Quote Originally Posted by xanatosdc View Post
There is nothing positive about this change. It is GUTTING the social scene. In a social game.
That's a very "don't care, got mine" take.
The fundamental dilemma here is that different parts of the community need very different things.

The non-gameplay social part of the game, including stuffe like RP, need DC travel to be freely possible, otherwise you are tearing apart communities that have formed over the past expansion.
The gameplay part of the game needs DC travel to be limited at least for now, else you end up with dead datacentres with long queue times and just flatly being unable to do certain content on them, savage and ultimate raids in particular; and thereby forcing anyone who still subjects themselves to DC travel and becoming a part of the problem to a plethora of disadvantages over people actually "native" to a given DC.
Both of these cause frustration and anger and do hurt the game. Which one causes more damage, I have no data to say.

And until they can either implement Cross-DC Party Finder, or remove DC-travel limitations such as no FC buffs, no retainers, etc., all you can do is pick one side and brave the fallout and negative consequences for the game that come with it.
Of course, Square made it a lot worse by exposing a functional problem in the DC travel system with this measure, with people getting stuck "between" DCs, which is a bug they ought to fix as quickly as they can.

In trying to regulate DC travel, Square went for using a system they already had in place, that being the DC travel capacity. There are perhaps other stop-gap solution that shouldn't be too difficult to implement until they can fix the more fundamental issues in 2-3 years that I'd like to see them try. Something that doesn't require a rework of server architecture and could be accomplished with a single extra check somewhere, and is less obstructive to the non-gameplay parts of the game.
Preventing people from making PFs on other DCs (but still being able to join them) might be a decent start. Maybe also preventing a party from queuing if more than 50% of its members come from a different DC than the one they are queueing on. There are options left that I hope they explore.

For what it's worth, even though the current state of the fix is a buggy mess, I am glad they are attempting to resolve the situation, cause the pre-DT state of PF was absolutely untenable.