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.

[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.

[VerdeLuck]

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.

With the Cloud server test, it seems to show there's an interest in other locations for DCs. If they were to move the DCs to other regions like East Coast or the Midwest, people would definitely swap over to a different DC for the lower ping to play.
The issue now is there is no difference between Dynamis/Primal and Crystal/Aether other than things that require home world like housing and retainers and island sanctuary, but if one DC had lower ping for people there would be a reason to stick around and try to make it work.

[Toutatis]

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

It's only PF. DF is still healthy with very short queue times. Anyway they need to make PF region wide. I am no longer bothering with it. I hate DC traveling as it breaks FCs and I miss my house, retainers and crafting. There is nothing to do while waiting for PF.

[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.

[Renathras]

It isn't "bad faith" at all, the same point occurred to me.

Not only that, but we're currently still in the cloud server stress test period, so that could also affect the populations, and possibly to varying degrees.

So it's an interesting exercise, I would repeat it a few times, as it's been said- this is *one* snapshot in time, and compare the numbers, before drawing any conclusions.

Agreed. The Cloud Server part was what I thought of right off the bat.

I'm with you that the idea of doing it has merit, but it shouldn't use such an unusual weekend, and ideally do several in a row to see what the average is, as well as snapshots from other days of the week (e.g. Monday night with people trying to do things before rollover or Tuesday night with people trying to do reset day clears).

.

As to the what's the point of the servers:

I personally like being on medium-pop server/DC, and as someone else said:

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.

I mostly do DF and Hunt Trains, and both seem pretty active here. Primal has a really active and engaged Hunt community, and I've also seen Eureka being pretty active of late. Just because people aren't doing stuff in PF doesn't really mean the DC itself is dead. It just means no one's really doing much PF stuff. and is that REALLY a shock? We're in the lulliest part of an expansion that's already been notable for its lulls. The total number of non-Other PFs posted across all the DCs there is 162. I remember when Primal ALONE had over 100 in just High End Duties. Not everyone, but many people, have already done what they want to PF out of the content in the game right now. Right now it's off-time on a Wednesday night and I see, on Primal, right now, 50 total, 14 regular and 36 other. Even post DC travel, I've seen it much higher, like when patches are released with new Extremes and stuff to do.

Note that I'm not saying DC travel ISN'T a problem, but I am saying I'm not sure this data is as conclusive as one might think.

EDIT:

As an additional note that I don't think I've seen anyone mention (though I could've missed it): Open PF listings are not indicative of groups that have formed via PF and are actively entering and completing duties. Once they fill up they don't show up in PF anymore.

Actually...this is PROBABLY a really good point.

Suppose Primal has a ton of PF groups actively doing content, but because there are so few of them AT ANY ONE TIME in the listings, they're immediately filling. So say someone puts a P9S group up and it fills almost instantly, then someone else puts one up, it fills, etc. There are now 5, 10, 50 groups running it, but only 1 in PF at any given time.

Meanwhile, on Aether, there are a hundred listings for P9S all up, but all of them are missing a healer, so none of them are actually starting up and going into the content/leaving the listing once filled.

This is less a measure of "PF activity" and more a measure of "PF groups failing to fill" at any given time, is it not?