Snapshot of PF activity on North American data centers

[EorzeaWanderer]

This is from Saturday, November 25, 2023, at around 6:45 p.m. PST for all data centers (within a 10-minute window or so, as I had to take some time to use data-center travel).

In other words, essentially prime time on a weekend. I chose the time to be within the one-hour early-bird bonus for Jumbo Cactpot.

Anyways here was the state of PF:
------------------------------
Aether (187 PF groups):
136 content
51 other
------------------------------
Crystal (76 PF groups):
12 content
64 other
------------------------------
Dynamis (17 PF groups):
6 content
11 other
------------------------------
Primal (37 PF groups):
14 content
23 other
------------------------------

Just putting this data out there for now in this post.
Discuss!

[EorzeaWanderer]

As for my own conclusions/opinions...

1) We are seeing the logical and inevitable effect of players being able to move freely. In the absence of any technical constraints imposed by the game designer (SE), people are going to cluster together because they all benefit from doing so. It's easier to find groups, it's easier for DF to pop, etc. It's just easier to play the game when players cluster together.

2) As for *why* Aether became the de facto "place to play in NA", it doesn't really matter anymore. It's already happened.

3) We can see that Crystal and Primal, communities that were about equal to Aether prior to DC travel, have not been immune to this powerful pull to a single data center, which, unfortunately for them, has become Aether and not Crystal or Primal.

4) Crystal has more PF entries in "other", and indeed, unique player housing is something that one data center can offer that another can't.

5) One wonders what the purpose of being on Primal and Dynamis is at this time.

This is one shapshot in time, but I hope that SE is collecting and looking at this kind of data and thinking about what DC travel naturally does to the people who don't happen to be on the DC where people actually play content.

[Raikai]

I hope they have concrete plans to address this sooner than later. As a PF raider, is really bad to see that wasteland and nobody should be forced to use DC travel and be locked out some activities because of a change to something that was perfectly fine before.

[Saraide]

DC travel needs to become as seamless as world travel.

[fulminating]

I would like to see Tuesday’s data, ideally from the week of 6.4’s release and the two weeks following. I would also like to know how many clears there were on each dc for the given Tuesdays to account for statics. I don’t think we’re ever going to get this data because it would pretty much have to be sourced by se who are unlikely to do so, but perhaps they’re looking at it themselves.
It would probably also be helpful to see the same information from before dc travel to get a more comprehensive picture, but as with the rest of this post, the horse has long gone.

[Boblawblah]

Wild to see Primal so low with how populated it is. Do primal people just not PF, or do 90% of them leave for that content? Even the 'other' category is low for Primal. I know I don't do anything with PF, maybe Primal has a lot of people like me? Not sure.

edit:

5) One wonders what the purpose of being on Primal and Dynamis is at this time.

I missed this post before, but I think you overestimate just how many people do PF stuff as their main activity. How many PFs are running isn't the sole indicator of how healthy a DC is.

[Derio]

Its really sad. As a Aether native most of my PFs are filled with travelers simply because the other DCs PFs are dead. They keep adding new datacenters to accomodate players. But that doesnt really mean much if 70%+ of your playerbase are all flooding to Aether. But this is really a community problem. How can developers solve this problem when the community has already strongly stated that Aether is the raiding server, Crystal is the RP server and Primal is the inbetween casuals server?

Only way this gets resolved is if they temporary disable DC travel or on expansion release Aether gets so full that they have to disable DC travel which forces other DCs to form their own groups in their own DC

[Ryvick]

I don't want to be "That guy" but not really sure what data on the Saturday right after a Major US holiday where the majority of people fly to relatives (most likely without any game access) really is supposed to be indicative of other than:

People enjoy cold turkey?

[VerdeLuck]

You can feel this in all aspects of Dynamis. DF is dead, PF takes hours to fill normal mode duties, Bozja, Eureka, Hunts, etc all didn't have a chance to develop their own communities and instead groups from Crystal and Aether just use Dynamis as overflow.

It's really bleak to be on that DC right now. We need a reason to be on our home DC and to organize things as a DC.

[Poporito_Popoto]

5) One wonders what the purpose of being on Primal and Dynamis is at this time.

This is one shapshot in time, but I hope that SE is collecting and looking at this kind of data and thinking about what DC travel naturally does to the people who don't happen to be on the DC where people actually play content.

To get away from people on the other servers.