Servers congestion

[Eorinn]

So the congestion/queue on most populated servers were supposed to be a temporary thing for expansion launch to aleviate server load, now we have less players than Stormblood (according to bancho census). Why exactly do we still have servers locked to visit? I understand if its for creation, but it makes no sense for visiting. I think its time to lift the restrictions, they only make player experience worse. Its not like its protecting us from ddos every other day anyways...

[Bonoki]

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

[Jeeqbit]

The status was actually created when Stormblood was about to release. So it checks out even if we have Stormblood level players (which I don't really agree with, the baseline back then was more like 500-600k while currently that stat is above 800k).

Even before Stormblood, we had certain worlds that were overly congested like Balmung and probably Gilgamesh, and they were a big reason for the creation of the status.

[Eorinn]

The status was actually created when Stormblood was about to release. So it checks out even if we have Stormblood level players (which I don't really agree with, the baseline back then was more like 500-600k while currently that stat is above 800k).

Even before Stormblood, we had certain worlds that were overly congested like Balmung and probably Gilgamesh, and they were a big reason for the creation of the status.

there was no world/dc visit in stormblood

[Eorinn]

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

they could've easily fixed that if they put balmung and sargatanas/gilgamesh in dynamis( like back when they split aether and primal and created crystal)

[Korrcen]

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

As a Dynamis native (I wanted a house), this will never happen sadly. When they created Dynamis, they should've put an already popular server on it.

[Jeeqbit]

Oh you mean the limits on how many can World Visit and how many can DC Travel. It wasn't even created at the launch itself. On launch, we were DC traveling like crazy for hunts and there were no observable issues with it. Maybe there was a server crash somewhere that we didn't think anything about though.

I do think that by not having some sort of limit, it's possible that an individual world could become too congested at peak hours. Even if the game's overall population is at the lowest levels in almost a decade, it doesn't change that most of the population could be congregating on Balmung. If the population on that one world is too much, it could crash the server or cause major problems, so a cap makes sense to protect it from that.

I think the issue with the cap is that it is a specific cap for Data Center traveling and a specific cap for World Visiting, and these caps don't necessarily scale in line with the population that reside there.

I suspect that this cap might also have been to try and force players to make PFs on their home data centers again. And it does seem to have worked to an extent.

[Naphtalia]

I'm sure people are still flooding into Aether and Balmung at night to either raid or RP. If it's not to the same scale as before where the entirety of Aether was getting locked down after 6 PM because of how many people were going there, then lifting the restrictions makes sense to me. If it's still getting flooded then that's ultimately the congestion that's trying to be circumvented.

[Striker44]

I do think that by not having some sort of limit, it's possible that an individual world could become too congested at peak hours. Even if the game's overall population is at the lowest levels in almost a decade, it doesn't change that most of the population could be congregating on Balmung. If the population on that one world is too much, it could crash the server or cause major problems, so a cap makes sense to protect it from that.

There's also the reality that even if the "troughs" are lower now than in past expansions, the "spikes" are still significant and caps have to be made with those spikes in mind. For a couple weeks now since the release of 7.4, some of the Hunt trains for example have gone back to being announced server-specific instead of DC-wide because the trains exploded in size again and were pushing 200 people like they were at the start of DT.

[Aidorouge]

The congestion probably won't go away until Dynamis is decently populated and can stand on its own two feet without having everyone DC visit to Aether or Crystal form there.

Having lived there for 3 years, I can tell you right now that this is never happening.

Xbox launch didn't help.
Dawntrail launch didn't help.
None of the major content updates helped, and Cosmic Exploration actually caused our 2nd exodus of players (the 1st being the Dawntrail lockdown) when we lost long-time gatherers and crafters.

I started playing on Maduin December 2022, by the time I left December 2025 for Excalibur, there was LESS people than when I began one month after Dynamis opened. It's a lost cause.
+++

they could've easily fixed that if they put balmung and sargatanas/gilgamesh in dynamis( like back when they split aether and primal and created crystal)

Unfortunately, the backlash from them "seeding" Crystal was so bad they apologized and promised to never do it again, so when Dynamis was made it was left to fend for its self.

The terrible irony is that we KNOW seeding a data center works in creating a sustainable population, because Crystal is the 2nd most populated NA data center and is often as locked up as Aether for transfers (visiting less so, but Balmung and Mateus are often blocked up during peak hours).

We know they won't do server merges, and they have nothing that can truly incentivize deeply rooted players from Aether/Primal/Crystal to move, on top of Primal still being open for new players too and its a much better destination for them if they want to actually get anything done (if they're forced to DC travel there anyway from Dynamis, why not just re-roll to Primal and skip the extra steps?)

Not even housing is enough reason to stay or join because I threw away two Mediums because it wasn't worth it to me anymore, and I doubt I'm the only one that's been abandoning ship this last year as players drop out making it even harder to find people to do stuff with.