[Reddit] Is the grass greener in Aether?

[Ardeth]

Oh I dont disagree that the system is terrible, especially since you cant use mailbox, retainers, FC etc, that can absolutely be improved.

The idea of cross DC is a good idea though imo.

Not without a way of making the DC irrelevant. What I want is cross DC everything down to the damn ocean fishing. I mean, what I really want is a complete reversal of the idea, but we all know that's not going to happen. So the best fix is making datacenters irrelevant. But in saying that, I don't want to play with y'all. That's why I am on Dynamis. I find all of y'all tiresome, if I'm honest.

[NekoMataMata]

Aether is where a Primal player goes to meet up with 7 other Primal players in Party Finder.

I've done this with Dynamis players before.

Granted, a couple of times it was statics looking for 1-2 fills, and how were they to know their fills were going to both be from Dyna, but otherwise? Yeah it hits about the same.

[All_Nonsense]

I've been an Aether native from the start so I can give a bit of insight now that I've traveled to other DC's:

- Our queues are faster, even for daily roulettes. I'm not sure if it's because we've had a congested population for almost the entire expac (currently not congested on a lot of worlds, even Sargatanas surprisingly) or if it's because our players have a higher proclivity towards running content, but it is an observation I've made.

- FC quality depends lol. There's def some large ones that are pretty good, and we have a lot of 'legacy' FC's that've been around since ARR. We benefit from this because everyone tends to travel to us for raids and not vise-versa so our server populations tend to be around and more active when they're online as opposed to being on a different DC

- Our RP community is pretty active but not as much as one would think. Most of it derives from the 'clubbing rp' scene from what I've observed, tho I can't give a lot of insight into that as I'm not into rp except when I sneak to a venue to enter a giveaway

- Most aether players are pretty bad at pvp in my experience. I've been running rival wings on Primal for mog tomes and the queues are popping (dead on aether p much). I've noticed that the players on primal are - on average, significantly better than the ones on Aether from what I've been able to tell. Definitely more organized.

- Raiding is our big thing, checking pf will be proof enough. We tend to have well over 100 different raiding pf's up for all sorts of content at prime hours and especially on the weekends during prime hours.

- Housing is housing lol. No vacancy rip

- Eureka/bozja communities def exist but mostly for BA and DRS, and they're fantastic. Beyond that tho if you hop into Eureka or Bozja for the first time you're not going to get a lot of help unless you have friends with you. This is based on my personal experience so ymmv

- It's interesting to go to other DC's because no one has their cool weapons or gear out on display. I like that about Aether tbh, I think the weapons look good and I get to think "good for them."

- Not sure about the LGBTQ thing but then again it varies based on who you ask and what their experiences are. I wanna say there's a grain of truth to that but I don't have enough empirical evidence to support the claim enough to make it. Aether is extremely LGBTQ friendly tho

- I rake in the gil over here but I figure you can do that anywhere. The markets will just have different hot spots due to what the needs of the servers in question are.


In short, is the grass greener? idk it depends on your needs. Unless you plan on hardcore raiding then I'd say you're prolly fine staying where you are. As always, ymmv, and there's a lot to consider when initiating a DC travel. Starting over in a new place isn't always easy.

[Anienai]

Aether has roaches.

[Avoidy]

it's self perpetuating
people say that aether is where the content is, so people go to aether to do content which leads to content being on aether so people say that aether is where the content is, leading more people to go to aether to do content
lately i've been on dynamis helping new players out. many sprouts there do not know about dc travel, and so many of them think final fantasy 14 is a dying game because their only experience with it is dynamis which has dead queues, a dead pf, and dead towns. one even asked me if the game is always dead like this. when they dc travel for the first time and see all the people in balmung uldah, they're blown away. and I imagine they probably feel like the game played a cruel prank on them. dynamis was a mistake in the current dc travel era. it never got a chance to thrive on its own or to find its own footing. but i digress. the result is that aether has a bustling PF and if that's all you care about, then the grass is absolutely greener.

[Limecat]

Data center travel is a failed experiment and they should either shut it down entirely with a few months warning, or make all duty content and PF blanket cross-DC.

[CidHeiral]

Personally, they should shut the door on DC travel/transfers and force people to build up their own communities instead of letting Aether canabilzing everyone else's.

Agreed.

DC travel is a great idea on paper but the community has proven once again why we can't have nice things. The negatives have far outweighed the positives. Roll it back.

I don't think that is an option anymore. We'd be reverting to the time before DC Visit existed and now that it's here, I think it's here to stay. There would be a major hurricane in the FFXIV community with all the people protesting how they wouldn't be able to play with their friends anymore and were cut off from their statics among other various resources.

Oh no they'll have to make an alt, like everyone has done for the entirety of the genre's history without issue. What a travesty.

[Bonoki]

Oh no they'll have to make an alt, like everyone has done for the entirety of the genre's history without issue. What a travesty.

I know this is sarcasm, but it's way more complex than that. You can't just remove existing features on this scale without there being backlash. The community would not take that very kindly. It's not as simple as reverting it because, for every person who thinks it's a failure, someone else thinks it's a success. This is a mistake that SE made that we're now stuck with.

[CidHeiral]

You can't just remove existing features on this scale without there being backlash. The community would not take that very kindly. It's not as simple as reverting it because, for every person who thinks it's a failure, someone else thinks it's a success. This is a mistake that SE made that we're now stuck with.

Oh I don't doubt there will be quite a backlash, but choosing between the long term health of the game and short term hurt feelings isn't a difficult choice. I have zero sympathy for anyone upset by the feature being rolled back. If the community had used it responsibility there wouldn't have been a problem, but they didn't. Many chose their own short sighted self interest over everything else. It's no different than using markers in combat. That was a very useful feature but people couldn't control themselves and abused it so it was taken away, spoiling it for everyone.

[Colt47]

Aether caused a lot of homogenization of the server sub cultures. There isn't much point transferring to Aether when the DC travel is available already and most features that get lost are honestly not worth the extra effort to have enabled all the time. Unfortunately I feel like it may have done more harm than good to have open DC travel.