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

[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).