[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[horsebirds]

Back here again to report that this problem continues to impact me, friends of mine, and the events we've been attending. An overworld event on Balmung had to be moved an hour before the event started because so few players could access the server. Among our little group we spent anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour trying and failing to travel between worlds, over and over and over. The randomness and lack of transparency make the system incredibly frustrating.

I'm not gonna speak for anyone else's experience in the game, and for best results I recommend that no one else does so either. But I'll keep sharing my own experience here whenever I have something to add. Right now that experience is that this is still really demoralizing. It makes it hard to plan events, or even plan to attend events. It makes it hard to reliably play with friends. It adds an element of difficulty and uncertainty to things that we're only doing so that we can spend time together and have fun, and I stay subscribed to this game because I like spending time together and having fun!

There are plenty of things about XIV that I like, but if it weren't for the people I know here I just don't think I'd have stayed interested in it for this long. At the end of the day the social scene is why I'm still here. I stick around every month because I like to see people and go places and take part in communities that have been built across DCs, and that's been getting harder and harder for me to do.

[MartinFreepaw]

I do a lot of events on FFXIV, primarily the crystal data center but i've been asked to do events on aether/primal before.

I run mostly roleplay events, but i've done charities, stream events and artparties etc.
I've accidentally shut down wards, and have closed many houses due to congestion.
I'm no stranger to closed off worlds from before SB, as i've been around doing this for more than 10ish years or so. It's my hobby, and I enjoy making community events for the RPers and others.

There has always been an issue with congestion, A normal zone has a limit of 300ish players but I believe since DT we've seen those numbers go up (Snake fate waiting)
A large house can hold about 120 players, A medium can hold up to 83 or so and a small can hold around 50 or so in the house before you can no longer have people come inside and people get stuck in fc rooms lol.

We've also found in our many years that if too many people crowd an Aetheryte or stand outside a house, you can't travel out of your house or use that aetheryte as the game thinks the instance is at max capacity. (Work around was to teleport outside of the area and come join the group hoofin it style)

That being said, i'm used to dealing with a certain amount of frustration and as an event runner hearing people be upset at not being able to make it to events. I've heard it from 'But i'm not on balmung/mateus etc so i can't make it '
'But i'm not on Crystal dc so I can't make it '

In most issues of past congestions woes there was work arounds. The DC travel currently frankly reminds me old housing from shb where you clicked your heart out and that frankly is incredibly frustrating to me. There doesn't seem to be as much work around for the DC Travel restrictions, itself.

For venue rp, the last few I've done since the changes were 'light' but expected for a new savage drop and new expac, so I wasn't aware of the other venue owners suffering even less turn outs than I did. And generally when I see something going on to this magnitude I ask/reach out and see what is causing a decline and everyone agreed it was DC Travel bans.

So it really does seem that us trying to group together for activity are really finding it frustrating, as right now the only work around seems to be 'if you can data hop earlier to get around prime times and hang out until event time you have a better chance.' Which feeds into the issue of congestion for everyone.

There doesn't seem to be any workaround outside of somehow convincing the playerbase themselves to stop afking in clumps on servers not their homeworld. Which frankly isn't going to happen, they are not getting out of their chairs.

A pretty wordy tl;dr of
I've experienced this annoyance, and i'm experiencing it again in the weirdest of ways and SE please can you give us more server space as thats the only thing I can think of to fix the issues.

[VoidsentStatus]

For venue rp, the last few I've done since the changes were 'light' but expected for a new savage drop and new expac, so I wasn't aware of the other venue owners suffering even less turn outs than I did. And generally when I see something going on to this magnitude I ask/reach out and see what is causing a decline and everyone agreed it was DC Travel bans.

I'm thinking a small implosion is happening. Before Endwalker, there were venues but nowhere near as many. When Empy came out for extra housing and DC Travel unlocked, the community got flooded with venues, with, ironically enough, nightclub clones that later got memed on. Everyone wanted to open a venue, later on everyone wanted to become a DJ, and both have seen reputation/quality decline over the years in the non-rp community eyes that don't know how widely they can swing in variance. Now that DC Travel is locking up people, you have all those extra venues without the population that fueled them to be alive in the first place. I would assume that over time, most of the smaller one's that don't have a strong core community will eventually close and things will semi-go back to how they were pre-Endwalker.

[MartinFreepaw]

Thats a lot of words that circle to nothing and i'm not feeling inclined to humor them.

I hope you have the day you deserve to have

[voidlorn]

I'm thinking a small implosion is happening. Before Endwalker, there were venues but nowhere near as many. When Empy came out for extra housing and DC Travel unlocked, the community got flooded with venues, with, ironically enough, nightclub clones that later got memed on. Everyone wanted to open a venue, later on everyone wanted to become a DJ, and both have seen reputation/quality decline over the years in the non-rp community eyes that don't know how widely they can swing in variance. Now that DC Travel is locking up people, you have all those extra venues without the population that fueled them to be alive in the first place. I would assume that over time, most of the smaller one's that don't have a strong core community will eventually close and things will semi-go back to how they were pre-Endwalker.

The vast majority of venue-based rp isn't just nightclubs and DJ stuff. It's story-driven events and locations built by people and communities who dedicate a lot of time and energy to the stories and connections created by writing together! Generalizing everything into "ew nightclubs, good thing they're dying" is demeaning and dismissive of other people's experiences and the passion we collectively put into this game's roleplaying community.

[VoidsentStatus]

Generalizing everything into "ew nightclubs, good thing they're dying" is demeaning and dismissive of other people's experiences.

Listen, you're talking to someone who has talked to and been friends with venues owners since 2019/2020 and earlier, some of which ran venues 3+ years before that even. I don't need a history lesson that venues aren't just nightclubs when I ran a venue before they even existed, before DJ's even played at venues. Before giveaways even broke 5mil. My point, is that things got worse, objectively over time for the community as a whole, and generic stereotypes from the bad apples has ran over to other areas of the community. Nightclubs are not the vast majority of the rp community, but they are the worst offenders of having unncessary additions. There are unncessary cafe's, there are unnecessary bath houses, there are unnecessary lounges, there are unncessary gambling locations. Every RP venue community has clones, nsfw and sfw alike. And if you talk to OG's, a lot of these places shouldn't even be open to begin with because they added nothing unique to the community. They added PF bloat, they added giveaway spam just for opening sake and never contributed to the community outside of openings. They added staff wage competition inflating the cost of running a venue to over 4x what it started as. So no, I am not going to shed tears over venues that fall into that category. The one's that survive will be the one's that were actually unique and have the resources and community backing them because they added something important to the community or the one's that don't care about having a smaller population at their openings because they did it for fun like how roleplay originally started. When you would go into an immersive roleplay venue that barely had 10-20 people and you were happy and cozy and people didn't mind making alts to go to venues. You have multiple housing wards fully empty on Dynamis, and pfff 30-50% of OCE wards completely empty. If you have a "community" that happened to be on a congested world that's hard to get to like say Balmung and you can't afford/crowdfund 10-25mil to relocate, something is wrong. You rebuild/relocate like other venues have already done. What's going to kill a lot of venues is that they cared about the traffic that isn't free anymore. If people manually decorated, I'd have a little more sympathy, but knowing people can click copy and paste designs in 10min for any house, that's just a gil check at this point. Even the leveling process is only level 50 which is 1 day of work given the XP buffs. You may be inconvenienced, but you aren't killed by any means. The only people killed are the clones that didn't build a community during the time they had or the people that cared about numbers and not the actual roleplay.