[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[Zarkovitch]

Please fix your implementations SE. Yesterday it ruined my day of raiding and this game really need a budget for servers only. Idc how but better do something than nothing.

[RezPls]

snip

this goes without saying but this is voidsent status trying to evade a forum ban with another account.

[LotteYanson]

At this point, why not just disolve the other DCs and combine them all into one?
Fixing the problem doesn't seem to be of any priority for them at all.
Otherwise they wouldn't have reopened DC Travel without a solution, lol

Ignorance or incompetence – the lines are blurred

[Jeeqbit]

? I literally got the ??? on Dynamis a few hours ago and it's literally morning time. That doesn't sound like DDoS protection worthy.

It happens when:

1. Lots of people are logging in at once.
2. When servers go up.
3. When there is a DDoS attack and you get disconnected as a result.
4. During an expansion or patch launch.

Regardless, it always happens when lots of people are logging in and it's intended to help manage the congestion. But in particular it's easy to notice when there's just been a DDoS attack and people are lagging.

Since this happened when lots of people where DC traveling it obviously triggered it.

[KazukoHimura]

I did some searching on Reddit to see if I could champion more people to our cause of either reverting or tweaking the current system, and found a workaround for those stuck in a DC travel loop:

Users jaqenhqar and drunkengranite both had input, and combined, the method is below:

Go to <insert drive letter here>:\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn
Open "FFXIV.cfg", and (if you have it) "FFXIV.cfg.old".
Delete the line "dkt_session_id" at the very bottom of the <Network Settings> section.

While it doesn't solve the root of the problem, it should hopefully mitigate the more pressing issue of the matter. As much as my roleplay loving self really wants to be able to visit my friends on Crystal and Primal (More Primal in this case), I think being locked out of a character due to technical reasons on the server's end is more of a pressing issue.

[Brynne]

I'll add my voice to this. Two of my friends transferred from Siren to Raflessia. They made this decision in large part because of the promise of DC travel returning in full with the release of savage, so they could continue to play with the friends they left behind on Siren while enjoying the quieter atmosphere of a Dynamis server. Obviously, they are regretting the decision now.

I feel like the assurances that you should transfer and spread out the population because you can still play with friends thanks to DC travel have been largely undermined by this change. No one is ever going to want to give up their spot on a congested server now.

[ObscuraFi]

interesting....don't suppose you got queens rests for sale on dyna? lol Kraken.

All of my characters are on hali so I can't buy and transfer directly. If you have 3 hours though, I can invite to group and get you 25+ of them.

[ObscuraFi]

I just want to point out that this new system is even blocking out traveling to Dynamis, supposedly the only non congested server. And no, not just on Seraph. Our raid group is split between Crystal and Primal, so our entire raid time yesterday was spent trying to meet up, at first on Crystal - it was congested even though our world is standard,

You didn't understand the post explaining the new data center travel system so let me explain it in more simple terms.
1) Every single world in the game, regardless of classification, has a traveler and visitor limit. Let's assume this normal value was 3000 players for each.
2) A Congested world is going to have a reduced visitor limit (2000 players) and a greatly reduced traveler limit (1000 players).
3) When a single world on a data center is categorized as Congested, the entire data center is punished. Every single Standard world on that data center now has a greatly reduced traveler limit (1000 players). Their visitor limit stays the same at 3000 players.
4) New & Preferred Worlds bypass this data center wide nerf and will have the normal 3000 visitors allowed, and an increased traveler limit (4000-4500 players).

When a world reaches the cap on travelers or visitors, you will not be able to access that world from that transfer method. According to the JP twitter account, people spiked the login queue for travelling worse than they did previously that caused the errors and people getting stuck. That travel limit was getting hit even in other locations where the tolerance is higher. You are not guaranteed the ability to world visit or to data center travel anywhere. It is just more likely/faster to get in, if you go to New/Preferred.

[Qorani]

I legitimately never felt the need to make an account on the forums until today so I could complain about this.

The worst part of the situation is that, even when you can DC travel to where you want to go, there's a stupidly high chance that you won't be able to log in when you get there. It's almost like there's a system to check if you can DC travel somewhere and an entirely other system that checks to see if DC travelers can log in once they get there. I spent nearly 20 minutes trying to get to Primal yesterday to give some crafted gear to friends and static members to just be told "F you, go back to Aether" by the system when I got there. Like, couldn't there be a system in place to let you slide into a different server on the data center when you get there?

It's worse because they somehow brought back the "ETA: Unavailable" bug that they had to patch out of Asura last year, so it's hard to even get to Dynamis, which is the only American data center to not have this issue. My static started raid an hour late last night because our healer got stuck in limbo for an hour. I know there's a method of cancelling your DC travel request by going into your system files and editing something, but going about the Cloudstrike method of making players with technical knowledge fix developer-created issues should NOT be something that we have to deal with.

I don't know which developer thought that the previous method of DC travel was broken, but in comparison to this, they were dead wrong. I never had issues with DC travel before aside from not being able to access stuff like retainers, but I won't claim that it was perfect. This feels like the devs trying to reinvent the wheel and turning it into a stumbling block.

One of my static members put it like "This is SE trying to kill DC travel without actually killing DC travel". This is a major issue and probably should be reverted until the devs have had PLENTY of time to work out all the bugs and kinks. If they think that day 1 of savage is bad, just wait until a major patch comes out.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that most of the servers that you even can get to (New/Preferred if you're lucky) still often have 5-15 minute DC travel times and 10-15 person login queues. This is gross incompetence at best and intentional artificial congestion at the worst.

[Dexion]

I genuinely dislike the change and miss Endwalker's DC travel system. As I've met friends IRL who play on different data centers it was a breeze to swap over, see their houses, go on treasure hunts, raids ect. When Dawntrail released I was a little bummed about the Dynamis push but waited patiently for dc travel to open back up only for it to be...underwhelming.