Suggestion: Cross DC Partyfinder Per Region

[Rhodes_Corpus-Leviathan]

Per Region Cross Data Center Party Finder

I think that making Party Finder & Duty Finder cross Data center. Personally I play on Leviathan(Primal) so my experiences are rooted in NA DCs but from reading other posts on Reddit/Discord I believe these experiences are universal. Since the release of DC travel almost 2 years ago raiding has slowly but surely shifted all to one Data Center per region. Of course you can still que in with a static on any server/DC but if you want to use PF you will need to transfer to the Raiding DC (Aether for NA).

At peak play times now Primal will have 10-20 actively recruiting Party Finders with more than half of them being social event venues or people selling crafted gear and only 2 - 5 of them being any sort of content. Aether at similar times will have 100-150 actively recruiting Party Finders.

While DC travel does not take very long the inconvenience lies in the fact that you cannot access your retainers, submarines/airships, gather timed nodes while the pf fills.
The easy answer is choose what your doing, either PF or gather/retainer/etc I don't think that we should have to make that decision, nor should they have to give up their housing in game to pay for a DC transfer.

I have seen the suggestion for Universal Party Finder / Duty Finder in the past but I do not believe that would be something the community as a whole would want.


Attached: Pictures from a few months ago on a Saturday afternoon. This was the case for the majority of the Abyssos savage tier and the entirety of the Anabaseios savage tier.

Aether


Primal


Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you have a great day.

[Mayoyama]

To be honest, it's also like this on JP.. people flock to Mana (I've seen 140 in high end duty alone and at the same time, elemental had 7)
This causes problems too because both DCs use different strats in PF (eg in P9s, elemental tends to use intercards/"braindead" and Mana uses Mario kart), so I had to learn both to prog this tier

[DrForester]

Hopefully Aether getting nuked at launch will light a fire under the devs butt to get cross DC party and duty finder going.

[Larirawiel]

And after this change, the people will complain about it because there are so many nightclub advertisements in the PF.



Cheers

[Ardeth]

And after this change, the people will complain about it because there are so many nightclub advertisements in the PF.



Cheers

Eh, you can just start mass blocking them all. But also you can sort the party finder. It's not that big of a deal.

[Dyvid]

Hopefully Aether getting nuked at launch will light a fire under the devs butt to get cross DC party and duty finder going.

This is my fear, another Raubahn Extreme right at launch.

[Shahi]

EU really need cross DC pf and df. Shadow DC will be so dead without it. Light dc will suffer from congestion.

[Ravenblade1979]

Hopefully Aether getting nuked at launch will light a fire under the devs butt to get cross DC party and duty finder going.

We could use the break on aether. Rest of the dcs can utilize their own and liven theirs again.

See, there is no actual need for cross DC pf. What's needed is for players to stay on their own DC and keep them lively. Well maybe except dynamis. Crystal and primal..stay home and liven your dcs again

Don't know when the community decided aether was content DC but that was the exact moment the rest of the dcs got screwed and dead for content.

Why should the devs have to create something like this for players who efficiently screwed their own data centers by deeming one the content one.

Go back to your own folks. Liven up crystal and primal. Heck, wander to dynamis and help them. Leave us on aether alone.

[HappyHubris]

We could use the break on aether. Rest of the dcs can utilize their own and liven theirs again.

See, there is no actual need for cross DC pf. What's needed is for players to stay on their own DC and keep them lively. Well maybe except dynamis. Crystal and primal..stay home and liven your dcs again

Don't know when the community decided aether was content DC but that was the exact moment the rest of the dcs got screwed and dead for content.

Why should the devs have to create something like this for players who efficiently screwed their own data centers by deeming one the content one.

Go back to your own folks. Liven up crystal and primal. Heck, wander to dynamis and help them. Leave us on aether alone.

Why would people choose to stunt their experience to kind of sort of boost participation on their own server.

[KisaiTenshi]

We could use the break on aether. Rest of the dcs can utilize their own and liven theirs again.

See, there is no actual need for cross DC pf. What's needed is for players to stay on their own DC and keep them lively.

Half true.

What is needed is to make it less of an ordeal to "permanently" switch servers and DC's. If I move to X server from Y server, that should take ME, my retainers, and all my money/tomes/gear/etc to that server without question. This should be as easy as "data center server" transfer is now.

However you realize why this is, is because the retainer system would completely destabilize server economies. All the crafters would just jump server to stripmine the economy of smaller servers, and people would have to jump around servers to price shop, which is the problem 1.0 had with having to manually check every place and retainer.

Perhaps that can be solved too, by making the market actually global. It would make purchasing things VERY much slower, but then you wouldn't have to jump servers to do any of it. However that would in fact make it impossible to be a new crafter in the game as all the materials would then be horded, or players would engage in a lot of price arbitration, making leveling crafting much harder.

Honestly the ideal situation is to just nuke the party finder. Replace it with a priority chain, where the game uses your friend list, linkshells, and free company, and "previous recommended players today" to decide how to form the party, and if you want a private party, set a password on your party. If nobody has "I want to do (DUTY)" set, then it considers PUG's from those queued to those duties, and then the roulette. The main problem with PF right now is that it's mostly filled with spam, so people don't use it.

There should be no incentive to switch data centers or servers unless that's where people want to be in a FC. Unfortunately certain servers on certain DC's get known as the "big hangout" server for a certain thing and players don't want to move because moving their house isn't possible.

So between the housing system and the retainers, that's why people can't freely/permanently change servers. The fixes to both of those is not straight forward without changing how both of those work. Perhaps the correct fix to that is to change how housing works in the first place and only allow the retainers to be summoned in your house or inn room that operates as a "out-of-server" instance. The outside of the house still exists on it's home server, but the inside can be accessed from any "inn" on any server then. You can't summon your retainers outside your home unless you're on your home server.

At any rate, the other way to solve, everything, is to just create dynamic instances inside one virtual "game" server. So all players in non-combat areas are in the same instance until that instance is full, and then it forks another instance, and this gets reset every maintenance. In combat areas, the instances would instead be handed out by latency to all players in that instance. So players with sub-10ms to each other get priority, then sub-32, 64, 96. This would automatically stick players in the same party in the same instance, but would prioritize players in each instance by their geographic routing table essentially. Players playing on poor connections (eg starlink, dial up) end up at the bottom and dropped onto whatever instance is lowest for them.

Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of good solutions that don't involve erasing the boundaries between the servers.