REGION-WIDE Duty Finder & Party Finder: Urgently needed in NA & EU

[Shistar]

Hello!

I am making this thread to hopefully get some attention from the devs about this solution many of us have been pushing for in various threads and put it in a centralized thread we can periodically bump or add our ideas to.


What region-wide DF and PF entails:

This means that anyone within their region would be able to seamlessly play with others also in the same region. Let's use the two EU DCs, Chaos and Light, as our example:

Current behavior: When you queue into a roulette or open your PF while in Chaos, you will only be matched up with players currently in Chaos DC, and only PFs created in any of the worlds belonging to Chaos will appear on the list.
If you want to see any PFs made in Light DC, you will have to manually travel there, losing access to any PFs created in Chaos. This causes the majority of players seeking to get matched up for content quickly to pool in a singular DC, in our case Light, leaving Chaos barren except for roulette queues (and only during peak hours)

What we'd like: DF will take players from both Chaos and Light worlds, resulting in quicker queues for everyone and a greater chance for nocturnal players to find others to get their roulettes done with. This will also mean you can run savages and ultimates in PF from the comfort of your home world, as well as interact with the entirety of the region's PF without travelling between DCs and congesting one DC over the other.


Why this is needed urgently in NA & EU:

As the wait between patches draws longer and longer, player population decreases and the pool of players DF can draw from is smaller, making queue times longer than expected even for supports in many cases. In the case of PF, this causes DCs like Aether and Light to become the "raiding" DC, causing the rest to become barren as players travel to get their savages and ultimates done. Since they are there, might as well get their roulettes done. Since they spend all their time there, might as well transfer... and thus these DCs become significantly more congested than the others.

Dynamis DC is the perfect example of why we need this so badly.
Dynamis, despite belonging to the group of DCs in NA (approx. 3 times larger than the entirety of EU), struggles to fill common roulettes every day due to the amount of players it can draw from (only within Dynamis DC). Their PF is completely barren in comparison to other DCs within the same region.
By sharing a PF and DF with the entirety of NA, Dynamis would no longer suffer these issues and new players stranded in these worlds would be able to advance their MSQ with other players instead of relying on NPCs for nearly all duties.

Players can already travel across DCs, quickening the "death" of certain DCs while others are bursting at the seams to match the demand of players logging in. Eliminate this issue by allowing DF and PF to be region-wide. Many players will immediately return to their home worlds, and will do so happily. Many will consider transferring to less-populated worlds now that barren DF and PF is not a worry to them and get to enjoy other features such as housing, which also greatly suffers in congested worlds. This will greatly help towards balancing out player population without dragging players kicking and screaming, closing down entire DCs, forcing merges that will doubtless affect the game's reputation, etc.

In NA, Aether has been in lockdown for long enough for players to be worried about the future of their DC as player activity wanes but new blood is not allowed in their worlds.
In EU, Chaos is lucky to see more than 10 PF listings at one time, and this includes venue spam which typically takes up 4-8 of those 10 listings.


The how to get it done is, at the end of the day, the dev's job to figure out, but please share your ideas or bump this thread if you would like to see this feature added.

[Hanzz96]

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia. Japanese players are quite hostile to English speaking players often putting the phrase "Do you speak Japanese?" In their PF's and kicking anyone who doesn't. English speaking players from Elemental literally cannot say a single word while PFing on the regions "raiding hub" and if they MUST speak have to rely on Google translate and pray no one discovers the secret that they are not Japanese.
Imagine if this happened on EU with all the languages.

Japanese players not wanting to interact with english speakers is the reason why the OCE datascenter exists even though SE knew the region didn't have the population to sustain itself because the Japanese players do not want non Japanese players on their servers and in their parties. Its also why cross DC travel is restricted to region only (NA > NA. EU > EU) square Enix confirmed they limited this feature because of possible "culture clashes" on various DC's.

Long story short we will never get cross region PF or full cross region DC travel because Japanese players do not want to mingle with the rest of the game even within their DC region. This is mind boggling considering players outside Japan make up majority of this games profits and playerbase but SE are incapable of not catering to JP players first and foremost, just look at the ping problem being an apparent non issue.

[CaptainLagbeard]

It keeps getting suggested, but I don't think it can be done except for maybe the European servers, mostly because there's only 2 of them. And even there it would likely be an extra inconvenience to the players.

You'd need people to send over their characters data to the other DCs, essentially doing just the same things as what happens with a DC Travel, in order to begin queueing with multiple DCs. As I said, with Europe only having 2 servers, it wouldn't be as bad. NA and Japan having 4 servers, they'd need to do essentially 3 DC travels back to back in order for it to work.

And in order to ensure the data is properly synced, it would likely need to be done once per login.

[Jeeqbit]

It's technically possible but also complicated. But so was DC travel and world visit themselves, and they achieved them.

In order to achieve sending people over they would ultimately have to DC travel at some point. It could be made seamless by disconnecting the player but making it look like they are still connected and in a cutscene.

What also complicates it is the scenario where a world is congested. In that scenario, the party leader may also need to be transferred to a different DC or world that is less congested.

[Rueby]

Would a cloud server that functions as a PF lobby of sorts? Think something (hypothetical) like solution 9 but with multiple instances? Then we'd just transfer to it to PF (I guess?).. Or is this like a technical nightmare scenario?

I guess the drawback would be having to travel to this cloud server to PF... Hmmm

[Jeeqbit]

Would a cloud server that functions as a PF lobby of sorts?

I think that external servers are a good idea generally to divert resources from the game server itself since they seem to have such trouble with that. There are many features in the game that don't really connect to eachother and could be completely separated like that.

However, they could likely achieve showing other DC PF listings simply by having the server itself get a periodic update every minute of active PF listings on other data centers. They seem to do a similar thing with the Friends List but it's heavily rate limited so that they don't DDoS themselves.

I guess the drawback would be having to travel to this cloud server to PF... Hmmm

The location you actually do the content is the main issue. As I mentioned, the DC or world that the PF leader is on might be congested. However, an ideal solution would be for a server to figure out where the least congestion is and transfer everyone there for the content. So, Dynamis/Chaos.

The exact details are the difficult part. Does everyone have to logout manually? Can the transfer occur without it feeling like you logged out, such as while entering the duty? Can the time be reduced since it takes ages currently and closes the game sometimes due to login session expiring? How does the party reform - an external cloud server could hold cross-DC party data maybe? Where is the cross-DC party chat located, cloud server maybe? If it's cross-region PF/DF, which region is this cloud server in?

So I'm not saying it's impossible. It's just a technical challenge. Think of it like Cid achieving something technical in the MSQ, that nobody else has, because it's just not a simple thing to do, but can if someone goes through all the trouble and has the motivation and strong desire.

[Doki]

Ranked PvP being only on one DC before Region DF/PF is such a terrible decision too. Want to do ranked? F your retainers, F being able to talk to anyone in your LS or FC!

[SaltyDaddy]

Well. If I remember correctly, they tested both "Cloud sevrers" and EU had a time limited Shadow DC with the DT release. Every instance you join is a specific instance on a game server, that fetched data from lobby server. I know all the data is junky, having a specific login, database, lobby and game servers. But don't tell me, it is beyond a scope of a company like Square, to make communication between Lobby servers (where your character data is stored) and game servers (the instances) more effective, that you could make a special "dummy" DC with instances between both DC's. Heck, I would even want it to be fully used for a duty finder, not just a PF, even tho PF needs it the most.

[SalamanderIX]

This problem isn't exclusive to NA and EU it's even happing on the JP servers with Mana becoming the "raiding" server and everyone from other JP datacenters congregating on Mana very much like Light & Aether.

This is also where the reluctance to fix this issue with cross region PF comes from. If they introduced cross region PF and queues Japanese players could be paired with players from the Elemental DC which if you don't know is the unofficial Japanese DC for English speakers such as players from South East Asia.

The solution seems pretty simple to me, just as we have it now with the option for Server only PF (I forgot it exists sometimes)- Cross Datacenter PF and Region PF would only be options.
I suppose this doesn't help too much with their problems of everybody going to Mana, though at least it means they won't have to play with Elemental if they don't want to.

[Astronis]

They need to go back in time and change their minds about enabling DC visiting. The "culture issues" isn't just between JP and the rest of the world; there are smaller culture issues between NA DCs too. There are reasons some of us don't go to other DCs to use their PFs even if our DC PFs have been emptied.

Can't say I would be too pleased if, in my years of effort to avoid Aether, that Aether was simply unavoidably dumped on me.