerbase constantly telling new materia players to do this feeds into the cycle of further starving the roulettes which further biases them towards MSQ content and the whole cycle repeats

If square doesn’t show some serious commitment to materia and making repeatable content to hold veterans to the game in 7.0 I can honestly say materia is doomed (dynamis isn’t far behind and that 3rd EU data centre is DOA), 7.0 is really going to either be 14’s renaissance or the time when most everyone agrees it’s truly entering its slowdown

[ChrysOCE]

you should not need to unsync eden raids during Saturday night prime time because the roulettes don’t pop them, however the playerbase constantly telling new materia players to do this feeds into the cycle of further starving the roulettes which further biases them towards MSQ content and the whole cycle repeats

There may be some saying that but the majority I see encourages (and prefers) people to do content syncd. But yea, PF is the default position which, given the low pop, is not a surprise.

To me, its all on Square. Whatever the solution is, they need to do something. How can you spend that much capex, setting up a DC, to then just let it flounder? And the thing is, there's just no acknowledgement. No real news. Nothing will be mentioned at the fan fests, about Materia directly. Oh, they may say some nonsense about waiting to see more evidence/data around cross-dc travel/cross-dc df/pf, but that's just noise.

[Anonemoose]

Whatever happens, whether DC travel is expanded to cross-regions or they implement cross-region queues for content, JP will remain a separate, isolated region. At the end of the day, it's only the opinion of JP players that matter, and they've been very, very vocal about this issue which is why DC travel was implemented in the region locked state that it is in. If you're playing on JP and you're not a JP national who can speak Japanese, you're going to get kicked from content, blacklisted, and just have a really bad time. The JP playerbase tolerated Australians and New Zealanders in the Tonberry containment server but ever since the DC travel was announced they have been on an absolute crusade against all non Japanese players simply because they don't want the JP servers to be included in cross-DC travel. They don't want players from other parts of the world coming in and messing their space up, and that's something we can all understand, if not condone. Sometimes it's about sending a message.

[Communion]

Joining the Duty Finder on Materia is pointless. Doesn't matter a little msq dungeon or 24 like Copied Factory -- you'll never get a group. N.E.V.E.R. Server is FILLED with gil bots falling through the world. Chat is clogged with their spam posts. If you're thinking about making a character there so you can get a Large house, too bad... all the large houses are taken (pretty much empty housing zones aside from the occupied large houses -- that's because people have bought the millions of gil the bots are selling -- and there's a good six zones that the devs have blocked for some cheap reason). So yeah -- unless they truly join this datacenter with an EU or NA one... I'm wasting my breath, I know.

[Lieri]

I know this is probably a lost cause as they are so persistent with Materia and will probably attempt to fix it by Cross DC travel, not by actually fixing the actual population.

But in my opinion the proper fix is something like this:
1. Move the server to somewhere in SEA region. Yes I know it's unfair for people in Oceania as they will be getting more pings but what can you do... there are more SEA players in only two JP worlds [Tonberry & Kujata] than maybe half of Materia combined. This will boost the population massively and I'm sure OCE players would rather have 50 more pings than to have no one to play with (at least some of my OCE friends said so). SEA players that had been in JP for years are now reluctant to move because they waited to see how Materia fared and it failed... so most stays in JP or transferred back to JP.

2. After moving the server, give SEA players the ability to transfer from JP to Materia for free. You slap the word SEA to Materia and SEA players will flock to the server. Right now they have no reason to. They have a house, they have better ping, and neither OCE nor JP is their actual 'home' anyway, so they might as well stay at the place they've made friends and purchased a house on. Most (if not all) SEA players speak english in JP so language barrier shouldn't be an issue.

That's it. You've just created a new popular DC, potentially the size of EU. And you've also made the game more accessible which would attract more players that are considered new customers (so many untapped potential from SEA, and while it's not the biggest economically, the gamers here love to spend money on cosmetics - ask any Korean MMO and mobile games). But SE is SE and they are so stubborn for mistakes they have made, especially ones that have costed them a lot of money. Materia wasn't well thought out, they didn't do enough research about the market.

I might be biased since I play from SEA. But I would love to play with OCE friends... rather than seeing them suffer, queueing for dungeon for hours. It's just sad.

[LianaThorne]

I know this is probably a lost cause as they are so persistent with Materia and will probably attempt to fix it by Cross DC travel, not by actually fixing the actual population.

But in my opinion the proper fix is something like this:
1. Move the server to somewhere in SEA region. Yes I know it's unfair for people in Oceania as they will be getting more pings but what can you do... there are more SEA players in only two JP worlds [Tonberry & Kujata] than maybe half of Materia combined. This will boost the population massively and I'm sure OCE players would rather have 50 more pings than to have no one to play with (at least some of my OCE friends said so). SEA players that had been in JP for years are now reluctant to move because they waited to see how Materia fared and it failed... so most stays in JP or transferred back to JP.

2. After moving the server, give SEA players the ability to transfer from JP to Materia for free. You slap the word SEA to Materia and SEA players will flock to the server. Right now they have no reason to. They have a house, they have better ping, and neither OCE nor JP is their actual 'home' anyway, so they might as well stay at the place they've made friends and purchased a house on. Most (if not all) SEA players speak english in JP so language barrier shouldn't be an issue.

That's it. You've just created a new popular DC, potentially the size of EU. And you've also made the game more accessible which would attract more players that are considered new customers (so many untapped potential from SEA, and while it's not the biggest economically, the gamers here love to spend money on cosmetics - ask any Korean MMO and mobile games). But SE is SE and they are so stubborn for mistakes they have made, especially ones that have costed them a lot of money. Materia wasn't well thought out, they didn't do enough research about the market.

I might be biased since I play from SEA. But I would love to play with OCE friends... rather than seeing them suffer, queueing for dungeon for hours. It's just sad.

Weren't people saying the point of the split was to try to separate JP from everyone who isn't from JP (just disguised as better ping)?

[Minali]

Regardless of what may or may not have been the original reason, making it a better option for SEA players sounds like a really good idea. They've been asking for being able to play the game with a decent ping for years. Although I don't know how much you'd have to physically move the servers to achieve a good ping for players in both SEA and Australia (or if it'd have to be in the middle of the ocean to be good for both areas). However, when it opened, I read it could have a better ping if the data wouldn't be routed over Japan instead of going the direct way. I don't know if this is still an issue nor if it would be widespread, but should this affect many SEA players, this would be a good starting point to make OCE more attractive to them. (If this is on SE to fix it or SEA internet providers, I cannot say. Wouldn't hurt if SE'd come knocking at the doors of said providers though.)

[Puddor]

I can say from personal experience (SEA friends) that the OCE data center being basically the same as them playing in NA was a real disappointment for them. I'm not sure how that's even possible frankly, aside from maybe better latency support for the older DCs because they have always been multicultural, but in that case why neuter OCE so badly in that respect? Between AUS/NZ you have a fraction of the populace and without any bolstered support from other DCs for queue times it's going to remain this bad. Having the queues bolstered by the JP community would at least make standard content playable.

Not to mention low pop. means that housing content is also difficult to do anything with because you need people circulating materials in the marketboard...which means you need people actively playing.

Problem is this is becoming a catch 22 for OCE region players. My friends are all NA, even those who are based in SEA. The raiding scene is hard enough to break into with friends let alone solo, but the ping on NA has been steadily increasing. I want to raid and do PVP and it's impossible to queue for in OCE and almost unplayable at 170ms on NA. Blah blah VPN (VPN only brings me down to 150 which is still obscene).

Proposed solutions:

Definitely focus on upping the validity for SEA players to play on OCE servers. They should absolutely not be getting equivalent to NA ping connecting to a Sydney server.
Run more moving campaigns for the server. Level rewards for moving, gil rewards for registering an FC (and a big chunk too, maybe enough for an S house?) to encourage people to continue at least logging in. Logging in is half the battle.
Encourage more active engagement from OCE. Examples include, oh idk...an OCE Fanfest? Campaigning to establish an SE Store base somewhere in SEA? OCE players literally cannot purchase the collector's box still. It's 2024. The FFXIV team showing up once a year for PAX Aus isn't good enough when you literally have servers here.