Aether locked, PF dead. What now?

[Miradelle]

Aether's locked again, so gone are the days you could just swap over whenever and join ultimates or savage prog for fun. Why is it even locked? It wasn't locked in Endwalker, and that expansion was waaay more popular than this one. It felt like there were way more people playing in 6.4-5 than now, so what's the deal?

SQE should either

1. Make a cross-world PF (pipedream atm). I don't care if it logs me out once full party is formed and transfers me to a specific party finder server, I just want to be able to do other things while waiting instead of "service not available on this world."

2. Kick everyone who isn't from Aether out of the server once they've been logged out for 1hr. Right now, the only way you're raiding is if you're on Aether, so everyone logs in at early morning hours and basically lives there. This way you have spill over on Primal, like how it worked during M1-4S; you could actually fill parties and there were hundreds of them. Not guaranteed to work though, 'cause game ded lmayo.

3. Remove Aether lock, just like in Endwalker. I assume they have a reason why they don't. Maybe downgraded their servers due to costs? Maybe they can't protect against DDoS and this alleviates the problem? I swear to god if it's because they can't stand a regular Aether person seeing a "100 in queue" instead of "25th in queue" then I am going to lose it.

[Hyperia]

I get the feeling that they want each DC to be able to do content without everybody going to one DC.

I expect one of the big selling points of 8.0 will be cross DC party finder and roulettes.

[Miradelle]

I get the feeling that they want each DC to be able to do content without everybody going to one DC.

I expect one of the big selling points of 8.0 will be cross DC party finder and roulettes.

Every time cross DC PF has come up, they've said how difficult it is to implement (but they say that about everything). So, I don't think it's coming in 8.0, maybe 9.0. The game desperately needs it, or one of the options I listed. That, and they only now realized that it's an issue, and SQE works VERY slow. Complaints from early DT are probably only being addressed well into the next expansion.

[Alicie]

I expect one of the big selling points of 8.0 will be cross DC party finder and roulettes.

I wish! They'd be talking about it like crazy though if it was in development.

[Amarande]

I get the feeling that they want each DC to be able to do content without everybody going to one DC.

Yep. There's probably a certain sentiment that I myself, as a longtime MMO player get and invariably shake my head at the disagreement from the greater community.

You used to have organic options for what player pool you wanted to play with in an MMO, because most games that have the "named realm" server structure (like FFXIV, WoW, LOTRO, SWTOR have - mostly had in the latter two case but that's just because of physical server mergers as player population declined) would tend to sort themselves out so that there were the ultra-primo servers with the top tier raiders on them, and then there would be a number of more laid back servers where you could still readily form a group (there would also usually be a bunch of dead worlds, of course, but that's because opening a fixed number of servers without either having a launch disaster of the Endwalker type or a bunch of them dying of attrition after launch rush wears off is legitimately hard).

If you found you were on one of the ultra-primo servers and it was too stressful for you, you just moved to one of the more laid back ones and you were gucci. I still remember doing so in WoW TBC and its benefits. Here, before DC travel, I literally moved off of Aether - like if I wanted to be on Aether, I WOULD HAVE STAYED ON AETHER DADGUMMIT!

Granted there was some centralization even then as the top raider servers did also tend to be the most popular overall, but it was nothing like today's situation, in which EVERYONE is pushed to pile into the sweat server to even try to do content at all (either because the entire grouping pool is regionally consolidated as with WoW's grouping system or because of ad hoc travel as in FFXIV), and those who don't want to do so are more or less pushed out of content altogether unless they are very fortunate or have a static.

You get memes like everyone from Crystal feeling forced to travel to Aether, only to find virtually the entire group is from Crystal when they get there; I expect that travel restrictions are designed to encourage people to simply group on their home DC. You'd have the people if you didn't keep traveling, right (Dynamis and Materia might still have issues, but Primal, Crystal, and Chaos would be just fine at least).

But people won't go along with this. They'd even rather accept the cultural dominance of the sweats if that's what it takes to get the benefits of further centralization ...

[Xapapetsu]

I know I go to aether because most of my ultimate static is on aether, but I think most people are going to aether to farm the EX and run Quantum 40. I think going to aether to farm the EX is stupid because it's the easiest EX we've seen in a long time, but I understand Quantum 40.

[Doki]

Meanwhile on Aether

[SkankyRoe]

Meanwhile on Aether

I feel like this should be punishable since Faerie is now designated as Congested; every single one of these bots is taking up a precious spot that could have gone to someone who actually wishes to engage with the game's content.

[Alicie]

I feel like this should be punishable since Faerie is now designated as Congested; every single one of these bots is taking up a precious spot that could have gone to someone who actually wishes to engage with the game's content.

It's just going to be the same situation as with RMT PFs. It's going to be unnoticed until JP guys will come and see it, and shortly after that rules will be immediately changed and these guys will be immediately banned.

[VoidsentStatus]

I feel like this should be punishable since Faerie is now designated as Congested; every single one of these bots is taking up a precious spot that could have gone to someone who actually wishes to engage with the game's content.

This same argument applies to anyone who AFK's all day, especially on Balmung. And was also a reason that they implemented the kick feature at various points if people weren't active gameplay wise to automatically log them out and then people used plugins to avoid being kicked (notoriously used for people who wanted to stay on Aether when restrictions were tighter). Instead of nuking the plugins/cheaters, Square Enix just caved and relaxed the congestion restrictions so a part of me feels like they don't care as much as one would assume.