Servers congestion

[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.

[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.

[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.

[VeyaAkemi]

The only way to fix the situation is cross DC PF/DF, everyone keeps citing Dynamis, but Dynamis is just the extreme example, even Primal players, an allegedly healthy DC, have been complaining about how much harder it is to raid since EW launch, and even if you magically equalized the population of every single world server, so long as DC travel exists and any given Data Center is considered "THE DC to do <thing>", then the problem will continue on indefinitely.

[GraceHorizon]

I live on Dynamis (transferred because I wanted a Medium house), and I do most of my gameplay there. Queue times for roulettes are often long, but usually bearable, and queueing for individual duties from the current patch generally works okay. Queueing for duties that aren’t current is something of a lost cause though, and my Dynamis friends and I have to DC travel to Crystal or Primal to do most such content because.

I would attribute a lot of that to new characters being funneled to Dynamis: my general impression of the data center is that it’s a lot of new characters with a smaller salting of high level ones who have a lot of stuff unlocked. So even if data center travel weren’t possible, queueing for optional duties in later expansions would still go poorly. I’m okay to shepherd sprouts through Sastasha in return for some daily tomestones and materia tokens, but I would be happier if the Duty Finder would just pool all 32 North American world servers together and fill parties with people from everywhere. Then first-timers would get their queues to pop, and experienced players would get more variety in their roulettes.

[GraceHorizon]

Your queueing situation would have been the same on any Dynamis world, queueing is datacenter-wide. I cleared the MSQ and almost all side content before I moved, so I haven’t had so acute a need to queue for old content, but for anyone struggling (or bored) on Dyna I have noticed there’s a reasonably healthy Party Finder culture. If you put up a PF for a duty, you’ll probably get takers. I’ve taken to checking the Dyna PF listings to find interesting normal difficulty fights for the sake of variety.

[Aidorouge]

Your queueing situation would have been the same on any Dynamis world, queueing is datacenter-wide. I cleared the MSQ and almost all side content before I moved, so I haven’t had so acute a need to queue for old content, but for anyone struggling (or bored) on Dyna I have noticed there’s a reasonably healthy Party Finder culture. If you put up a PF for a duty, you’ll probably get takers. I’ve taken to checking the Dyna PF listings to find interesting normal difficulty fights for the sake of variety.

Queuing is data center-wide, yes, but you kind of need other people on your own world for things like FCs or even Eternal Bonding if one goes that route, and even just making friends off-world wasn't always viable because people tended to only friend people from their own world for convenience's sake, or how it was rare to run into any active cross-world linkshells (most people don't even know they or fellowships exist). At best you might run into somebody trying to drop a Discord link, but even putting aside not wanting to join dozens of channels for mostly the same content on the same data center, it was still a regular habit for people to group up with only people from their own world because some folks were as anti-wander as they were anti-travel. There's also the endless venues I suppose, but I don't RP so there was no reason to go anywhere near them (and its debatable how many of the people in them actually play versus chatting all day, not that there's anything wrong with that).

Quite often I was the ONLY person from Maduin in some circles, never got into an FC that lasted long/had barely anyone logging in, and any friends I made outside of Maduin were always hard to grab and do anything with that they weren't already doing with people they knew from their home world, and I didn't really have any friends from Maduin at all that didn't up permanently grayed out after a while or I noticed they were on another data center 24/7 (almost always Aether or Crystal), suggesting they had possibly moved. Some people also took the advice to bring friends/family/partners when they started on Dynamis to make things easier, and I'm not going to interject as a third-wheel in whatever progress they were working on together. (Meanwhile my own siblings had abandoned the game years ago.)

Admittedly, I don't have a FC/friends/groups on Primal yet either, but at least I don't have to travel for queues anymore. Other people are welcome to stick with Dynamis hoping it pays off, but I paid my dues trying to make it work and I was done with it.