[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[Kit_Lakshmi]

I mean, while I understand being with your friends is what you want, that's what caused problems, so the more you and your friends fight against the devs, the hard they're just going to screw everyone over including you. ... [snip because of character limit] ... You can keep doing what humans do, and they're just gonna keep doing what devs do.

To be more direct, had DC travel to Dynamis not been botched with the release of the changes in 7.05, my group of friends would have continued to chose Dynamis as our place to play together. Even if we were looking forward to getting together on Aether, we would have chosen any location that involved less risk. So if the underpopulated world servers can be traveled to reliably, that would be sufficient for what my group of friends are looking for. I think the devs can make this happen, and they may already be working on this despite their silence.

That being said, it wouldn't help the RP community. A different approach would be needed.

In regards to calls for players to take the initiative to relieve the strain on congested data centers, I consider it unrealistic to expect hundreds of thousands of customers to change their behavior in significant ways when the implementation of new systems is clumsy, e.g. large portions of populations leaving friends to switch home data centers when newly implemented barriers severely impede certain types of cross-DC interactions that players have come to enjoy. The system as released with 7.05 likely discouraged many players from shifting their gameplay away from congested data centers. The devs can address these issues as the onus is on the business to develop their product in ways that better appeal to their paying customers. I don't expect players to get everything we want, conflicting interests make that impossible, but the devs are more likely to steer resources and development in ways that appeal to more players if they pay attention to the various criticism and praise from players.

I believe the devs are genuinely trying to improve what is a complex web of mmo gameplay while trying to minimize a heavy-handed approach. And I am getting the impression pieces of this new DC travel system are quietly being worked on. My posts in this thread are my attempt to communicate what specifically has sucked in my recent experiences, describe why my friends and I choose what we choose despite restrictions, and hope that there's some invisible funnel that somehow places a conglomeration of player comments in the ear of someone on the dev team.

[VoidsentStatus]

..

That's the misunderstanding. You're not supposed to be able to go to Dynamis reliably anymore. If you could, that would just shift the problem. You aren't supposed to be going anywhere consistently and for a long time period because that is what causes problems wherever you go, even outside of running content. That severely impedes cross-DC interactions is because that very activity impeded home-DC interactions that people had enjoyed for 5-10+ years compared to the 3 for DC Travel. This happened because that new interaction is not top of the priority list.

"quietly being worked on" -> Agreed. Because we have no idea what the traveler or visitor limit is, and they get to set it anytime they want, and we don't even know if they need a maintenance to change it. The only thing they posted is relativity notes on the worlds in terms of "decreased or "increased", but not what the "Normal" amount is that can be shifted at any time. We don't even know if "Normal" exists per Data Center or is it shared per Region, or is Normal for that world. There's a lot of assumptions we have to make, but the one assumption I won't make is that they're going to backpeddle and make things easier because of complaints that could've been predicted by a 3-year old.