[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[CuteBucket]

It is just WILD and BAFFLING to me that during a content drought in an MMO where the only "new" things to do for veterans is Savage raids and/or community ran events and getting together with friends, then take such drastic steps to prevent us from doing ANY of those things without significant hassle.

I guess if your entire raid and friend group has always been on Aether and nowhere else, you're good. But mine isn't, and it sucks.

[VerdeLuck]

Came back for the free game time for returners and the queues are about as bad as I remembered on Dynamis, 15+ minutes for some roulettes as healer, 30-40 minutes on alliance raids. The kicker is now I can't really travel to other DCs to fix that anymore so I have to just eat the long queue times.
Real nice system Square, not a fan of this at all.

[Ardeth]

Clearly, it's time for mega servers.

[Arzalis]

Megaservers would destroy this game's communities overnight. Been there, done that.

Also, they'd have to actually put effort to addressing the housing system to ever consider megaservers. So it's never going to happen. They clearly don't care enough to change that.

[glitteringcosmos]

9:50 am est on a tuesday. this is unacceptable.

image of the queue blacked out in case the forums won't load the picture: https://imgur.com/a/s5yNmYd

[CuteBucket]

And as an Aether player, I can tell you, there are not nearly so many people logged in at that time to warrant this at all. At this point, even though I'm an Aether player, I have been parked mostly on Primal or Dynamis just to try and meet up with my friends to try and do anything together. I decorated my house for Halloween and then realized that half my friends I play with can't even come by to see it.

Nothing makes me want to just say "f*** it" and leave this game more than little moments like that, where I realize the things I used to do just casually with friends can't happen anymore. It's so disheartening.

[xanatosdc]

Once more joining in here to say that this is ridiculous... almost 4 months post release and I still can't properly play with friends.

[Eskat]

This is honestly just so much worse than if they never opened up DC travel in the first place. When I started, I asked my friends which server they played on. They said Cactuar, so I joined on Cactuar. I made new friends on various worlds across Aether, many of whom chose to leave Aether for the housing on other servers. And that was fine, I'd visit them, they'd visit me, we'd all have a good time with it. But now we can't, the promise of a feature of the game was taken from us, and we don't even have the option to take back our own choices because of this. People who moved to Dynamis are just kinda stuck there now, with their weak in game economy, long queues, the lot of it. They moved on the promise of at least still being able to visit their friends, and now that's been taken from them, in exchange for nothing.

[VerdeLuck]

More than shutting down servers for travel, SE needs to do what they did with adventurer in need but for DCs.

Set up a system where the DC with the lowest population at any given time has a boost to gil and xp for all content you do through the Duty Finder while not in a premade group. Encourage people to travel to dynamis to fill out their queues for better rewards.
Time and time again it's been shown that punishing unwanted behavior in players doesn't work, the only thing that does work is rewarding the behavior you do want, which is evening out the DCs populations on any given day so they stop crowding a single DC.

[shiftweave]

I play this game for ultimate raiding, I actively dislike content like Bozja, there is nothing here for me except the ultimates, which I play as often as I can. In EW this was approaching 5-6 times a week. Now in DT it's 1-2 if I'm lucky, and usually I am not. I cannot simply park my character on Aether forever for a few reasons e.g. statics. I feel like I got punked at character creation and have been paying the price ever since. As soon as Aether opens up I will leave my fc and permanently world transfer my character, but there's little to no reason for me to play this game once I'm done with FRU because it's just frustrating.

Is Square even aware of how much the ultimate scene relies on Aether? Why is there no fix for this DC travel issue months after the expac released? This game had the reputation for not having any bugs, yet here is a horrible outstanding issue that wouldn't be acceptable for even one day just sitting around for actual months.

There is no fix for this issue other than cross-dc pf or opening up travel. You can't undo years of raiding culture just by crippling essential features and hoping it works out. There are roleplayers on Aether now and there are raiders on Crystal, and these groups aren't going to be able to fix this issue alone.