Materia/Oceanican Data Center needs help please!

[Kirstie]

Just to be honest with you, nothing will happen, seriously, it wont, Materia will stay a dead DC, if anything it goes to their advantage as people are paying to get off of Materia back to NA

I certainly wasnt expecting that much doom in replies

[GTK0HLK]

seconds/minutes/hours/days/weekends/week/biweekly/monthly/bimonthly/yearly, Biyearly even(hopefully not a decade)

takes its toll, while I'd rather March on, I understand many can feel the pain of waiting with no info, and being left to feel like nothing is done, and while the things actually done is a slap to the face.
[I'm not of OCE but I understand the pain, but if nothing has been done in all this time. I imagine those left on OCE are feeling the pain sharply like Hrothgars are, except that Hrothgar pains have a clear end or point if giving up. OCE will always draw people into its endless pit of hope. As some novel antagonists will tell you. Too much hope is dangerous. as well as a lack of it]

Doom start aside.

While I'm not of OCE, since the start I had hoped SE would Lock OCE Regioned character creation to their own servers.
to artificial fill it with new players.

but of course no sign.
This might be Consoleist, but XBOX would probably give OCE a big new number.
if they actually go to OCE.

like others have said, SE could allow Cross Region Travel.
or like they mention, try to implement cross-datacenter/region dutyfinder/raidfinder. it would at least keep some people together til something concrete is implemented.

But it's a wait til whatever it is we face at the end

[AlunKha]

Luckybancho census shows Materia lost 5000 players over a 3 month period, including the patch release of a raid tier. Most of those players didn't transfer out, they just stopped playing the game.

I wanna focus on this because while Materia does have populations problems, this is more widespread than just our little corner on the map. I've been playing on JP a lot these past two raid tiers, the PF changed dramatically (most JP pugs go to Mana to raid now) and the overall feeling is one of exhaustion. People are retiring from XIV, and while it's not fair to measure this during a long, long intended lull between now and 7.0 it is kind of alarming.
OCE is the canary in the coal mine so to speak. When the population shifts away from XIV we see it most starkly... and ultimately I don't think cross region will fix the issue. NA/EU/JP players aren't gonna want to come here to play with us, to help fill our queues (NA can't really be bothered helping Dynamis let alone Materia), and if we collectively go elsewhere to make our own queues pop what does that mean for Materia? The sprouts who don't know any better stay in hours long queues because we've vanished, our overworlds become even more barren, the rp scene dries up overnight...
While I do want SE to help us out a bit, I don't think there's much they can actually do. Maybe after PAX Aus we'll see another jump in sprout numbers.

[DixieBellOCE]

I wanna focus on this because while Materia does have populations problems, this is more widespread than just our little corner on the map. I've been playing on JP a lot these past two raid tiers, the PF changed dramatically (most JP pugs go to Mana to raid now) and the overall feeling is one of exhaustion. People are retiring from XIV, and while it's not fair to measure this during a long, long intended lull between now and 7.0 it is kind of alarming.
OCE is the canary in the coal mine so to speak. When the population shifts away from XIV we see it most starkly... and ultimately I don't think cross region will fix the issue. NA/EU/JP players aren't gonna want to come here to play with us, to help fill our queues (NA can't really be bothered helping Dynamis let alone Materia), and if we collectively go elsewhere to make our own queues pop what does that mean for Materia? The sprouts who don't know any better stay in hours long queues because we've vanished, our overworlds become even more barren, the rp scene dries up overnight...
While I do want SE to help us out a bit, I don't think there's much they can actually do. Maybe after PAX Aus we'll see another jump in sprout numbers.

Overall the exhaustion is caused by the game systems themselves.

Nothing changed from SHB to EW, we are stilling running on the same treadmill of content that was predicted and nothing surprised us. If anything people are just bored, there is no long term content to keep people invested in playing the game, you log in for ~2 weeks every 4 months and you are up to date and have no reason to play again.

If the content structure doesn't change for 7.0 it will just be more of the same, and that will just be the final straw for most players. A lot of the WoW exodus players have left, after they reached the end game and realized FF has nothing to offer them outside of small content drops.

Square really misread the situation when the playerbase boom happened, and should have started creating content to keep people invested in the game. Instead we now just have a deserted wasteland of potential that will never be expanded on.

DC travel will never solve the problem, it will just leave Materia as barren as Dynamis is, as somebody who experienced Dynamis at launch and stayed there for 7 months, i can tell you that it is not in good shape.

The only solution to Materia is to implement cross-DC DF for casual content, so that people can still play the game, but don't have to travel elsewhere to do so. (Or just.. make better content that keeps people invested in the game)

[Supersnow845]

^this is the big problem, square got a massive influx of people during late ShB early EW massively expanded the infrastructure to hold all of them…….then did nothing to actually make them want to stay

So now we have too few people spread over too many servers and it kills places like dynamis and materia

If square wants to bring these people back and also hold onto the new Xbox players they have to give us more than 30 seconds of yshtola thirst every 4 months and one extreme that’s the same as the last 7 extremes

[Iscah]

I still think at least part of the problem is that people turn to PF instead of having a little bit of patience with DF.

Every time I see people gathering an entire fifteen players for getting through Labyrinth unsynched, I wonder how much more effective it would be if we could just drop those fifteen players into alliance roulette. And sometimes I've seen those parties, queued for the roulette myself, gotten into Labyrinth and come out again to see them still waiting for their PF to fill.

There was also the time when Euphrosyne had just released, we were 22/24 in the DF queue and then the whole thing fell apart because someone decided it would be quicker to set up a PF instead of waiting for two more to join.

There's a perception issue, not just a lack of numbers, which makes it harder to gauge the actual scale of the problem.

[AwesomeJr44]

^this is the big problem, square got a massive influx of people during late ShB early EW massively expanded the infrastructure to hold all of them…….then did nothing to actually make them want to stay

So now we have too few people spread over too many servers and it kills places like dynamis and materia

Yep. They introduced Materia and Dynamis to deal with the influx of new players and then proceeded to do nothing to keep those people here. Maybe Dawntrail will bring some of them back (or bring more newer players in), but are we going to be having these same discussions once 7.0 is over and we're in the patch cycle for 7.x? Hopefully Materia and Dynamis won't become seasonal DCs, but it's possible.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

Honestly, I believe they released too many Oceania servers at once. It should have been like 1 to start with, open up more as needed. The playerbase is too spread out between them.

There should be limited cross overs too for dungeons, I agree. Make it an easy to spot option, like build it in so it's on the same page as the daily roulette and make it a toggle.

[Iscah]

Honestly, I believe they released too many Oceania servers at once. It should have been like 1 to start with, open up more as needed. The playerbase is too spread out between them.

The number of individual servers is not the issue. If there aren't enough people queuing for duties, then that is an issue with the number of data centres, and we can't have less than one.

[Nebelheim]

Honestly, I believe they released too many Oceania servers at once. It should have been like 1 to start with, open up more as needed. The playerbase is too spread out between them.

There should be limited cross overs too for dungeons, I agree. Make it an easy to spot option, like build it in so it's on the same page as the daily roulette and make it a toggle.

It seems from the census data there is only roughly 10-20k at most active on oceania spread out on all its servers. That 10-20k active players could easily fit on a single server or 2 servers if they merged the servers down to 1 or 2.