Data Center Travel Changes Have Made Raiding Impossible, Where is the Fix?!?

[Gurgeh]

They should make anyone with the Traveler tag count as loot locked automatically.
That way, you only get rewards for current raids if you're on your home DC, but can still go elsewhere to help out friends.
"Oh, but what about my static. we're all spread apart across the different DCs"
don't care. I just want to raid from the comfort of my own house again. This was an issue ever since DC travel was added, and the fact that it's been over two years with the most cursory of fixes is just baffling. Square really should have known better.
Locking down travel didn't fix anything, it just made Aether the place you get to at 2AM, then stay there as long as you possibly can.

This would be truly catastrophic. Before I un-subbed about the last people in my Chaos communities still logging into the game were raiders. (spending a lot of their time on Light.) If you did this you'd murder their statics and their reclears. And they would most definitely transfer or stop subbing. I'm not sure those are arguments against but its bordeline hostile to the new sprouts naively starting their new adventure on Chaos. I feel just so sad for them, I really do. They are happy now, but they are not going to be. XIV is a *wonderful* reflection of the better side of humanity but they are murdering it at the moment.

[Drimn]

Unfortunately come November, Dynamis will have been around for 2 years and it *still* has population issues. Even the claims of "just wait for the Xbox players" fell through because they mostly went to Aether/Primal/Crystal instead, and the whole "more people will show up for Dawntrail" also failed to bolster our numbers because, yep, they all went to A/P/C with Returners of course having no reason to visit us at all.

It's a large part of *why* there's travel restrictions in place right now, because Square-Enix got tired of waiting for the playerbase to disperse on their own and stop making a super data center, so they took matters into their own hands short of removing DC travel completely.

It's especially rough for Dynamis because we already got locked down once to little benefit (where we couldn't leave *at all* for about 3 weeks) and now we're under a "soft" lock down where we still can't travel easily to get stuff done during some hours of the day. I had to wait until after 10PM tonight to slip into Faerie for my roulettes because everyone was apparently already long gone on Maduin where I was looking at a 15+ minute wait just for 4-man content, whereas I was getting "less than 5 minutes" on everything I wanted to do (on DPS no less).

Their current plan isn't likely to force people to transfer to Dynamis though, and while it may have stemmed the amount of people that hop to Aether, it's just made Primal & Crystal into the go-to places for a lot of folks (I myself often hit up Behemoth for example). Their plan is indeed making people unhappy for different reasons now, but lifting the travel restrictions would just bring back the previous problems of Aether bursting at the seams while Dynamis twists in the wind. There just isn't a good solution no matter what.

Dynamis is in horrible, horrible shape. Seraph is relatively healthy, but the other 7 servers are pretty dead. Cuchulainn in particular feels empty in a way that I've only seen on F2P MMOs 5 years past their peak and 1 year away from shutdown. Server merges or DC closures and redistribution would be a bad sign to outsiders, but Dynamis as it is can't be considered anything other than a failure spurred on by streamers making FF14 their flavor of the month and the chip shortage rendering Squeenix two years too late to accommodate. Not that it matters, since all of the streamers were on Aether, so everyone would just try to get on there to follow them rather than go on a new DC.

[JimCasey_RF6]

It appears that the devs feel they made a mistake by opening wide the flood gates for dc travel. The new restrictions, most likely, are the fix or at least an attempt at one.

[Avoidy]

Square's solution was dumb, but I'm surprised the raiding community isn't adapting and just meeting on Primal instead of Aether since that dc is actually open. I'd heard from some friends that this was the case, but OP's post leads me to believe that there's still a sizable chunk of folks who refuse to leave the locked datacenter and would prefer to wait until crazy-hours to sneak in rather than just migrate to a new hub dc. Weird.