Little to no raiders on non-Aether NA data centers

[sixbullets]

Hi, I just wanted to express my frustration as a new player getting into the savage raiding scene. The first week, there were a ton of players progressing in the new savage raids, but I was unable to raid until the first Saturday.

My data center (Crystal) does not have very many raid listings, but a friend suggested I change data centers to Aether. Doing this, I was able to beat M9S and I am progressing through M10S.

Today, Aether is congested, and it has been for all of today. Unfortunately, I have gone to each NA data center and there are very few players doing M10S, sometimes none at all. It is unfortunate and feels like Aether players have a premium version of the game.

Is there any solution? I have tried making my own listing, but it fills very slowly on a non-aether DC.

[17cupsofcoffee]

Unfortunately, this is entirely down to player behaviour creating a self-fulfilling prophecy - at some point, people (completely arbitarily) decided that Aether is 'the raiding data center' and started moving there to raid, meaning that there's less parties on other DCs, meaning more people move, meaning there's even less parties, and so on.

There's only three ways I can see this issue being resolved, from least likely to most likely:

• The community as a whole makes an effort to push back on the whole 'you must move to Aether to raid' meme
• SE decides to turn off data center travel so that people are forced to raid on their home DC
• SE finally implements cross-DC party finder

Option 1 would require players to inconvienience themselves for the greater good, so that's never going to happen, lmao

Option 2 probably won't happen unless the situation gets significantly worse (e.g. people not being able to queue for normal content on Crystal), because the backlash to cutting people off from their friends/raid groups would be enormous.

I'd put money on Option 3 being what SE are actually planning to do, but it's not a quick fix.

[sixbullets]

Unfortunately, this is entirely down to player behaviour creating a self-fulfilling prophecy - at some point, people (completely arbitarily) decided that Aether is 'the raiding data center' and started moving there to raid, meaning that there's less parties on other DCs, meaning more people move, meaning there's even less parties, and so on.

But hasn't Square Enix stepped in to address large-scale community-made issues in the past? For example, with players skipping cutscenes in MSQ dungeons and pressuring sprouts to do the same; I heard this is the reason why MSQ cutscenes are now unskippable. This is another situation where, in my opinion, Square Enix needs to step in. It's just not fun to sit in a 4/8 person party for 1 hour before disbanding, because you made your PF on Primal, for example.

[CidHeiral]

But hasn't Square Enix stepped in to address large-scale community-made issues in the past? For example, with players skipping cutscenes in MSQ dungeons and pressuring sprouts to do the same; I heard this is the reason why MSQ cutscenes are now unskippable. This is another situation where, in my opinion, Square Enix needs to step in. It's just not fun to sit in a 4/8 person party for 1 hour before disbanding, because you made your PF on Primal, for example.

The only real solution is to remove DC travel entirely, but the devs are probably apprehensive to do so both because they put a lot of work into the feature and because that would cause the community to freak out for a while. The congestion solution was an attempt to address the issue somewhat while avoiding those pain points, but as a band-aid half measure it can only do so much.

You often see people repeating cross-DC PF as the magic bullet solution but DC travel's negative effects reach into every corner of the game, many of which are unrelated to PF and thus cannot be solved by a cross-DC PF. More than likely the feature would solve one problem, fail to solve many others, and create entirely new problems. This community is notorious for collectively demanding something without thinking it through, getting exactly what they asked for which blows up in their face, then complaining about that.

[CCheshire]

So, what I know many savage raiders do is to move their WoL to the Aether in the early morning or late at night once the congested time is over, usually 1AM-4PM EST on a weekday as I tried to world visit earlier than the listed times but they also locked down world visit on the weekends for almost all day too.

[TeresaFortell]

You often see people repeating cross-DC PF as the magic bullet solution but DC travel's negative effects reach into every corner of the game, many of which are unrelated to PF and thus cannot be solved by a cross-DC PF. More than likely the feature would solve one problem, fail to solve many others, and create entirely new problems. This community is notorious for collectively demanding something without thinking it through, getting exactly what they asked for which blows up in their face, then complaining about that.

It’s not a panacea for everything, but it might just resolve the constant congestion everyone is facing when they are heading to aether or even within aether. That is a very big issue that needs to be addressed right now.

Curious to know the downsides to this.

[Frizze]

Cross-DCPF should solve a couple issues. Dynamis players would see their que problems vanish. Crystal and Primal players would see somewhat of a return to the pre-travel days of just being able to do content on their home worlds(i understand this is a player driven problem). And it would lessen the congestion on the servers everyone flocks to now. There are also possible knock-on affects that could happen(being able to group with friends without traveling might encourage people to spread out more and lessen housing strain as example). Off the top of my head i dont see any downsides that dont already exist. If im not being creative enough with my dooming, by all means share your thoughts. Dooooooooom!

[Shistar]

This issue would be solved entirely if each region shared a DF and PF across all DCs. Here's a thread I made about it if you'd like to add your thoughts or support it.