How Square Enix can solve both data center travel and ping/routing issues for NA

[mana-burner]

TL;DR: Spread NA DCs out. The playerbase will naturally distribute itself evenly for better ping so Aether is no longer the PF hub. Nobody is punished and everybody wins.

The Problem - Half-assed solutions to what was a small inconvenience result in new issues and exacerbate the original problem in the long run:

Ever since data center travel was implemented, raiders have gravitated towards Aether in search of a livelier party finder and many players from Dynamis, the newest data center, regularly traveled away for faster duty finder queues. Unfortunately, this mindset of Aether being the raider server and Dynamis being dead was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so it became difficult for many people to do some activities on their home servers. It wasn't a terrible system because the process of traveling between any data centers was generally quick and easy, but there were some small inconveniences like not having access to retainers or linkshells that many players would endlessly complain about. Square Enix has made attempts to solve this that haven't panned out.

In 7.0, Square Enix temporarily limited data center travel for North American players so that they could only access Dynamis and Materia. This had the benefit of making Dynamis and Materia more active than they have ever been and it worked fine in the interim before the savage patch. However it could never last. You can't introduce a feature like the ability to play on any server in the region and then gut it permanently like that. For example, roleplayers might be able to meet up with their RP partners on Dynamis or Materia, but they would be disappointed if they permanently lost access to RP venues that they spent the last two years socializing in. Although obviously this was only intended as a temporary measure during the new expansion.

With the release of 7.05 they rolled back the 7.0 restrictions and introduced a new system in which servers categorized as "congested" have a drastically reduced capacity for wanderers and travelers. This makes it practically impossible to travel to many servers during most of the day. Even a standard world can become restricted during peak hours for travelers if it is on the same logical data center as a congested world. While it did keep party finder active outside of Aether for the recent savage tier a bit longer than normal, there are some serious long-term concerns to be had about this.

[mana-burner]

Unlike when Dynamis was the only NA data center available to all NA players, any server is now technically "accessible" even while congested. This has resulted in Aether reclaiming its status as the de facto party finder hub while Dynamis dies again and Primal/Crystal slowly dwindle back to their pre-7.0 state. Now that the PF hub is very difficult to access it somehow feels even more restrictive than when the only options were Dynamis and Materia, because at least everybody else was going there too.

However, the biggest issue with this system is that Aether cannot stay congested forever. The native population will slowly shrink while server transfer and character creation is unavailable. It could happen in 7.1, or it could take well over a year like with Balmung and Mateus but eventually enough existing players on Aether will have taken a break or quit the game that Square Enix will need to open access for new players. When that happens there will undoubtedly be a massive flood of raiders from Crystal, Primal, and Dynamis wanting to permanently secure access before the entire data center is inevitably congested again. So many raiders moving to Aether will make PF on other data centers worse than it was in Endwalker.

The Solution - Moving North American data centers to different regions within North America:

Over the past two years I've read many suggestions on how SE should fix the data center problem but the common theme with most of them seems to be imposing new restrictions on the player that make data center travel almost pointless. The best way to have players distributed across all servers is to make them feel rewarded if they comply rather than punished if they don't. Square Enix already does this by making transfers to new/preferred servers free as well as rewarding players with feathers to be exchanged for items in-game, but the rewards can be earned through other means and aren't worth leaving your home server for a potentially dead one. And now that data center travel is a thing it doesn't even incentivize playing on the server you transferred to anymore since you can immediately leave. A much better incentive would be low latency.

[mana-burner]

Currently, the North American servers are located in California. It might be the most populated state in the USA but about 80% of the country lives in the eastern half. And of course there's a noticeable amount of ping over this distance. In addition, when there's a node having issues near the FFXIV servers it means a significant amount of the playerbase is going to be affected. Many people affected by this end up paying for a service to reroute traffic on top of the FFXIV subscription. Many of us had a blast in November 2023 during the cloud test from experiencing normal latency after going through those issues for years. As someone whose ping can vary from 70ms to 100ms (120ms lately) I didn't even know that the game could feel so good at 20-40ms. It's a completely different, better, and snappier game.

Anyway to bring this back to data center populations, Square Enix just needs to move each DC to a different location. They could keep one server in California, move one to the central United States (perhaps Texas), place one in the Canadian data center where the cloud test took place, and move the last one to the south eastern United States. I guarantee that if Dynamis was in Atlanta so many players in the region would swap to it that you would think it was around for as long as Aether or Primal, even if the transfer wasn't free. Are you having issues with a node again? Now instead of paying for a VPN you can DC travel to the second closest data center in a different physical location until the problem ends. Is half your static split between east and west? Don't worry, you can still meet in the middle with the central US DC while spending the rest of your time at home.

This post is pretty US-centric but it would also improve the experience of the Brazilian playerbase and the data centers in EU and JP could probably do something similar to better serve players in those regions.

[mana-burner]

Other Proposed Solutions:

Lastly I wanted to talk about why I'm not a fan of some of the more common proposals from the community.

1. Implement cross-DC party finder & duty finder.
   Unfortunately there seem to be some big technical hurdles that need to be tackled first
   

   Would it be possible for you to consider [...] a content finder registration system that transcends regions?

   a matching system across all regions and a content finder registration system are also being considered for implementation. However, the super server engineer on the development team and I have had many meetings, and at the end of each meeting, I find myself saying, “U～～～～～～～～, let's talk about it again at the next meeting” (smiles). (wry laugh). It is very difficult in terms of both technical and infrastructure, but I think it is a good thing that the “FFXIV” team never gives up on a challenge, so I would like to continue to think of ways to make it work without giving up.
   Since CS3 are attempting other solutions I doubt they're still considering this. But any time Yoshi'P gives an answer like "it would be very difficult" I'm inclined to believe that the chances of it happening are very slim. Obviously I wouldn't be opposed to cross-DC grouping if it were to happen but latency would still be an issue for east coast players.
   
2. Remove data center travel.
   We can't go back after pandora's box has been opened. Many players have made friends and joined communities/statics across data centers. Most would not be happy to have that suddenly taken away from them.
   
3. Restrict access to party finder, duty finder, and other content when traveling.
   This is almost as bad as removing data center travel. What good is being able to meet friends on other servers if you can't do anything together? You might as well find a different game to play together at that point.
   
4. Reduce rewards when playing on other data centers.
   Data center travel was implemented so we could game together. It would be awful if every time you played with your friend you had a nagging feeling in the back of your mind about the rewards you're missing out on. This would also break up a lot of statics if it meant reduced gear.

If you have any other ideas please feel free to share them. The more we talk about it the more likely SE will try a proper solution instead of this god awful congestion based system.

[VeyaAkemi]

Surely Cross-DC Party & Duty Finder would be easier to implement, and cheaper, than physically moving servers across a country and all the logistics issues(safety in transportation, required game downtime, possibly rent of physical locations, possible costs in hiring and paying additional maintenance teams, so on) that come with that, right? sure there are technical limitations around it, your solution would infer a much greater financial strain on the studio, which Square would likely veto immediately as it would cut down profits, plus, you are ignoring the possibility that the physical proximity of the server racks, and them being physically connected to each other, is why DC traveling is even possible, doing so over the internet could range from being significantly slower to outright impossible, at least under the system implemented.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

People were already paying to transfer to Greg as the 'raid server' long before datacenter travel existed.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Crystal PF has improved a great deal lately, just judging by the amount of listings… but I do fondly remember how much smoother the game played on the cloud server (after a few initial hiccups), and a DC with a better ping (and/or less NTT node issues) would definitely be attractive. Not having to suffer the random lag spikes and DCs would be nice!

[Jeeqbit]

Restrict access to party finder, duty finder, and other content when traveling.
This is almost as bad as removing data center travel. What good is being able to meet friends on other servers if you can't do anything together?

There is a better solution to this, which is:

Restrict access to the public High-End category in Party Finder for Travelers.

This would prevent people traveling to PUG, but would not prevent them from:

• Joining private static parties (so statics can remain cross-DC)
• Joining hunt parties
• Joining map parties
• Joining Other parties

Surely Cross-DC Party & Duty Finder would be easier to implement, and cheaper, than physically moving servers across a country and all the logistics issues(safety in transportation, required game downtime, possibly rent of physical locations, possible costs in hiring and paying additional maintenance teams, so on) that come with that, right?

I say this as someone with technical and programming knowledge - I actually think it would be easier to setup a new DC than to implement cross-DC PF and DF. Especially when they already tested an NA cloud DC.

Now sure, if it were me personally, I am sure I would find a way to make cross-DC PF and DF work relatively fast, but I'd have to admit some things:

• It's complex and messing up anything could result in character data loss. That they even dared to go ahead with World Visit and DC travel impressed me because it was very risky and complicated stuff behind the scenes.
• It's communication between multiple servers and regions, which can be complex, including from a security standpoint.
• It would need thoroughly testing due to its behind-the-scenes complexity.
• It's probably a lot more complicated for them due to spaghetti code, their hardware arrangements or their interpretation of their hardware situation.
• It's probably harder for them because they split jobs between different team members, whereas an indepedent developer could probably do certain things faster if they did it all alone, due to the task not having to be passed along to different teams at different stages of its development, which is a bit like a bill being passed around by politicians - it can make things take longer than they should (but in other cases it can speed them up so it's not always bad).

[mana-burner]

Surely Cross-DC Party & Duty Finder would be easier to implement, and cheaper, than physically moving servers across a country and all the logistics issues(safety in transportation, required game downtime, possibly rent of physical locations, possible costs in hiring and paying additional maintenance teams, so on) that come with that, right? sure there are technical limitations around it, your solution would infer a much greater financial strain on the studio, which Square would likely veto immediately as it would cut down profits

In the past, all NA and EU servers were located in Montreal. Then around Heavensward, they moved Chaos to Germany. Aether and Primal were also moved to California.
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...8c71cb4be72616
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...0716040e34a5b6
It might require a longer downtime but just like back then they can offer a day of playtime to each active subscription.

I can't give you the exact cost of everything but given the fact that they were able to do this back when the game wasn't as financially successful as it currently is and the fact that Yoshi'P said recently cross-datacenter party finder and duty finder would be a massive technical hurdle that would take years to tackle I think spreading out data centers is actually the easier and cheaper option.

plus, you are ignoring the possibility that the physical proximity of the server racks, and them being physically connected to each other, is why DC traveling is even possible, doing so over the internet could range from being significantly slower to outright impossible, at least under the system implemented.

We know this isn't true because anybody from NA, EU, or JP can travel to Materia, a data center located in Australia.

There is a better solution to this, which is:

Restrict access to the public High-End category in Party Finder for Travelers.

This would prevent people traveling to PUG, but would not prevent them from:

• Joining private static parties (so statics can remain cross-DC)
• Joining hunt parties
• Joining map parties
• Joining Other parties

This still isn't ideal. A lot of people solely play this game for high-end content. Someone might have friends on other DCs they want to practice savage or even farm a current extreme trial with but now they wouldn't be able to because they don't have 7 friends available and they can't fill the remaining slots in PF. Even for non-high-end raiders, restricting where players can do current extreme trials would be felt by most of the playerbase.

[UkcsAlias]

The playerbase will naturally distribute itself evenly for better ping

They dont, even if the DC gets split, people will still flock towards a single one. Just because 1 has a better reputation. People dont care about ping that much as the game is gracefull enough to not make it matter.

The best solution is to make cross-dc PF possible, so those on an other DC are also revealed on the "main". No travel requirements for anyone anymore.
That is what they should aim for.