Data Center Travel is ruining server Party Finder

[LianaThorne]

Except that's not really true. Crystal had a perfectly good and decently populated raiding scene pre-DC travel. I know because I used it. And if anything, it's the fact that basically all combat PF activity has disappeared supports that, because all the people who want to do that content (raiders) are now over on Aether all the time. Crystal is known for RP, but it's hardly the ONLY thing players there are interested in.

Fair enough if this is true, I just have a different experience. I used to be on Primal at the beginning of Endwalker (pre-DC travel) and had people in my circle/FC get called over to Crystal to fill PFs since they weren't able to get them filled for 30m+, as in they specifically had alt characters (leveled or paid) to help fill raid parties on Crystal.

So, I believe you that it had a raid scene but I don't believe, in my opinion, that it was ever really on the same scale as Primal/Aether. DC travel definitely demolished it though and turned it mainly into the RP-centered DC it is now with, in my opinion, public access to Balmung and other NSFW hubs leading the charge. The explosion of clubs during Covid + DC travel really screwed up a lot and at this point, unless the devs actually step in, I don't think it's ever going to recover.

Kind of wish DC travel was never a thing and just cross-PF was created in its place as someone who is also on Crystal now and would like to not have to sit in a queue to have a chance to raid lol.

[LianaThorne]

The game does work. I have no problems playing it and 98% of my visits Aether to marketboard browse. If members of my Marilith FC want to do something that is awkward to get a party for on Dynamis, we head to Crystal and manage to get things done just fine.
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If you're so certain it's that easy to accomplish, please feel free to send your resume listing your certifications and experience to Square Enix. YoshiP has stated they are specifically trying to hire someone who can solve this problem with the infrastructure they have in place. This isn't a situation where they're being lazy. They want it fixed because it's become a big problem on the JP servers just as much as it is for NA and EU.

It's totally fine if you're happy DC traveling for everything but at the very least there should be something in place so that people who want to do things on the DC they picked can actually do them lol. That's not asking for a lot.

[littlehobbit13]

It makes sense that people all go to one point to do the raiding: The entire point of sitting down when the player gets home and loads into the game is to get into doing something as quickly as possible so they're playing the game. [...] Also, I feel like aether is kind of pushing this game a bit too much towards the "sweat" category vs being about "fun".

I would almost say that's the very problem with "people all go to one point to do the raiding". A single DC now gets to set the culture for how things work now. Crystal and Primal now either get in line with what Aether is doing or they just don't really get to have a PF experience at all. If Aether has decided "sweat" is more important than "fun", then that's how things work now. Nobody else gets a say.

I do take issue with the rewriting of PF history I see people slowly doing though. Many are starting to paint it up like Crystal/Primal NEVER had a functional PF before DC travel, so that it was some kind of salvation for them, and that simply isn't true. You didn't have to wait long to fill a party on Crystal during normal play hours. "Get into content as quickly as possible" was already possible. People didn't go to Aether because of a dead PF; they went to Aether because it was known as "the raiding DC" and that's it.

If anything, for me personally, I now feel like having to go to Aether works against that goal. I can't just "get into content". I have to plan my night out. I can't just do things as I want to do them. Instead, I go to Aether for functional PF and I sit around with nothing else to planning out all the things I need to remember to do when I get "home" since I can't do any of them off-world. It's very much the opposite of getting to do content as quickly as possible.

at the very least there should be something in place so that people who want to do things on the DC they picked can actually do them lol. That's not asking for a lot.

Co-signed, fully agree. I don't care if everyone else wants to go to Aether. I care that I now no longer have the same game experience purely because I chose to homeworld on Crystal pre-DC travel and don't want to uproot my whole game life for a single piece of content (raiding). Square needs to provide a way for people who want to stay on their home DC to still have a full game experience.

[Colt47]

Oh I agree fully. This is going to go down about as well as Raid Finder in WoW, which demolished a LOT of guilds.

[sindriiisgaming]

I don't quite know how to feel about DC travel anymore. While it has its pros, in my case the cons have outweighed it.


The biggest issues are that:

• I no longer have sense of home anymore in the game.
  
  
• As a result of the above, I no longer have a sense of community either.
  
  
• I don't even decorate my house because I rarely see it, so what's the point ?
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• How Dawntrail is going to handle DC travel is going to be ... interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if they disable it completely as Aether is already filled with congested worlds.

The thing is websites exist where we can see all PF available on any world, any dc, at any time.
And another thing is that the core system for that already exists: It's DF. Instead they copy/pasted the crossworld travel to DC and said "solved".

Did they think to ask:
How can we ensure world communities don't become alienated as a result of DC-Travel ?
Maybe they did and didn't see it as being worth a long term investment this far into the game's life. Then again, SE has a track record of these short term features. Short-term solutions are often cheaper and easier to implement, right?

In short, the ability to query a global PF system and simply have the party queued into a global instance of their duty should have been the first step.

global instance meaning when a party queues for their duty, an instance is created without requiring a DC/World/Region to host it

but all these issues are just choices you make, you choose to think your home is where you raid and not where your friends are, you choose not to visit your house and you choose to weigh the sense of community on these things

[Colt47]

The community an MMO caters to is really based on the resources available to the team supporting the MMO and how much that team can shoulder. People want a journey that is worth their time and rewards that are worth the journey to begin with, which is something that FFXIV mostly has handled before this point through the separate communities. The second they opened the flood gates they ran into the problem of the culture being driven by the "best option" for reward vs journey... at least on paper. In practice savage is awful for most players but there's nothing else that is available to compete, so it's either never set foot in hard content and do casual stuff, or do the hard content and deal with the myriad of problems that come with it.

Like the one thing that is weird about FFXIV is that they lack any kind of good cosmetic reward outside of dying gear. No special character effects, no appliable weapon effects, nothing. They rely completely on basic systems that shouldn't be even used the way they are for the reward system and it gets the wrong people invested in some of the content they have.