[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[LianaThorne]

Imagine having nothing better to do than complain on the forums about empty houses that weren't bid on for 6-12+ months. Listen, I'm sorry you're too broke to understand how investments work. I'm sorry you're too broke to understand how much high quality decorating costs. I'm sorry you think someone that has venue connections, staff, rp partners, and business partners on Primal, Aether, Crystal, Dynamis, Chaos, Materia, and Elemental, that has given out over a bil to the community, has no friends. I'm sorry if I made you reflect on your contribution to any community and that made you feel some type of way. As a voidsent, I apologize for entering the realm of your brain, and sucking out all the aether there so I can live rent free.

Peace and love but you should probably take a step back and a deep breath. Coming from someone else with also a sizable amount of gil, it's nothing that actually matters. You can literally buy gilcap for $500 or less if you wanted to

I also wouldn't parade the fact that you own multiple wards worth of houses here as I wouldn't put it past some on here to come and harass you for it in game since it's pretty much a taboo topic.

If people are physically unable to access a game they're paying for (outside of scheduled maintenances), it's an issue. Point blank period.

[kinslayer-]

Imagine investing the time and money to maintain 24 accounts, hoarding 50 plots unused, and still having no friends to play with.

he thinks he owns Dynamis
He thinks he's an anime character
I'm kinda glad not many people have interacted with this individual

But yea, Square should fix the Dta center travel asap

[ObscuraFi]

,

(reached daily limit on main forum acc)
Apparently I am an anime character considering I dropped two Madara meteors on Aether and Crystal's bozja market, tanking the prices to 30% of normal market, controlling 80-90% of the sale history for over a month which caused your friends to lose their minds after griefing me. Called the whole leaf village of Diabolos for help to the point your friends started stalking me in and out instance, on social media, tried to outfarm me and failed and quit, making retainer names about me, spamming shout chat with hate messages, spamming my tweets with replies, and giving me free livestreams to report to GM's while you scream about me botting for years and getting nothing done to my accounts. I literally live rent free in your people's head and ya'll still want to talk years later only able to say "anime dweeb" as a comeback.

[xanatosdc]

Adding my voice here. This change is horrible for everyone who has friends, raid members or RP Partners spread over various DCs.

[1313]

No sense even trying anymore. They do the opposite of what we ask more often than not. Just quit and find another place to spend time, build new friendships and communities. This place doesn't appreciate us so why pay them and stay here to suffer?

[Serilyn]

Would love for them to fix this, fortunately I haven't run into it yet but I fear I may sooner or later since with the raised difficulty I have to DC travel to OCE so I can do solo battles without massive latency on my US server alts.

Along with that, they really should open up OCE so we can travel to other DCs/regions if we want. Keep other regions apart if you want sure, but let OCE travel. The main reason I haven't created an alt there despite living in the region is because I fear running into a msq roadblock with something like crystal tower or trials that don't have trust versions yet.

[GTK0HLK]

"People Hated Them, Cause they Weren't Wrong" and told them the exact thing they didn't want to hear.

Tale old as time.

I knew this was coming a mile away.
As someone who really just completely rooted themselves in Crystal. (Despite having "friends" all over. though most in EU-DCs- despite a number of them being from NA. They all went there.)

It was pretty obvious what was gonna happen.

WE'VE KNOW WHAT ISSUES THE GAME HAS BEEN HAVING.
YOU'VE SEEN THE THREADS ABOUT DYNAMIS AND MATERIA.
YOU'VE SEEN THEIR PAINS AND LOSS OF GETTING FARMED AND WORK TAKEN FROM "TOURISTS".

This was clearly coming. and while I carry both Empathy and Sympathy for the situation.

You're reactions only draw relish from others. More so when you inadvertently take a combative stance, just cause they aren't 100% saying exactly the same thing as you.

(This literally applies to almost every single thread and topic on this damn general forum. Unless people actually converse small differences, options, or ways to improve. which is saddingly rare, cause it's easy to just knee-jerk into emotion.)

__________________________________________

Rectifying the issues with community, and growing them in the wide open dcs clearly come first. as they are the players who suffered the most.

As someone who wants RegionWide PF/DF. I'll happily wait til it becomes a reality(as I want PVP to grow. and become more fun. Without having to resort to FOMO/Haves-Havenot. And of course Alts Friendly/AccWide Options.)

But such things will wait, til they find a solution that doesn't gimp the rest of the games resources. (you wouldn't want that now, Would You? the devs having to choose how thin the resources should be spread again?)

__________________________________________

While they need to resolve things. (For me, congestion being one. as I'd like to make my Rothgal alt soon.)

This is all a necessary, yet painful lesson and data.

We Knew since the DCs were locked, that the best option was to exist in the same homeworld and DC if such options are on the table for SE.

And this just proved those who prepared or had Alts ready. (You can say Noone can handle all the prep on an alt. but others have.)

We can only find options that satisfy the need to grow Dynamis/Materia. or find ourselves partially ignored while spilling our guts.

Edit:
ps
just like Others and Void has said.
No one is entitled to anything.
This topic can easily spread out into various subjects.

Just like Housing, If you went to these wide open dcs for housing. expecting not to live there and be part of the community there. that's on you, you've made your bed.

At least enrich the community.

If you have problem that you can't get a house where you're friends exist. same issue for everyone. Keep pushing the housing topic. (I personally wish, all plots are largest. with only the building size being the different thing. with varying outdoor furnishings limits)

If it's for Hunts, you aren't entitled to them. it's just a benefit of the situation, and congestion.

Just like if others take advantage of the fact they can do Questionable things. That's on SE.

Least they try.

[EBYRWA]

I want to voice my support for a removal of the recent DC travel changes. Others have already outlined well the issues: numerous errors, inaccurate information pertaining to actual travel time, and the inability to reliably join up with friends (for whatever activity; hunts, raids, rp). None of this works as a way of improving the overall gameplay experience compared to what it was prior. If this feature isn't going to be designed to work in a manner similar to pre-Dawntrail (in terms of availability and speed), just take it out. It is painfully obvious this change is designed to be punitive to encourage more DC-centric activity.

Any reply from VoidsentStatus will be ignored entirely. I've read your opinion multiple times already.

[RaenBlackMage]

I don't really know things from before DC travel... I only joined shortly before it was available. However... since then, I have made friends across multiple data centers. I've raided with some, farmed content with others, and spent far more time simply dropping in on them to visit and hang out, catching up and spending time with them. Deep Dungeons being a favorite to just grab a group of friends and hop in.

Even if the use of PF was disabled for me, I would like to be able to drop in on my friends again- and have them able to drop in on me as well. For me, FF XIV is where my friends are. I live in an area without many readily available social opportunities, so for me the Massively Multiplayer part of MMO fills that niche quite nicely. But being effectively cut off from half my friends- friends who I at least could see on Dynamis before this all went down- hurts.

What I would like most is free Data Center travel and cross-DC PFs. However, I would take free data center travel and PFs only allowed on uncongested worlds/ by people on their native worlds over this, and I would be quite happy with the EW way of doing things as well. I didn't mind hopping to Aether when I wanted to PF harder content. For me, it became an opportunity to pop in on my Aether friends, as well as to take a look at their Market Boards for anything I wanted to spend my gil on.

I do feel that the social value of cross-DC travel is more important- for me, the friendships that I have cultivated over the past few years are the real reason I keep paying my subscription. The gameplay has been quite fun, and the story amazing as I spent the past few years slowly working my way from ARR to EW. But it's the friends I've made across that time- and on different Data Centers- that kept me playing.

[ObscuraFi]

I don't really know things from before DC travel... I only joined shortly before it was available..

So, small history lesson:

When the current version of the game first started in 2013, world visit wasn't even a thing. You were stuck to the world you selected. That is the reason why certain worlds developed reputations for a set type of community like Balmung and roleplay because that is where everyone interested in that thing went.

Over time, years later, Oct 2019, world visit on the same data center became a thing. Some period around here and also from years in the past, including in the original version of the game in 2012, there were several instances where worlds got shifted and or merged. Different data centers got created. So, people got split up, housing was lost etc. etc. The Legacy tag next to a world is for worlds that existed before ARR in 2012. (ARR is called 2.0 because the original game 1.0 failed significantly, Yoshi-P brought the game back with hard work which is why he is considered the savior, and lore wise the entire world got nuked.)

Notable examples include that Crystal and Light DC did not exist before April 2019 and got worlds shifted over to it instead of them being created like what happened with Dynamis.

Fast forward 2022, EW releases with cross-data center travel, login queue happens to be clogged as hell so they create new worlds and data centers, being Dynamis for NA, Meteor for JP and also adding Materia for OCE ppl for ping reasons.

This is also when we find out world visit issues because the world visit queue was set to be behind the login queue. So if the login queue was busy enough, you couldn't even world hop. World hopping was not coded to be guaranteed.

Another issue that stemmed from server congestion is the afk timer itself. That used to didn't exist. In Bozja there used to didn't be a timer where you'd get kicked out after 10min in instance. That was added to help with congestion and they were begging people to log out instead of being afk in game. And with Dawntrail they doubled down on that issue and updated it to cover some of the other ways people tried to dodge the afk kick timer. Every time the playerbase doesn't listen to what Square says, another feature gets added that inconveniences other players or they force Square Enix's hand to force the situation like with Dawntrail launch. They could've launched DT with the current system we have now, but they didn't even want to give people the chance. They already know the playerbase tries to dodge afk timers and if they got over to Aether and dodged it, they would've made the situation worse than it needed to be.

That is the primary reason I told people the current system is a privelege. Square Enix has a track record of shifting data centers around and not having a problem demolishing thousands of houses. Square Enix has congested entire data centers several times beforehand and left them that way for months, some worlds being congested for 6+ months at a time without being able to create characters there to be with friends. Where you are, who you're able to see, even the resources on that given world aren't a given to stay all the time.