Quote Originally Posted by VoidsentStatus View Post
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.