[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[horsebirds]

Posting to share some feedback and start a conversation about the state of Data Center travel as of patch 7.05.

My general feedback is that this causes more problems than I can see it solving. I’ll talk about those that I’ve personally experienced based on the way I play XIV.

I have two characters that I play often, my main on Aether, and an alt on Dynamis.

A lot of my enjoyment of this game comes from playing with friends across data centers, and attending player-run venues and events. Things like visiting players who open their houses up once a week so that people can gather there and roleplay, or attending player-organized roleplay events in the overworld.

A lot of these events happen on specific worlds, at specific times, and usually with a predictable schedule. All of this is important because the success of these events relies on having a lot of participants, creating an active community. They also rely on word of mouth, making it difficult if not impossible to switch their location on short notice to respond to congestion. A lot of these events happen on Crystal, which has a reputation as the roleplayer’s data center of choice, but which has also historically been pretty crowded. Before DC travel you had to elbow your way into that crowd and make a character on Crystal in order to participate. When DC travel first opened without restriction, it opened these events up to everyone on a North American data center. You could make a character anywhere, and still take part!

So, when I made an alt I intended to use to roleplay, I put her on Dynamis, under the assumption that being on Dynamis wouldn’t prevent me from joining these events.

Being on Dynamis is now preventing me from joining these events.

Tonight I’ve had a discouragingly hard time traveling to the world of an event I’d like to visit. Several of my friends are also having the same problem. I anticipate that any system that prevents people from gathering in one place, the way events like these require, is likely to have a huge negative impact on these communities and the players who take part in them.

I’ll also say that for my part, this system is making me question my decision to make a character on the same underpopulated worlds it intends to bolster. While I often travel elsewhere for events or to play with friends, I also spend a lot of time on my characters’ home worlds, and I like to be able to do so as long as I know I can safely travel back and forth. But if I can’t be sure of my ability to join an event on a world unless I’m from that world, then it starts to feel like the best option is to try and cram a character onto the world in question as soon as I have the chance to.

If you have feedback about this change, please feel free to add on. I’m interested to see what other people have experienced (or will experience over the coming days).

[KazukoHimura]

Crossposting from another topic on the same issue:

I'm predominantly a role-player, and a lot of my RP spots are various player houses. I actually had to go on hiatus until the initial lock was lifted, but now that it's gone...it's just a lighter version of it. If enough people are on the same world logged in, I can't even go to said world. All of my buddies and their houses are on Crystal and Primal, for example, and I'm also on Dynamis (since I wanted to leave Aether ages ago, and wanted that buff, a chance at a house, etc.). I'm fine with staying on there for regular gameplay content, but for RP, I don't think some random is going to want us co-opting their house because it has the environment we need for our scene. Personally I don't like doing that, consent is vital, but when Sqenix forces you onto one DC, or locks the world the house in question is on, and schedules don't align well enough to show up at non-peak hours, what can you do? I'm an immersive RPer too, and have been looking forward to going to a friend's clinic (My character has a chronic illness). Said friend is a Sage and has the full Sharlayan setup-I've never seen anything like that on Dynamis, but I've seen it on Crystal and Primal, and every once in a while on Aether (Though none of my RP partners are on Aether, and those that are just come to Crystal).

[Tiraldric]

First post ever. This DC change is super poorly thought out. I don't know how it needs to be solved but this isn't it.

What they had prior to this expansion dropping was leaps and bounds ahead of whatever horrific monstrosity of queues this is.

[sylphlands]

Agreed 100% with all of this. This game is popular for its RP scenes, why would they roll out something that actively discourages RP...and what incentive would anyone have now to create a character outside of Crystal knowing they can't travel to venues? Of course people will want to only have alts on The Server Where Fun Things Happen.

[Relizkah]

So attempting to transfer to go to dynamis because we have all players from aether/crystal/primal to raid for savage. the new changes are horrible. I am an hour in a locked in limbo. I cant go back to my world and i can pick a new world to travel at all. At this rate they didnt fix the problems of first day release. these changes made it so much worse, that we cant play the game now.

I really do hope they fix this quickly..this sucks and feels bad. Spending all day excited to not be able play.

[Xellos1892]

So none of my static can travel to the same data center in order to prog the new savage raids, and now since I tried to travel to Dynamis, I’m stuck in an infinite loop of trying to finish traveling but getting booted off and having to log back in. There has to be something done about this, cause now essentially I can’t play the game that I pay a monthly subscription for.

[a_little_bunny]

I tried to DC travel from Dynamis to Crystal. The wait was 20 minutes. Before that time was up, the wait time changed to "Unknown" but after a while, it finally let me onto Bryn. When I tried to log in, I couldn't, with an error saying that because the world was congested, traveling characters can't login. Alright, fine. I'll return home. Except nope, can't do that either! It finally let me wait in queue but then popped with another error of, "World data could not be obtained. Please try logging in later." Alright, fine. I'll play another character for now. Also wrong! If you try going to that DATA CENTER at all, it just puts you back in queue until you get another error So I can't play a single character on the whole of Dynamis because my alt is in limbo and can't get home.

Edit: Turns out, I was even more wrong than that... I can't play on EITHER DC I play on because that character in limbo has tied them both up. I can't even get into a queue without getting an error. So the game is actually unplayable right now.

[CidHeiral]

I'm also confused on why this is just now an issue and not when Endwalker came out.

This change is a direct response to the community choosing to pile on one DC at the expense of every other DC, which wasn't an issue at Endwalker's launch since DC travel didn't exist. If you want to be mad at someone be mad at everyone who participated in the dogpile.

Kudos to Yoship and the devs for delivering when they said they were going to do something about it. The change is great.

[kajv95]

Europe here, it's a disaster. Met some great people right before Dawntrail on the other datacenter, formed a little group split down the middle between Chaos and Light. Then they announce we're basically not gonna be able to do content together for the first 4 weeks. Okay, fine. Now they "lift the lock" but made it so much worse. My group planned maps with the release and it seriously took an HOUR to try and figure out where we'd go because changing datacenters to restock maps just isn't going to cut it. And this was on Omega, a world that's not even known to be filled to the brim. A world that had a "queue" of 23 while it was kicking the others out over being "congested."

Now we're not sure if we're going to be able to properly do synced content together at all, because adding upwards of an hour just to be able to coexist is genuinely awful.

This is probably their solution to try and keep PF localized within datacenters again to hopefully avoid actually having to solve the "universal PF" problem and sure, it's working to an extent, but this is coming YEARS too late, when many people have formed cross-dc connections. I've been incredibly happy with the expansion, story aside, but this is genuinely giving me cause to unsubscribe because at this point I might as well go play a game with them that *does* let me play with them.

[MrMordio]

A member of my raid group got disconnected during raid and couldn't log back in without first taking 20 minutes to return to his home world, and then he wasn't able to travel back to Primal from Aether.

We all had to transfer to Dynamis. We've been in the queue for 30 minutes and still can't get back to raid.