Party Finder needs to be unified across data centers

[WeebAlert]

First let me say that I am happy with the DC travel system and I am glad it has been added to the game, to remove the barrier of not being able to play with friends who may be on different data centers from your own. It is a great change to eliminate this barrier and it is and was a needed feature.

Also, I obviously don't have any knowledge about the way the backend of this game works, or what technical limitations there might be to a request like this. Regardless of that, I believe this feedback needs to be given because despite the possibility of there being limitations preventing this feedback from being implemented, I think it is an important enough feature that work should be done to work on removing what limitations there might be to prevent it from being added.

Which brings me to the actual feedback/suggestion, as the title implies. With the release of data center travel, on NA specifically (I am not sure about EU/JP/OCE as I do not play in those regions), slowly the raiding scene has transitioned to party finder existing solely on the Aether data center. At the time of writing, on the Primal DC, just after the weekly reset, on Tuesday evening, there are less than 10 parties in the "High-End Duty" category. Even beyond the high-end content, the drought does extend to more "casual" forms of content in the form of groups for older trials/raids, to be done synced or unsynced. Meanwhile on Aether, there are over 100 groups in the high end category and significantly more in the other categories as well.

While it is of course a possible solution for anyone to travel to Aether to join these parties, I believe it's impractical/unsustainable for PF to keep working in this way. Particularly when new content is released next year going into Dawntrail, the influx of people going to Aether to join PFs is going to make it a worse experience for everyone; people who call the Aether worlds their home, which will now be more congested as a result of the travelling, and for the travelers themselves, who may find themselves unable to raid/long queue times to get in as well.

I believe that the best solution to this problem is to make the party finder work cross-DC, similar to how it currently works across worlds within a DC. This would allow players to sit in their house, island sanctuary, use retainers, etc. And it would keep the populations across the Data Centers more balanced. Lastly it would make it easier to find groups for "niche" content, like older raids/trials, BLU, min ilevel/no echo groups, etc., because all listings would be viewable no matter what DC you are on.

Again, I am assuming there is some technical limitations to this given the way that data center travel currently requires one to log out of the game and log back in just to travel to another DC. However, I believe it is an important problem to solve and I hope that Square Enix can consider the benefits of changing the back end to allow this feature to exist.

[Ravenblade1979]

*puts a mark in the column about pf*

[DamianFatale]

I don't want to datacenter travel. I will do it as little as I possibly have to. It just isn't fun waiting forever to transfer to another data center, and then having to wait again to come back. There are also too many restrictions, and I'm very peeved that our community has made it the norm for content. I want to go back to the way things were where you could stay on your own datacenter to do things.

[Toutatis]

Only read the title but yes that would be ideal. DC travel is unpleasant and you can’t access several game features. It breaks fcs too. It’s one of the reasons I deleted a Dynamis char after getting a house and now it’s affecting other characters on DCs that previously had a healthy PF tab activity. Since 6.5 I’ve made the decision that if something in PF is not on my character DC, I am not doing it (yes that means skipping a bunch of things but I am that annoyed).

[Reap00]

I don't want to datacenter travel. I will do it as little as I possibly have to. It just isn't fun waiting forever to transfer to another data center, and then having to wait again to come back. There are also too many restrictions, and I'm very peeved that our community has made it the norm for content. I want to go back to the way things were where you could stay on your own datacenter to do things.

I DC travel every day. It usually takes 30s each way. I don't know what you are talking about. You are trying to make something bigger than it as usual. Don't you get tired of doing the same thing based on nothing? I certainly would.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

What I find really strange is that we only have 2 EU data centers, and for a few months now the same trend has begun... Doesn't make much sense to me when there's only one other DC to chose from? What's the point of specializing one?

I don't go on Light that often so I can't tell how much of it is due to people unsubbing in late end game, and how much of it is due to this trend, but my raider friends from Chaos have been complaining about it for a while and I myself have been struggling to fill my PFs recently.

[HermitUK]

What I find really strange is that we only have 2 EU data centers, and for a few months now the same trend has begun... Doesn't make much sense to me when there's only one other DC to chose from? What's the point of specializing one?

I don't go on Light that often so I can't tell how much of it is due to people unsubbing in late end game, and how much of it is due to this trend, but my raider friends from Chaos have been complaining about it for a while and I myself have been struggling to fill my PFs recently.

Light has become the EU Data Centre for high end parties; on a given evening Chaos might have 10-15 recruiting for high end duties, Light will have 80-100. I usually hop over there now if I'm doing my weekly unreals or looking for Ex farms. My static also hops over there sometimes if we are short a player for an evening, just to increase our chances of filling.

Partly this is because Light PF hosts the EU ultimate prog parties, but really its inevitable that players will all congregate in one place of they can. It's not just PF either. Eureka and Bozja seem to be more active on Light than Chaos, even at off-peak times.

If I wasn't tied down by a house I would be seriously considering a DC move just for convenience sake. DC hop is easy enough but its annoying not being able to manage retainers/island/etc while waiting for a PF to fill.

I'm hoping the Cloud DC testing is a first step to a fix for this - cross DC parties could then spin up a cloud based instance that can host players from both DCs simultaneously without anyone having to travel.

[Bonoki]

This sounds like a good idea. Are there any unforeseeable consequences that could arise?

[Hyperia]

I believe cross DC everything will eventually happen but because the JP players are worried about it, I would implement for all except them.

[WeebAlert]

DC hop is easy enough but its annoying not being able to manage retainers/island/etc while waiting for a PF to fill.

I'm hoping the Cloud DC testing is a first step to a fix for this - cross DC parties could then spin up a cloud based instance that can host players from both DCs simultaneously without anyone having to travel.

Agreed on both points. Traveling DC is easy enough (and definitely does not take forever as someone in the thread implied), but I do think that concentrating the community onto one DC is harmful long term.

I am also hopeful that the cloud DC test could be a first step into a more seamless experience across data centers.