[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[strigiformes]

As a roleplayer and event organizer, I will easily say that RP was the single thing that kept me subscribed to this game during the post-launch patches of Endwalker. If I'm unable to host my events, see my friends, or find groups to play with due to this change, I see very little reason to continue playing this game. People have lives and jobs. We can't all log in at 4 AM to transfer servers and then /stay online/ for a group meeting at 8 PM. These changes need addressed sooner rather than later before the mass amount of people unable to play this game the way they used to go find something else.

This has thus far been my experience trying to attend events that previously I had no problem getting to. We've tried to adapt to this new system by "leaving the house early," so to speak, and even that isn't enough. Some overworld events can get moved around, sure, but the ones tied to housing that previously had very strong, consistent turnouts the last several years? Those are in jeopardy. The smaller events that were just getting off the ground and gaining support? Those also deserve to thrive in the community! These restrictions won't even give them the chance.

The rp community is in the beginnings of a crisis. I've heard from multiple friends at this point, talking about unsubscribing for some undetermined time (possibly permanently) because the social aspect is the game for them outside of the MSQ. It's disheartening and demoralizing to have one of our favorite hobbies turned so sour because of this. As horsebirds said earlier in the thread, I stay subscribed to this game because I like spending time together and having fun with my friends, but if I can do neither of those things then it becomes harder and harder to justify the monthly expense. I've been here since 2013 and this is the lowest I've felt about the game and the devs' decisions in a decade.

To bring up a suggestion I made earlier in this thread: at least institute a secondary queue system, if you aren't going to do away with the restrictions entirely. Even when I'm commuting and stuck in traffic, I know roughly how many cars are in front of me. There are queues for everything else; why not this?

[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.

[Starstriker198]

Dear SE
From feed back on this and everyone in community rp, venue owner and players who have friends on other data centers. People Wanted no cap and travel between centers peacefully and small group of people got upset. But with cross region travel coming soon and more players coming to ff14 through consoles and someday next switch console. It made all of us unhappy with caps on servers and data center travel. So please for all players across eu and usa reverse it on next update please.

[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.

[Veladrys]

A couple weeks in now and I definitely see more of the problem than I'd initially thought in my previous posts. I've struggled to get to Balmung for other events that I'm a part of or help run, or even just for regular RP. Even after peak hours, it can be tedious at best to try and world hop - I tried to go to Balmung at midnight EST the other day and it just wasn't possible. It's extremely frustrating.

[1313]

A couple weeks in now and I definitely see more of the problem than I'd initially thought in my previous posts. I've struggled to get to Balmung for other events that I'm a part of or help run, or even just for regular RP. Even after peak hours, it can be tedious at best to try and world hop - I tried to go to Balmung at midnight EST the other day and it just wasn't possible. It's extremely frustrating.

you have to go between 4-6am eastern. otherwise, forget it.

[erroch]

I figured I'd chime in here. I'm that poor sod that maintains the FFXIV RP Event Calendar, and helps maintain a few role-play events and does a lot of encouraging open world / walk up role-play.

This change is, frankly, an anathema to what role-play in the open world is.

At the heart of it, organizing anything social and open is about openness, discoverability, and consistency. These are the bulging blocks of community, and what causes people to return to make lasting connections.

Currently we have lost this.

This change is slowly killing organized social activities. To consistently get to any server in the Crystal data center we're having people need to log in hours ahead of time and spam the aetherites in a similar manner to the old housing plot purchasing debacle. Even then it is a dice roll if you'll be able to get to any particular server in a reasonable amount of time. It’s become nearly impossible do some open world bit of roleplay on Buscarron's on Balmung for a few hours and still drop in on someone's new gathering over on Goblin in the late evening.

Since Heavensward, we have been encouraged to spread to other servers, with world visit being the promise that we'd still be able to play with each other, both socially and otherwise.

This update is punishing us for listening and spreading out instead of sticking to a single overloaded hub server.

Some of these impacted groups have spent nearly a decade building their communities, and now they wonder what next?

In the end, we’ll survive, and roleplay will happen. But this is damaging very long running communities and outright smaller ones.

[VoidsentStatus]

A couple weeks in now and I definitely see more of the problem than I'd initially thought in my previous posts. I've struggled to get to Balmung for other events that I'm a part of or help run, or even just for regular RP. Even after peak hours, it can be tedious at best to try and world hop - I tried to go to Balmung at midnight EST the other day and it just wasn't possible. It's extremely frustrating.

Balmung specifically is fighting Quicksands that literally has people camping the aetherytes on other worlds on Crystal spam clicking trying to visit. That specifice prime time is way past midnight probably because you're fighting degens and people that purposely afk there all day from every data center. Every Balmung has to find a way to relocate because they're going to stay congested even longer than other congested worlds even after the general population leaves the game.

[Arzalis]

Balmung specifically is fighting Quicksands that literally has people camping the aetherytes on other worlds on Crystal spam clicking trying to visit. That specifice prime time is way past midnight probably because you're fighting degens and people that purposely afk there all day from every data center. Every Balmung has to find a way to relocate because they're going to stay congested even longer than other congested worlds even after the general population leaves the game.

If only we didn't have a housing system that forced people to stay on the server they are on. Alas.

Forcing players to do a certain thing like this is always going to be worse than understanding why people do what they do and trying to cater to it or work around it. SE has, for some reason, decided to take one of the worst options.

[angienessyo]

I think they just have it set to where if there's any queue at all you can't visit. Someone in my static was trying to come to Cactuar from Primal and we had a 15 person queue but it wouldn't let him into the world. I'm pretty sure the servers can handle more than 15 additional people.