I've just read the news about the Oceania data centre and everything which is being done to relieve congestion and it's all great news. The part which really upset me though is this

"while the system has been designed to allow cross-region travel, we'll be limiting it to travel between logical data centers within a physical data center at first due in part to differences in game economy and values. We’ll be paying keen attention to the opinions of players as we consider whether or not to introduce cross-region travel in the future."

When the game started, the NA servers were on the East Coast. Many players from Europe decided to play on them to continue to maintain groups which they had established in Final Fantasy XI or in beta. Personally, have been playing with some folks in my Free Company since 2004. Because the servers were on the East Coast, the ping was acceptable, if not ideal.

Now the NA servers are on the West coast, the ping is large and it does cause a disadvantage. I appreciate that this is not everyone's hjistory but Square Enix made their FFXI servers global, I had friends and linkshell members from Alaska to Singapore and we moved as a group to FFXIV

I know this is a different game and I accept that I could move to an EU data centre but that would break up a mixed NA and EU group of almost 18 years... The very folks who make it worth playing in the first place.

As a UK player on an NA server, I am at a disadvantage. We have EU/NA folks in our group and the EU players were really hoping to be able to travel to the EU data centre to undertake more demanding duties.

Allowing folks to travel to other regional data centres also enables you to play reliably outside of your home centre's prime time.