Materia/Oceanican Data Center needs help please!

[Kirstie]

As world-wide cross-realm travel has been discussed & thought about for a while now (implimentations of it in other dcs), it has been met with good & bad outcomes. I can understand Yoshi-P's hesitation on a worldwide version.

But Materia is sort of stuck on its own. We can't duty finder with NA/EU/JP to make queue times faster, help other players with content & get them through the story. We're only 5 worlds, not many players yet, we've only been going a short while. We can always use the PF, but not everyone knows this, so they get frustrated at the queue times. Could also ask their FC, but not all FC's are ready or able to help at certain times or have the numbers.
It feels frustratingly slow for the game being so big & popular, and we're stuck with a smaller growing community, no other established region to help us out. We're not feeling the big population that's advertised to a new player, they might feel alone/not able to progress through the awesome but lengthy story.

I have a few ideas (thankyou to ElysiumDragon!)

1) Duty finder world-wide-cross-realm, but make it optional, like the language opt-ins (& unsync'd etc). Start with it un-selected, like when you start the game you have your clients language selected. Then you can select world-wide duty finder. You would understand (info panel) that your ping may be impacted by this, but understanding that would allow you to be queued with a much larger pool of players. This way the player knows what they're getting into and can make that decision.

And/or after a certain amount of time in the DF (with opt-in unticked), it will pause the queue & have a pop up, asking if you'd like to queue into other regions to make the wait time lower. This way it could introduce the player to this option to be ticked on, for the future.

PF could stay the way it is now, without being worldwide to keep the community feel some areas have. So if you wanted to do organised raids/dungeons/pvp/rp its there. But the DF, could be improved to help everyone who ops in

2) (thankyou to ElysiumDragon) "We get cross-region travel, but they implement some of the restrictions tied to Free Trial accounts, like being unable to use PF and having to be invited to parties manually (which would significantly mitigate the culture clash issues with things like raiding), and maybe removing access to the marketboard to maintain some regional protectionism.

That way, people from NA, EU, OCE, and JP could visit each other's servers and Data Centres, meet their friends, chat, GPose together, use Duty Finder, etc. All of the benefits, with far fewer of the downsides, and JP could just implement a "No English Client" policy for high-end content if they feel the need to."


Maybe these additional ideas could reach Yoshi-P, to give more ideas for him and the team to consider/work with, something to help with the issues players are faced with at the moment. Thankyou for reading all this and have a lovely day!

[Stormpeaks]

Just to be honest with you, nothing will happen, seriously, it wont, Materia will stay a dead DC, if anything it goes to their advantage as people are paying to get off of Materia back to NA

[ThaCa]

Your best bet is the potential influx of new players during expansion launches. As much as global DF and such would help struggling servers, the networking changes, ping and language issues would be really frustrating.

[DixieBellOCE]

Just to be honest with you, nothing will happen, seriously, it wont, Materia will stay a dead DC, if anything it goes to their advantage as people are paying to get off of Materia back to NA

Stop making so much sense.

Luckybancho census shows Materia lost 5000 players over a 3 month period, including the patch release of a raid tier. Most of those players didn't transfer out, they just stopped playing the game.
Materia is kinda the last straw for OCE players, if it doesn't work then its goodbye XIV.

I intentionally moved back to OCE, knowing full well what i was getting into this time, and it really is just the last straw.
Either it works out, or i'm dropping XIV after 9 years.

[Stormpeaks]

Stop making so much sense.

Luckybancho census shows Materia lost 5000 players over a 3 month period, including the patch release of a raid tier. Most of those players didn't transfer out, they just stopped playing the game.
Materia is kinda the last straw for OCE players, if it doesn't work then its goodbye XIV.

Not surprising really, people are either going back to NA or JP, or leaving right off the bat, and I dont blame them, Materia is literally a trap because then either you pay to move or you stop playing

[AwesomeJr44]

Materia was doomed to fail from the start. There's no saving it without taking drastic measures, drastic measures that SE probably doesn't see the value in taking.

Dynamis at least has some hope, Materia though? That thing's dead.

[Stormpeaks]

Materia was doomed to fail from the start. There's no saving it without taking drastic measures, drastic measures that SE probably doesn't see the value in taking.

Dynamis at least has some hope, Materia though? That thing's dead.

That's why I am sincerely hoping they dont do the same mistake by adding a new DC to EU, they couldnt even fill 4 worlds, 2 are medium populated at best and 2 are basically ghost towns, and they want to add 8 new worlds at once.. yeaaaaaaaah about that...

[DixieBellOCE]

Not surprising really, people are either going back to NA or JP, or leaving right off the bat, and I dont blame them, Materia is literally a trap because then either you pay to move or you stop playing

I was incredibly vocal about it after the first 11 months, and got nothing but hate and abuse from multi people on Materia for even speaking up about the issues, as if hiding them would make them go away.

2 years in, most of those people transferred back to Elemental or quit the game, it feels bad to be right, but the evidence was staring us in the face from the beginning.

XBOX might be the saving grace for OCE, i know more people that own an XBOX than a PS4/5 or a PC. And many of them are already talking about the game.
But that comes with its own fresh wave of problems, we are back to shepperding players through the game, and not enjoying the game ourselves, the endless cycle of helping in the hopes somebody stays to play.

[Minifie]

We really just need cross DC travel, if this was something the team said was possible but just not implemented because they wanted to wait on it. IDM if it's JP or NA, I come from NA servers and obviously the language barrier might be easier linking to NA but either way, being able to do almost all content with low ping and fellow OCE is great, but content that requires more people like ARaids, pvp, ocean fishing as examples would be nice (and those of us on rotating/opposing schedules could have somewhere to go to get PF content happening at odd times).

Any fix that keeps OCE servers segregated won't work. When Aussie servers dropped for WoD the servers themselves were chonky, but after the first few months outside of content that required you to put your group together like mythic raids I'd find myself back on NA groups with NA ping anyway.

[ChrysOCE]

But that comes with its own fresh wave of problems, we are back to shepperding players through the game, and not enjoying the game ourselves, the endless cycle of helping in the hopes somebody stays to play.

Agree with that. I want to help people through the MSQ but, at the same time, I don't want to spend my whole time doing that. It can feel exhausting.

I still don't understand why they would make the financial investment in setting up a DC to, seemingly, abandon it. I know, we don't know what their plans are. That's the problem, isn't it. They aren't communicating ANYTHING with us.