[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[Afkland]

I'm not sure what all those paragraphs about places and people I've never heard of had to do with the topic of the thread, but pivoting back to the topic of the thread:

The cap on travelers and wanderers is currently too low for the multiple communities in the game to thrive. The raiding scene, RP community, and night club crews are only three different communities within this game.

Unfortunately, this is a case where a fix for a problem spawned many, many, many more problems, most of them social and activity focused, in a game that relies on social and activity to retain players.

[VoidsentStatus]

I'm not sure what all those paragraphs about places and people I've never heard of had to do with the topic of the thread.

It wasn't for you. It was for the other person that wanted to have a conversation that had nothing to do with the the topic of the thread that did recognize several of the names.

this is a case where a fix for a problem spawned many, many, many more problems

Those many, many, many more problems were all things that contributed to the initial problem. You can't fix a problem without addressing what caused it, so this is a bit redundant. Thrive is going to be subjective on rp/night clubs given that they were able to cap buildings before DC Travel even existed in the game as well as Balmung existing and having its entire reputation well before DC Travel. Raiding was killed on 3 data centers for the sake of Aether so thriving isn't an argument there. You're going to need to give an example of thriving that doesn't involve the possibility of people dogpiling on one world/data center.

[NanaWiloh]

We got the recipe for a second aether diabical. One that could actually crash the Aether dc. Lol

[Rabi-Ribi]

This is the worst change they've made since I've started playing this game 4 years ago. During the first week of savage I spent 2-6 hours a day spamming log in queues non-stop with almost no breaks, meanwhile my friends were showing me there was a queue of like 20 players on the world for aether. I would have much rather sit through a 3000 player queue that randomly kicks you out, because that only requires interaction when it does kick you out and it does get you through eventually. Me and my friends almost didn't clear savage week 1 entirely due to these changes and we were stressing out about trying to log in for raid. We've since had to move our reclear times to 3AM instead of 9PM because thats the only time we can comfortably log in and play together.

It's appeared to have improved since the initial launch but its current state is still unacceptable and its causing issues even for players native to their data centers. I'm on crystal and I can't even go to Balmung, not being able to go to Aether was bad but I'm not even safe on my own data center. Another friend of mine spent 3 hours trying to transfer onto balmung today too. I would much rather get randomly kicked out of the game or even have servers crash due to congestion than have these changes in place, with the current design I wouldn't be surprised if people were rule breaking to stay logged in defeating some of the purpose this update was meant to prevent. This is definitely a case of them trying to be too safe for their own good.

I also want to know why they decided the worst possible time to implement these changes, on the start of a savage tier is the MOST important time to be able to data center travel, if they're gonna test out experimental changes like this it should really be done on some casual patch like patch 7.1, That way they could at least see how awful it gets implemented and fix it before ultimate comes out, and most people would have done their BiS from savage reclears by then. It's been 2 weeks now with no response on this thread and I'm afraid that nothings going to be done and that its just gonna be ignored, and people will accept this change despite it being a daily inconvenience to thousands of players.

If anyone is trying to log in spam I highly recommend changing your title screen to ARR/HW/etc. as that will let you get to character select faster than the dawntrail title screen.

[KazukoHimura]

If anyone is trying to log in spam I highly recommend changing your title screen to ARR/HW/etc. as that will let you get to character select faster than the dawntrail title screen.

Okay, that is interesting. I guess it's the timing of the logo coming up? I'd say ARR is the fastest.

[NanaWiloh]

This is the worst change they've made since I've started playing this game 4 years ago. During the first week of savage I spent 2-6 hours a day spamming log in queues non-stop with almost no breaks, meanwhile my friends were showing me there was a queue of like 20 players on the world for aether. I would have much rather sit through a 3000 player queue that randomly kicks you out, because that only requires interaction when it does kick you out and it does get you through eventually. Me and my friends almost didn't clear savage week 1 entirely due to these changes and we were stressing out about trying to log in for raid. We've since had to move our reclear times to 3AM instead of 9PM because thats the only time we can comfortably log in and play together.

It's appeared to have improved since the initial launch but its current state is still unacceptable and its causing issues even for players native to their data centers. I'm on crystal and I can't even go to Balmung, not being able to go to Aether was bad but I'm not even safe on my own data center. Another friend of mine spent 3 hours trying to transfer onto balmung today too. I would much rather get randomly kicked out of the game or even have servers crash due to congestion than have these changes in place, with the current design I wouldn't be surprised if people were rule breaking to stay logged in defeating some of the purpose this update was meant to prevent. This is definitely a case of them trying to be too safe for their own good.

I also want to know why they decided the worst possible time to implement these changes, on the start of a savage tier is the MOST important time to be able to data center travel, if they're gonna test out experimental changes like this it should really be done on some casual patch like patch 7.1, That way they could at least see how awful it gets implemented and fix it before ultimate comes out, and most people would have done their BiS from savage reclears by then. It's been 2 weeks now with no response on this thread and I'm afraid that nothings going to be done and that its just gonna be ignored, and people will accept this change despite it being a daily inconvenience to thousands of players.

If anyone is trying to log in spam I highly recommend changing your title screen to ARR/HW/etc. as that will let you get to character select faster than the dawntrail title screen.

Just want to pass along something. In regards to Balmung, that world and congestion are married 4 with kids and a house. They have never been apart for long periods.

[dododogu]

(shortened for brevity)

i'm sorry i have no idea how to reply to this or make sense of it. it's so insane lol.

anyway, i really wish they would at least be a bit more open about their plans for changes and how they're implementing DC travel since it's become much more utilized and important to players since EW.

one thing i do like about CBU3 is that they do tend to be more "open" about their process than most would, but i feel like they dropped the ball with this...As frustrating as this all is, i think if they at least went over the "how" and "why" they made these choices, it would make me feel a bit more accepting of the changes they've implemented. that would probably be complicated to answer because it's all infrastructure and data stuff your average player wouldn't know or care about, but i think it would make things just a bit less stressful i guess. more transparency is always nice.

[KazukoHimura]

idk how to reply to that it's kinda crazy. get well soon or congrats. i don't know.

anyway, i really wish they would at least be a bit more open about their plans for changes and how they're implementing DC travel since it's become much more utilized and important to players since EW.

one thing i do like about CBU3 is that they do tend to be more "open" about their process than most would, but i feel like they dropped the ball with this...As frustrating as this all is, i think if they at least went over the "how" and "why" they made these choices, it would make me feel a bit more accepting of the changes they've implemented. that would probably be complicated to answer because it's all infrastructure and data stuff your average player wouldn't know or care about, but i think it would make things just a bit less stressful i guess. more transparency is always nice.

I'm in full agreement with you there. I really think that the ball had been dropped since a lot of key players were pulled away for other projects. There's other things that I think the ball was dropped on, but those are for another thread.

[dododogu]

I'm in full agreement with you there. I really think that the ball had been dropped since a lot of key players were pulled away for other projects. There's other things that I think the ball was dropped on, but those are for another thread.

Oh, I totally forgot...but i don't think ffxiv's connectivity stuff would have been affected by xvi's development, would it? that's like a different department i'm guessing. then again, i'm not at SQE and i have no idea who was pushed to what project lol.

[VoidsentStatus]

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Bro, the stories I could tell you xD But nah, if you want to hear the details of things that happened in the past and understand how unituitive certain aspects of the community are, we can hop in VC on discord because it's way too much to type. One of the things people don't intuitively know is that most venues, like ~70-90% including some gambling locations even run negative consistently. A low end venue may only run 3-10mil negative a week. But the high end venues that have the biggest crowds, most of them are running 30-100mil negative a week between staff pay, advertising costs on and off hours as well as entertainment costs, during my era. Songbirds as an example (one of the most famous bard groups) used to run like 5+mil/hr to play at a venue/location. When you have owners in debt, RMT'ing (don't do this), struggling financially as a venue, that suffocates the entire experience. Not only are they stressed, but it can influence the entire business model they have, they can be borderline forced out of their property by the real owners or forced out of management, that stress can carry over to staff, etc. One of my old ex-friends, the Vexia name I mentioned, she ended up purchasing Full Moon, the venue that Asmongold went to when he played FF14, that was ~400Mil in debt and bought it from the previous owner and had to re-arrange everything as a business model because they were horribly failing having to take out loans from people like me but never being able to pay it off. I was in voice chat while she relayed to me how staff was whooping and hollering about staff pay being cut and they were getting like 1-2mil each a night (and this was back when average staff pay was like 25-100k/hr). For some places, those finances are the lifeline to every important relationship and purpose of that venue itself to everyone involved. A lot of venue finances are not extra/profit, they are maintenance until you build enough whales as customers that buy out lifetime packages, buy out the bar for 6+ months etc., or cover debt directly like I did that give you that breathing room. That is one of the many reasons it's not fun from a management perspective. When people get irritated at betrayal about gil, it's not a "I gave you extra money you didn't need" situation, it's a "the reason you aren't stressed and having to gil farm for 6+ hours a day is because of me. this venue would not exist as it does, or would not exist at all, without me." and some venues have had to shut down when they lost that lifeline. Some venue owners get way too comfortable spending other people's money. But that's just to give an idea of things that are not intuitive from an outside perspective.

As for the open about the process bit, while there isn't a lodestone, this is the interview:
23:30 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIxQPKBf0E