Data Center Travel is ruining server Party Finder

[Sqwall]

Going back to locking down dc travel again is a terrible idea ngl.

Not saying lock it down, but simply restrictions on what you can and can not do when traveling. i.e. retainers are locked

Or High End content must be completed on your own DC, or join a group with a password restriction.

This all kind of goes back to that idea of "purchasing runs" or "selling runs", and of which are NOT what SE wants for the game.

It would be simply to prevent DC's from being alienated for being guilty for just picking the wrong DC or simply no choice due to server congestion.

I don't want to lock anyone out of content, which is how I feel when I have to DC travel since NOBODY raids on crystal....or they do and can't find a static that does. It just sucks.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I’m just getting started learning the Ex trials and I go in order, so I guarantee there will be at least one Zodiark PF on Crystal this weekend, and then maybe Hydaelyn if I get lucky. If I don’t find one, I’ll start one. I’ve never DC traveled and don’t feel like starting now! lol

[Saraide]

Not saying lock it down, but simply restrictions on what you can and can not do when traveling. i.e. retainers are locked

Or High End content must be completed on your own DC, or join a group with a password restriction.

This all kind of goes back to that idea of "purchasing runs" or "selling runs", and of which are NOT what SE wants for the game.

It would be simply to prevent DC's from being alienated for being guilty for just picking the wrong DC or simply no choice due to server congestion.

I don't want to lock anyone out of content, which is how I feel when I have to DC travel since NOBODY raids on crystal....or they do and can't find a static that does. It just sucks.

You are asking SE to waste effort on going backwards. DC travel needs to become as seamless as world travel. Everything else is silly and backwards.

[Jeeqbit]

you are thinking as toggleable criteria yes?

Yes, like the current checkboxes and entry boxes we have.

Going back to locking down dc travel again is a terrible idea ngl.

I agree we should keep DC travel. It really is just the public High-End category being available that is ruining things for other data centers in my opinion.

I no longer have sense of home anymore in the game.

You could argue this due to World Visit or cross-world PF as well, long before DC travel came up. It really depends if you spend your time on your homeworld and if you do things with people on your homeworld such as maps, FATE farms and hunts. I do these 3 things on my homeworld so I do feel a sense of home.

As a result of the above, I no longer have a sense of community either.

Same as above. It depends if you spend your time in a consistent community, whether that is your homeworld or another small community such as an FC, an RP discord, a small raiding discord, etc.

I don't even do DF on my homeworld. There's not a lack of people on Primal, it's quite healthy population. But because DC-Travel has too many prompts, clicks, steps, and I'm already on Aether because of raiding.

This is why I think disabling the public High-End duty tab for travelers would help solve all other issues as well. People come for the raiding but stay for everything else purely due to the steps required to return.

Instead they copy/pasted the crossworld travel to DC and said "solved".

On a technical level, it made it easier already having the World Visit System in place, but it wasn't just copy and pasting it. There were a lot of technical hurdles to overcome, such as copying your character data over to another data center, worlds not being confused that you are from an unrecognised homeworld and accounting for the lack of access to your mail, FC and CWLS. To a certain extent, they had overcome these hurdles somewhat with the paid transfers but the difference was making it temporary in nature, so that you exist on two data centers at the same time.

Did they think to ask:
How can we ensure world communities don't become alienated as a result of DC-Travel ?

If you played back in 2019, there was a Data Center Split. Friends and free companies and statics got split in half, some to never talk to eachother again and causing people to quit the game. DC travel solves this and I think DC travel was, in part, a way of apologizing for splitting everyone up. They knew the damage it would do at the time, but they wanted to grow the game by adding data centers and they are normally aware that features such as World Visit can cause chaos at first. The chaos normally settles down after a bit though.

[VirusOnline]

I agree we should keep DC travel. It really is just the public High-End category being available that is ruining things for other data centers in my opinion.

Although I don't like the effects of DC-Travel, I agree that it is something that should be kept.
It's one of those "it's there now and people have acclimated, so don't mess with it".

You could argue this due to World Visit or cross-world PF as well, long before DC travel came up. It really depends if you spend your time on your homeworld and if you do things with people on your homeworld such as maps, FATE farms and hunts. I do these 3 things on my homeworld so I do feel a sense of home.

...

Same as above. It depends if you spend your time in a consistent community, whether that is your homeworld or another small community such as an FC, an RP discord, a small raiding discord, etc.

Well, remember, being off home-world means everything is restricted. Not just friends, but your fc, linkshells, house, retainers. These are, I would argue, basic gameplay elements that are being limited when you're off world.

Though what we can do on our homeworld is a part of that sense of home and community, those feelings aren't necessarily tied to that. There's a bit of a deeper level, not to be too dramatique haha.
It's a bit difficult to describe, but there is a reason why moving IRL is considered highly stressful. There's a bit of that sameness for me in game, though not to that drastic degree of IRL moving.

And the game doesn't let you forget it with the <Traveler> and <Wanderer> tags. It sort of relegates those people to NPC status in a subconscious way. Why not display these on a more detailed screen such as View Search Info or Adventurer Plate.

This is why I think disabling the public High-End duty tab for travelers would help solve all other issues as well. People come for the raiding but stay for everything else purely due to the steps required to return.

On a technical level, it made it easier already having the World Visit System in place, but it wasn't just copy and pasting it. There were a lot of technical hurdles to overcome, such as copying your character data over to another data center, worlds not being confused that you are from an unrecognised homeworld and accounting for the lack of access to your mail, FC and CWLS. To a certain extent, they had overcome these hurdles somewhat with the paid transfers but the difference was making it temporary in nature, so that you exist on two data centers at the same time.

...

I say copy/paste as DC travel has the same core idea and mechanisms as CW travel.

Personally, I don't think high-end duty should be disabled when DC traveling. A player should have the choice to go visit another DC to maybe see their friends or whatever it is they do and queue for a high-end PF. As the system is now, it would be a good option if they added a global Duty PF system with its own dedicated server that hosts these instances. Naturally this would have the side effect of alleviating a lot of things the game experiences. IE a lot of player will not move to Dynamis because DF is sparse and PF is nonexistent.

[DrForester]

They would never be dumb enough to lock out high end duties from DC travel. For good or bad that cat's out of the bag. To try and lock it out would break up existing static groups that have members from different DCs and I can't imagine they would do that.

HOPEFULLY they learned their lesson with the Oceanic DC and how that DC should have been counted as a local DC with Japan, then people probably would have been more eager to switch.

[Jeeqbit]

Personally, I don't think high-end duty should be disabled when DC traveling. A player should have the choice to go visit another DC to maybe see their friends or whatever it is they do and queue for a high-end PF.

They could make it so a friend on another data center has to invite you over somehow, I suppose.

They would never be dumb enough to lock out high end duties from DC travel.

It's not dumb though. It is causing the issue in all regions.

For good or bad that cat's out of the bag.

Easy to put it back.

To try and lock it out would break up existing static groups that have members from different DCs

No, it would not, because my proposal was to block the public High-End category. That means the private version with passwords that statics use, or forming a party via a CWLS, is still possible for statics.

[mallleable]

log out

ok

start

visit DC

select world

Aether

<world>

confirm

proceed

-queue-

ok

character

ok

-queue-

It adds up.

having to wade through all these prompts, and queues just to have a functioning party finder is not a good experience.

[Tsurayu]

The only thing Data Center travelled ruined was Labyrinth of the Ancients.

We never used to bother wasting time pulling the Bone Dragon out into the middle of Timbuktu on Aether until Data Center travel became a thing and a bunch of Primal and Crystal players came over and started pulling the Bone Dragon far away from the center and wasting time as it stupidly caught on. Am I being unreasonably salty? Yes. Yes I am. <.<

[TaleraRistain]

The only thing Data Center travelled ruined was Labyrinth of the Ancients.

We never used to bother wasting time pulling the Bone Dragon out into the middle of Timbuktu on Aether until Data Center travel became a thing and a bunch of Primal and Crystal players came over and started pulling the Bone Dragon far away from the center and wasting time as it stupidly caught on. Am I being unreasonably salty? Yes. Yes I am. <.<

Yeah I get annoyed with that, too. Especially when I tank trying to do Aether stats and some idiot from another DC vokes it off me and pulls it out into Narnia. Entirely possible to keep it on the middle platform because we've been doing it that way for years now on Aether.