The Dynamis Problem and Potential Solutions

[Alicie]

The bandaid aka DC travel has been a massive failure due to ppl just crowding aether for everything. But putting quick and easy solutions into the game with little forethought, next to no testing and a complete lack of understanding on how game communities work is kinda par for the course in this game.

If they actually want to fix the problem they need to just pull the plug on dc travel and force everyone back to their home dc until they can come up with a better solution. But I also understand that this will never happen. "meh, it's good enough" feels like the new "please look forward to it"

Except that this will force all active raiders and just players to permanently transfer to Aether, only making the problem much, much worse.

[Miradelle]

The bandaid aka DC travel has been a massive failure due to ppl just crowding aether for everything. But putting quick and easy solutions into the game with little forethought, next to no testing and a complete lack of understanding on how game communities work is kinda par for the course in this game.

If they actually want to fix the problem they need to just pull the plug on dc travel and force everyone back to their home dc until they can come up with a better solution. But I also understand that this will never happen. "meh, it's good enough" feels like the new "please look forward to it"

This won't work in the current state of the game, unless you want raiders to literally transfer off of their DCs to Aether. There's simply not enough people playing this game, at least on NA, for there to be healthy amount of groups for the raiding/extreme scene. What they'd need to do is consolidate servers so that there's a lot more people on each server, or make cross DC party finder that automatically sends the party to a dedicated cross-world server.

Right now, the best system is to let everyone just go to Aether, so people don't need to wait hours and hours for a group that never fills. However, they screwed even this over by locking Aether .. so ironically enough, what you suggested is sort of already in play, and it has just made things worse--everyone just LIVES on Aether now by logging in at early hours and never leaving.

[Alicie]

This won't work in the current state of the game, unless you want raiders to literally transfer off of their DCs to Aether. There's simply not enough people playing this game, at least on NA, for there to be healthy amount of groups for the raiding/extreme scene. What they'd need to do is consolidate servers so that there's a lot more people on each server, or make cross DC party finder that automatically sends the party to a dedicated cross-world server.

Right now, the best system is to let everyone just go to Aether, so people don't need to wait hours and hours for a group that never fills. However, they screwed even this over by locking Aether .. so ironically enough, what you suggested is sort of already in play, and it has just made things worse--everyone just LIVES on Aether now by logging in at early hours and never leaving.

Why half-measures are even being discussed?
Are we assuming that Square Enix is completely incapable of creating cross-dc pf and df in a timely manner?
Other studios manage to do it, why SE can't?
Maybe we should demand - and demand really hard - that they reroute their revenue back into game, hire programmers and make it happen?

[Infindox]

The problem is DC travel. They need to just rip the band-aid off and delete the feature entirely instead of all these half measures dancing around the root issue.

Deleting it would literally screw over every NA server that's not Aether.
People use the DC travel simply because of the fact that they want to play with friends.

[CidHeiral]

Deleting it would literally screw over every NA server that's not Aether.
People use the DC travel simply because of the fact that they want to play with friends.

No server is being screwed over by going back to exactly the same situation that worked just fine for a decade. To the contrary, less people will be screwed over when they can play on their home server normally instead of being forced to travel elsewhere. If people want to play with friends on another DC they can make an alt or transfer if it's available. The mountain of issues DC travel is causing is not worth a little convenience.

I've heard the claims in all these posts a million times before. No, the game isn't going to suddenly implode if they remove DC travel. Some people would kick up a fuss for a time, a small percentage might quit, then most would learn to live with it, especially when they see the immediate and numerous benefits of their DCs coming back to life (doubly so for Dynamis). It is far healthier for the game and community in the long run.

If they actually want to fix the problem they need to just pull the plug on dc travel and force everyone back to their home dc until they can come up with a better solution.

100%

[Alicie]

No server is being screwed over by going back to exactly the same situation that worked just fine for a decade. To the contrary, less people will be screwed over when they can play on their home server normally instead of being forced to travel elsewhere. If people want to play with friends on another DC they can make an alt or transfer if it's available. The mountain of issues DC travel is causing is not worth a little convenience.

But it won't be same situation. Player population is not the same as it once was. Dynamis wouldn't even have current 2,5 players if there was no DC travel. People will just naturally trickle to the most populated servers: raiders to Aether, RPers to Crystal. Dynamis will be left in submarine-farming ruins, Primal will probably be middleground where you'll farm like, ex trials and prog savages over 6 months. These who won't be able to transfer to Aether for raiding will unsub. These who won't be able to transfer to Crystall will unsub as well.

[Alicie]

...

I already transferred my main out of Dynamis to Aether while it was open. I had to give up my large house and settle for just a small on Aether, but either way it was unused, I couldn't really be there because you kinda have to be on Aether to do content, nobody wanted to come over either, and overall it was just a thing that nobody really needed, neither me nor others. No regrets - no more DC travel, no more inaccessible retainers and FC chest, no more struggling to switch worlds or data centers during prime time.

[CidHeiral]

That's because cheese didn't go anywhere. People just bring level 50-59 jobs into alliance roulette, partying up with such or skipping unlocking of other alliance raids. Crystal tower still dominates roulette while alliance raid roulette pop got decreased because a chunk of people who only did it via cheesing permanently left it because, realistically, if it takes more than 15 minutes it just isn't worth doing.

Most of that is inaccurate and you entirely missed the point of what I was saying.

I think it's very unlikely that they'll remove DC travel at this point, whether it would be the best solution or not (we could probably argue hypotheticals for ages). It's not like the ilvl cheese, something which was never intended in the first place and SE just closed the loophole. It's a feature that was introduced and is widely used, and if SE backpedals on it now, it makes them look bad.

Moving markers during combat was a feature that was introduced and was widely used, then people abused it so it was removed. A good dev is going to do what's ultimately healthiest for the game overall even if that ruffles some feathers and "makes them look bad" to a group of players that don't understand much about the situation. There's an insightful clip on this topic from the Killer Instinct devs that I recommend checking out.

That being said, I agree with you that arguing in circles about hypotheticals won't accomplish much. People who can't see past their own nose are going to argue for whatever benefits them the most and I'm sure there's no changing their mind. Ultimately we're all leaving our opinions to the devs and they're going to do whatever they feel is best, and hopefully they do it soon because the current situation is untenable.