When will Dynamis ever compare…?

[Gember]

I think the main issue is that they released Dynamis as a new datacenter while releasing datacenter travel roughly around the same time. It didn't have a single chance to grow all throughout Endwalker due to the open travel. Nowadays they sort of have a restriction to help it grow, but honestly; Endwalker just taught a bunch of players that its okay to do different activities on different datacenters; which sadly is a slow death for a lot of unpopulated servers. The amount of complaining that the worlds aren't opening up is a good indication of that. I think SE had good intentions when they implemented DC travel, but the playerbase ruined it.

[Ryaze]

The big problem is that Data Center travel and some DCs being known for certain activities(Aether for raiding, Primal for PvP, Balmung exactly for ERP, etc) means that if you are a Dynamis character and want to do those things, the community encourages you to go to those DCs instead of staying in Dynamis, so even if Dynamis has a high enough number of raiders to sustain a population, it's never going to materialize because those raiders are all in Aether or Primal, it leads to a vicious cycle that is really difficult to break, and it isn't even truly SE's fault, they recent DC travel limitations were meant to discourage this behavior, but they just made inconvenient to play the game.

They'd have to do something to encourage raiding in your home DC, positive reinforcement over negative ones, but I couldn't tell you what that is.

I will say this isn't 100% player perception's fault though. When SE broke apart Aether and Primal to make the Crystal DC I was on Brynhildr at the time. People looked at the stats for raiding clear rates and saw that servers that had the highest clear rates were put on Aether, mid ranges were on Primal, and absolute bottom of the barrel + Balmung were put on Crystal. Even at the time Balmung had a heavy notoriety for RP. While the subsequent free transfers that occurred and the mass exodus from Crystal servers reinforced the stereotypes, it was clear SE was trying to present the DCs with a purpose of player activity. This is 100% SE's fault. Instead of trying to average out server clusters they put very clear bias of activity towards DC composition.

[Jeeqbit]

I will say this isn't 100% player perception's fault though. When SE broke apart Aether and Primal to make the Crystal DC I was on Brynhildr at the time. People looked at the stats for raiding clear rates and saw that servers that had the highest clear rates were put on Aether, mid ranges were on Primal, and absolute bottom of the barrel + Balmung were put on Crystal.

The clear rates probably reflected how populated they were, for the most part, though.

Balmung was flooded at the time. Except for split seconds on Thursday, it was virtually impossible to make a character on there even when I started the game 10 years ago! So people did paid transfers instead. I created a linkshell on there in Heavensward and it filled to 128 people in 2 days. Most of them had just transferred to Balmung.

It was then that I knew Balmung was a bubble and it was going to burst if SE didn't do something. So they split it away and paired it with a lot of notoriously dead servers (logically, dead servers will have low clear rates). Then Balmung would be able to "spread" across these dead servers using the World Visit system, which was actually successful because all the worlds feel populated on most data centers (except the new ones obviously).

Even at the time Balmung had a heavy notoriety for RP.

You're right though, because of Balmung being the RP server, the side effect of bursting Balmung's bubble and giving them their own data center, is that they spread across all of Crystal making it the "RP data center".

[CuteBucket]

The current DC restrictions have only made this worse. Now being stuck on Dynamis feels like a punishment and I hear Dynamis players wanting to transfer back to any of the other big three as soon as they can, because they transferred there under the assumption that they would still get to see and play with their friends across all the other DCs, which isn't true anymore. And it also feels like a punishment for me on Aether who made friends across different DCs in Endwalker and has been raiding with them since the beginning of Pandaemonium now that we all finally could get together, because they can't come ever visit me and my house and FC anymore, I can only go visit them.

People want to play with other like minded people, and will find ways of doing this. If they learn that X place has the best of Y activity, they will go there. That's just how people operate. If SE really wants people to go to Dynamis, they need to make it worthwhile. Free transfer and bonus EXP isn't worthwhile for a lot of folks. Shuttering Aether and half the other DCs at primetime just makes going to Dynamis feel like a punishment, like you lost out getting to play on the active servers and are stuck there now, which only makes people want to get out the first opportunity they can.

Dynamis needs its own server identity to thrive. Unfortunately, I don't know if that will ever happen, because right now identity seems to be "sprouts and housing land." I think the best solution would be to make a Cross DC Party Finder. Duty Finder would still pull from local players, but anyone anywhere could make a PF and run raids and harder content from anywhere. Being on Dynamis wouldn't feel like a mistake or punishment then.