[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[fourzero]

First ever Forum post, because I'm literally stuck unable to play the game when I'd had zero issues with Dawntrail launch previously

I've been trying to return to my home world - not even travel somewhere else - for exactly past hour and constantly getting getting error 505 and 2021. It only NOW just let me in.
Why not at least give homeworlders priority, or a way to cancel out of DC travel and return to the world you were originally in?
If nothing else, at least redirect me to a different world in the same DC that I can actually log into to play in a cross-world party, or let me log into a different character...?

I'm really wondering what exactly this change is trying to accomplish...? If people are trying to play together specifically, a change like this is going to inherently split parties, which is pretty disastrous on Savage patch day. If you can' cancel out of DC travel, how exactly are you supposed to coordinate where your party will go?

I don't know, guys, I feel like this change wasn't well thought out :P

[sylphlands]

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.

I'd rather take up my gripes with the company I give money to than the players who used a system that the company put in place. They created DC travel and players took them up on it. Now people are hardlocked out of logging in because they happened to DC travel. This is going to have a terrible effect players who travel for socializing and RP venues, not just raiders going to Aether or whatever.

[kajv95]

It's just ridiculous. You can't force people to go back to "the way it was" because every region made a (reasonable!) decision to merge their raid communities together.

It's messing with every single type of players. From the hypercasuals who found new connections while talking random things in Limsa, to the people who simply played with real life friends who were literally barred from making their characters on the same world due to lockdowns and decided to make the most of it with DC travel, all the way down to the RP community who basically keep this game funded as it is now and the raiders who went cross DC because they literally let the pf woes sit that way for more than 2 years.

Do I like having to go to move DCs to raid? No. But I'll gladly take that annoyance over screwing with every single social facet this game has.

[Rogovi]

There was very little thought put into the actual repercussions of this change. All it does is punish players that decided to make friends or join raid groups outside of their data center. Punishing players for using a game feature to play and interact with more people in an MMO just doesn't make sense. All it does is segment the community into their own little server ecosystems, making it so data center travel might as well just not exist at all.

I was lucky enough to log in early enough to travel to my static's data center for raid tonight and now I am actually terrified to log out as there is a good chance that I will not be able to log back into their data center for our next raid night.

I data center travel every single raid night in order to raid so I do not see a problem with Aether being the server everyone piles onto to use party finder, especially if the alternative is to seriously inconvenience every single cross data center group in the game whether they be hard core raid groups or casual social groups.

If you want to actually fix people piling into aether for party finder then the solution is cross data center party finder, and if you are worried about people having to data center travel for duty roulette then consider incentivizing people with some extra experience or tomes for using duty roulette on their home world.

This change is the most anti-fun change this game has introduced for both the casuals and hard core players and does nothing but make me frustrated to try and play with my friends.

[VoidsentStatus]

the solution is cross data center party finder, and if you are worried about people having to data center travel for duty roulette then consider incentivizing people with some extra experience or tomes for using duty roulette on their home world.
.

They already mentioned both of these and why they won't work/aren't preferred.
The first is 2-3+ years of resources assuming it's even possible. And they have to weigh all of that time against something that's more beneficial to the game.
The second just shifts the data center that everyone loads into including overwhelming the native people's login queue timers.

They literally talked about shutting off cross data center on stream as one of the solutions if things came down to it because at the end of the day, breaking up statics and venues is better having 75% of your region with no access to current raid tier PF content. If people actually handled the responsibility of data center travel properly and just visited other worlds instead of staying there all day and doing everything from there content wise, we wouldn't have been in this situation. Aether had 3-5k logins at Dawntrail with cross data center disabled. Their servers would've been massacred if it was triple by travel. They need to shut off people grouping up and have them spread out for hardware stability and overall content health.

[Sove92]

We live in a time where SE self-DoS's their own service, and it's not even a server struggle, like back in EW launch. And even in those EW days, you could at least get in queue...

Now it's simply because of an arbitrary decision that has nothing to do with actual server load.

[CuteBucket]

Logged in to start savage raiding with my static earlier. We can't. We started our static in early Endwalker and have people from three different datacenters in our team. We were prepared to be on Dynamis to raid, we go there often anyway, but today we can't even do that. Everyone who wasn't already on the server from last night can't get on. It's been almost an hour and no one has been able to get to Dynamis to start raiding.

After the trashfire that was the Dawntrail MSQ, raiding with my friends and the social community scene of the game were the only things keeping me from unsubbing. If this isn't fixed VERY SOON, then that's it, I'm done, I'm out. The story went to shit and I can't even play the game with my friends anymore.

[CidHeiral]

They created DC travel and players took them up on it.

This is the same justification people use every time they game the system and eventually get checked. "Oh well you created the alliance raid roulette the way it is so why shouldn't I cheese the ilvl? WTF YOU FIXED IT THIS IS AN OUTRAGE THE GAME IS RUINED!!1!"

This is going to have a terrible effect players who travel for socializing and RP venues, not just raiders going to Aether or whatever.

Not as terrible as what the Aether dogpile was doing to the rest of the game so it's a net positive.

[xoci]

I (and many other people) went about static hunting for this savage tier under the assumption that world and data center travel would work like it has up to 7.01, and formed groups consisting of players from different data centers. However, the newly implemented world/dc travel changes make it really difficult, if not impossible for these cross dc raid groups to actually meet up to raid.

I understand that the changes are intended to even out player population, but this should have had at least several weeks prior notice before implementation so people would know to form groups consisting only of people from the same data center, and definitely should not have been spontaneously implemented the same patch as savage release.

(on a different note, i asked a friend on primal to make my raid gear for this tier and now i cant go pick it up!)

[Roehann]

We live in a time where SE self-DoS's their own service, and it's not even a server struggle, like back in EW launch. And even in those EW days, you could at least get in queue...

Now it's simply because of an arbitrary decision that has nothing to do with actual server load.

Agreed! I am stuck in limbo myself.. Can't log into any server, any world, not even my home world.. Got caught in a data center transfer... SE if you aren't going to let us travel, then just stop us at the door, don't let us get away from home and THEN shut us down..