[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[CuteBucket]

I'm hoping since it's not Tuesday Reset I can actually go to Primal today for mogtomes. I did eventually get on the other day, but I had to wait until much later in the night and didn't get to play as much. Lately my static has just been meeting on Dynamis to raid since we can all get there, but we wanted to do some PvP too. But nope, can't raid on Primal and can't PvP on Dynamis, so we have to keep hopping around and waiting just to get together and play the stuff we wanted to play, when this was never an issue before.

[KitaiAryik]

Even better, some of the mogtomes events require doing Alexander raids for the current weekly or Treasure Map groups for the Ultimog, with group content in general making up most of the standard objectives. Suffice to say some people have had a hell of a time trying to get a lot of those things to pop on Maduin during certain times so they try to data center hop and... WHOOPS, can't enter Aether/Primal/Crystal for most of the day! I only finally got my own Alexander weekly done recently (on Primal at like 1AM) because I joined someone else's Alexander and people slowly jumped in and jumped out for the next 2 hours until there was no one left that needed it. By comparison, my own Alexander PF on Maduin went for *40* minutes with no takers and it was like, only 8:50 PM by that point, and between 9PM-1AM I just did the rest of my roulettes and got some Rival Wings done while I was still on Primal.

It really is night and day between Dynamis queues and A/P/C ones, or how Primal activity has started reaching Aether levels of "you can still find people queuing late on the weekday" because more and more people are getting into and camping there when they can't reach Aether. This is the first mogtome event where people on Dynamis *can't* just easily data center travel to complete objectives and it's as painful as you can imagine, and while you *could* just do GATEs... it gets kinda lonely being one of the only people wandering around Gold Saucer (and also boring depending on the GATE).

this is causing more problems then they thought out with the restrictions here. and removing the afk timer when still insisting on said restrictions is another mistake since ppl can just hop over early morning/very late night and just afk there so they themselves don't have to fight the travel restrictions in place which makes things worse all around, specially for those on dynamis

[Eskat]

Another day stuck in DC prison for the crime of wanting to game with my friends who spread out across the DCs because there was no reason not to. I tried to wait a while and hoped I'd just get used to it, but the complete inability to even reliably plan if you can get somewhere or no makes it an inevitably, and consistently frustrating experience.

[Eskat]

Unfortunately the only way for scattered friend groups to consolidate themselves is to transfer to the same data center (and preferably the same world within that data center), but it costs money if one's target is Primal or Crystal (and you only have 4 choices each), and Aether isn't an option at all.

That leaves only Dynamis, but there's clearly not enough incentive to make people do it, including there being plenty of housing plots for those who are worried about giving up the one they already have on Aether/Primal/Crystal. Square-Enix may be operating under the false assumption that people will get fed up enough to free transfer when there's an equal, if not greater, chance that people just stop playing until data center travel goes back to normal ...if it ever does, assuming this is indeed being deliberately done to force player re-distribution by making Dynamis the only option for group consolidation (minus Seraph which is apparently already considered "populated enough" by their unknown metric).

Of course, this doesn't really consider what else would get left behind in the process. So yeah, great, someone manged to get all their world-spanning friends on board ...but none of their free companies or venues want to make the jump, so one *still* ends up having to part ways, and for someone on Aether its probably especially grueling to consider because the data center is the hardest one to get back into after you leave.

Yeah, my static formed before the changes, and most of us were Aether, one on Primal, but with DC travel being opened, a lot of our members moved to Dynamis for the easy access to housing. And all the members of my static, even the ones on Dynamis are now just suffering. Because this hasn't really helped Dynamis to their perspective. Queues still take forever to pop over there, the Dynamis economy is still slow... nothing's really improved for them even with this in theory pushing people towards Dynamis, the reality seems like it's lacking.

So now we're all stuck raiding on Dynamis, which is mostly fine, until someone can't make a day, and then we're down 1 person and it's near impossible to find a fill in PF because Dynamis is indeed still dead, and it's still basically impossible to get anything to happen in PF. We've tried occasionally to just go somewhere else, it doesn't have to be Aether, but so often everything else is already locked by the time we're raiding so we're just marooned on Dynamis.

[KitaiAryik]

It certainly feels like a "soft lock down" for Dynamis, where instead of being barred from DC traveling at all like they did earlier, they've made it difficult to find somewhere else to go so I feel stranded until later in the day. But now there's also the added oof that it's affecting Aether/Primal/Crystal folks from playing with each other as well (whereas before the previous lock down didn't affect them at all).

All of this during a mogtome event no less where some of the better ways to farm them is all group content and yet a lot of people can't do any of it. It's just... UGH.

which is causing more problems for everyone here. where 90-95% of the mogtome is grp content and only solo stuff is fates/gold saucer. everything else is a "get fkd" situation that now affects everyone, worst of all for those on dynamis.

[Marche100]

I guarantee if Aether is opened up to new characters/character transfers at any point in this expansion, they are going to get an unprecedented number of people wanting to have their characters on Aether. Why have your home world be anywhere else at this point? If you're on Aether, you're as free as a bird. You can go practically anywhere you want, anytime you want. If you're on any other data center, good luck getting into Aether, and god help you if you need to do any sort of content (like Diadem) that forces you to be on your home data center. If you're not on Aether, you're a second-class citizen.

To be honest, I'm not sure I have much faith in them rolling things back at this point, and if Aether does open up, I'm seriously considering transferring my character over. If this is really how they want things to be, fine. You reap what you sow, Square Enix. Enjoy Aether becoming even more densely populated and exacerbating the problems even further, I guess.

[Eskat]

I guarantee if Aether is opened up to new characters/character transfers at any point in this expansion, they are going to get an unprecedented number of people wanting to have their characters on Aether. Why have your home world be anywhere else at this point? If you're on Aether, you're as free as a bird. You can go practically anywhere you want, anytime you want. If you're on any other data center, good luck getting into Aether, and god help you if you need to do any sort of content (like Diadem) that forces you to be on your home data center. If you're not on Aether, you're a second-class citizen.

To be honest, I'm not sure I have much faith in them rolling things back at this point, and if Aether does open up, I'm seriously considering transferring my character over. If this is really how they want things to be, fine. You reap what you sow, Square Enix. Enjoy Aether becoming even more densely populated and exacerbating the problems even further, I guess.

Being an Aether player myself, even we're feeling it. Primal is kinda the main server to do PvP related events, like Rival Wings for example. I'll admit I'm still lucky as I still can get to Primal if I try late enough at night, it's a smaller issue than people on other DCs are feeling for sure.

Regardless, the point still stands, the second the gates open up on any kind of transfer, Aether will get flooded, and at this point, I welcome all with open arms. Let every square inch of Aether be as densely packed as the Balmung Quicksands, I am ready to greet all of my new neighbors. Ironically, I basically only play on Dynamis at this point because all of my friends can't get to Aether anymore. It'd be kind of a homecoming for me too.

[Andanie]

Just coming back. This is still a problem. As an rper it can still be hard to get onto Balmung- the server most events are held. It's definitely a bit better now for me- but it's not for raiders either. Locking all the realms like this is still insanely frustrating.

[glitteringcosmos]

This is still absolute garbage. I moved my character from Aether to Dynamis for a multitude of reasons, but helping the congestion was one of them. I feel like I've been penalized for doing so, as getting on to Aether at any point other than from aroun 6am to 9am EST is impossible. I was up at 4am EST last night and STILL could not get in. Making the congestion restrictive of creating characters and transferring them there I can understand, but the heavy restrictions on just visiting is gutting a lot of social aspects of the game for the players who want to transfer out but still play with their friends on Aether. And as Marche said above, what's going to happen is the minute a world on Aether opens up for transfers, they're going to have a massive influx of players flocking to move their characters to Aether to get around all the restrictions and exacerbate the problem. The "solution" they came up with is making things worse.

[NOODS]

Cloud servers and cross-DC queueing can't come any faster. I've never had my character on Aether but my entire raid static is on Aether and it's frustrating for everyone to have to transfer to Dynamis just to get our raid group together when I'm the only one there.

Beyond that, joining Hunt Trains or PvP events as well as other social/content related events becomes more and more difficult as I often can't move around much. And it's not just isolated to Aether either, If there's a PvPrimal event happening, Primal often ends up fully congested and I can't participate. I understand the why's but the results have ended up counter-intuitive post expansion release.