Low pop servers

[RinaB]

As someone who came to Dynamis about 2 days before DT launch, its become very apparent that most players on Dynamis do not bother running anything except dungeon roulettes and have figured out they can DC hop. When DT launched the server was great and queue times were very low (not surprising with new xpac). Fast forward to now and outside of limsa, everything is dead. Has there been any word from square at all in regards to this problem or do they think DC hopping is perfectly fine and problem solved? I would like DC merging before they just offer a free transfer because moving my condo will be a massive pain in the inventory since for whatever reason I can't just keep housing items in housing storage and it comes with me like a glamour chest....

[Jeeqbit]

Not really, they just made those data centers then forgot about them.

They have locked character creation/transfers on other worlds a lot to try and push people to Dynamis, but obviously it's only had limited success. They have tried to shuffle ranked pvp around to specific DCs, as well as Chaotic, but considering the amount of people doing either of those things now is very low...

[Minali]

As someone who came to Dynamis about 2 days before DT launch, its become very apparent that most players on Dynamis do not bother running anything except dungeon roulettes and have figured out they can DC hop. When DT launched the server was great and queue times were very low (not surprising with new xpac). Fast forward to now and outside of limsa, everything is dead. Has there been any word from square at all in regards to this problem or do they think DC hopping is perfectly fine and problem solved? I would like DC merging before they just offer a free transfer because moving my condo will be a massive pain in the inventory since for whatever reason I can't just keep housing items in housing storage and it comes with me like a glamour chest....

They are aware of the issue of people flocking to certain Datacenters, it happens in all regions. Tthe question of a regional PF came up in the Dawntrail Media Tour quite often. (This would at least help against people on Dynamis never being on Dynamis due to raiding etc.) The problem is that this is not as easy to fix as it looks like from the outside and they'd have to completely restructure how communication between worlds work or something like that. Yoshi-P said it would take three years or so, but he is also aware that players don't want to wait three years for a solution, so the devs are pondering about some short term way to lessen this unintended impact from DC travel. I suppose cycling Datacenters for ranked PvP is one attempt, and of course participation in the new crafting content being limited to each players home world might help as well. At the moment this feels a bit like "too little, too late" though, considering many people who moved to Dynamis in the beginning possibly moved elsewhere for good by now.

Tl;dr: They know it's an ugly situation, but there's no easy or quick fix for it. (Aside from turning off DC travel I guess but of course this is very drastic.) You can hardly force people to play at a specific DC after all.

[Shyxx]

Not really, they just made those data centers then forgot about them.

They have locked character creation/transfers on other worlds a lot to try and push people to Dynamis, but obviously it's only had limited success.

Doesn't work as long as everyone can still make new characters on Crystal and Primal

[Valence]

They need to turn off high end duties on visited DCs, that would be a good start to revert and try to go back to the situation before raiding skewed everything toward single regional DCs. Let the visit active otherwise.

[Misutoraru]

Not really, they just made those data centers then forgot about them.

They have locked character creation/transfers on other worlds a lot to try and push people to Dynamis, but obviously it's only had limited success. They have tried to shuffle ranked pvp around to specific DCs, as well as Chaotic, but considering the amount of people doing either of those things now is very low...

All they need to do is have the ball to:
Stop DC travel follow by one time free DC transfer. Merge some servers and may be even the two DC in EU.
Don’t introducing half baked system until they are properly coded. I.e. stop rolling out DC travel before cross DC PF/roulette ready

[Rinoa_353]

SE's mistake was not funneling all new players to Dynamis only and should have had character creation and transfers restricted to Dynamis only until at least patch 7.1 or 7.2 to give time for Dynamis to grow. I loved it when Dynamis was the only DC you could travel to when DT came out, Seraph was so full and content was popping so quickly. They should do the same once in a while to encourage people going to Dynamis and restrict DC traveling to Dynamis only for a few weeks at a time.

[miraidensetsu]

They need to turn off high end duties on visited DCs, that would be a good start to revert and try to go back to the situation before raiding skewed everything toward single regional DCs. Let the visit active otherwise.

Or do the opposite: Duty/Raid finder covering all datacenters from a region. So anyone can find a party, regardless of their home server.

So, what will attract people to empty servers? Free plots. If you move servers, you can get your own house.

[Voryn]

They need to turn off high end duties on visited DCs, that would be a good start to revert and try to go back to the situation before raiding skewed everything toward single regional DCs.

This would be really bad for the PF raiding scene. And anyone on Dynamis might still just travel elsewhere for duty finder/roulettes. But a similar idea might be worthwhile…

I loved it when Dynamis was the only DC you could travel to when DT came out, Seraph was so full and content was popping so quickly. They should do the same once in a while to encourage people going to Dynamis and restrict DC traveling to Dynamis only for a few weeks at a time.

If Extreme/Savage/Ultimate raids could only be done on Dynamis then that would be a lot better than how currently everyone goes to an already-populated server for that. And then people who raid would have a reason to make characters on Dynamis and actually play there. Right now we have ranked queue for Crystalline Conflict locked to a specific data centre and that isn’t a problem because it’s not a really really busy one.

Maybe Dynamis could be for Savage, Crystal could be for PVP, and Primal could be for Extreme and Ultimate. And then things could be shuffled around based on new content releases. But of course all of this would not be as good as having cross-DC Duty Finder and Party Finder.

[Valence]

Or do the opposite: Duty/Raid finder covering all datacenters from a region. So anyone can find a party, regardless of their home server.

Well of course, that's what everyone wants. Even SE said they're on it (and Yoshi said it would take 3 years or something? I don't remember and the fact that he can even guess the exact time is funny as fuck to me as an ex game dev).
But this was for what to do now as a contingency measure, because they should never have opened the floodgates like this without limitations, which I do believe should indeed have been to restrict the whole DF/PF or just high end raiding on your own datacenter. Now that everybody has taken the habit to go raid on other DCs though, backpedaling is going to be painful and that's probably why they don't want to do it.