Aether congestion has made raiding with friends impossible

[CCheshire]

snip

Wait, why punish members of the lower pop DCs even more like this would only drain the other worlds to force them to do paid transfer once Aether is unlocked because they can't do X content now for no reason like they pay the same sub price to use the PF and DF as everyone else.

Players will always go to aether since it's like the city for the same reasons for more opportunities and more ways to play the X content that they liked from savage raiding, Field ops, and to like even just visiting some RP venues/friends on diff DCs too.

Also, oddly enough, I moved to my current world over 8 years ago on aether because it was small and quiet compared to primal and I now I'm baffled that suddenly I can't do a world visit anymore in the evening for weeks now.

[Jaltaer]

Wait, why punish members of the lower pop DCs even more like this would only drain the other worlds to force them to do paid transfer once Aether is unlocked because they can't do X content now for no reason like they pay the same sub price to use the PF and DF as everyone else.

Players will always go to aether since it's like the city for the same reasons for more opportunities and more ways to play the X content that they liked from savage raiding, Field ops, and to like even just visiting some RP venues/friends on diff DCs too.

Also, oddly enough, I moved to my current world over 8 years ago on aether because it was small and quiet compared to primal and I now I'm baffled that suddenly I can't do a world visit anymore in the evening for weeks now.

It wouldn't, though - they can still join PFs on other DCs, just wouldn't be able to make public ones. As for locking them out of DF - right now people (aka Dynamis players) complain the main reason they leave and/or world transfer is because "you can't queue for anything because everyone leaves for Aether/Primal/Crystal to do normal content". But if they can't do dailies on other DCs (unless you're playing with friends, in which case, like I said already, just party with them and they can queue you), they would have to do them on the DC their character actually lives on, ie there would actually be queues that pop on Dynamis.
Going off your city metaphor - it's less "locking people out of the city" and more "encouraging the other city (because let's be real this particular topic is pretty much solely about Dynamis) to actually grow rather than being a wasteland of AirBnBs because everyone bought up all the property but then effectively lives elsewhere".

[Catwho]

Can confirm, last tier I had a group of 4 that traveled from Primal to Aether, put up a PF, and ended up getting 4 more people.... from Primal.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy - "The only place I can raid is Aether, therefore I must travel to Aether" and now there are no local raiders on the other DCs.

We actually tried putting up a PF on Primal and actually got local raiders who were like "oh thank the Twelve I don't have to go to Aether." And they were nice people and good players, to boot.

[Voidsent-Uchiha]

Lowkey, I wish Yoshi-P would just come out and flat out say Aether is never being uncongested because people seem to somehow be missing the primary brick wall in their face. Their primary concern is always congestion. You playing with your friends, doesn't matter. You raiding with your group, doesn't matter. You roleplaying at certain places, doesn't matter. Congestion, matters. They knew everything you said was going to happen /before/ they made the decision so saying it again has no effect. This is a years long phenomenon of people banging their head into the Aether brick wall of congestion. Mana had congestion problems like Aether did in the past and got locked down for a year, JP people spread out and I haven't seen Mana locked again since then. Meanwhile Aether is going on likely the 2+ years streak of NA people that would rather suffer self-inflicted brain damage from slamming into a brick wall than doing what JP did and listening to orders someone gave you. He asked lodestone after lodestone for years and no one listened and people want to act like he's the problem and not their peers. Aether is never going to be uncongested because NA doesn't want it to be uncongested. If they did, they would've listened to him.

[GraceHorizon]

It wouldn't, though - they can still join PFs on other DCs, just wouldn't be able to make public ones. As for locking them out of DF - right now people (aka Dynamis players) complain the main reason they leave and/or world transfer is because "you can't queue for anything because everyone leaves for Aether/Primal/Crystal to do normal content". But if they can't do dailies on other DCs (unless you're playing with friends, in which case, like I said already, just party with them and they can queue you), they would have to do them on the DC their character actually lives on, ie there would actually be queues that pop on Dynamis.
Going off your city metaphor - it's less "locking people out of the city" and more "encouraging the other city (because let's be real this particular topic is pretty much solely about Dynamis) to actually grow rather than being a wasteland of AirBnBs because everyone bought up all the property but then effectively lives elsewhere".

Dynamis resident here, moved from Crystal last autumn. I try to be a good citizen of my new datacenter, so I run roulettes there and it usually works out. Queue times are longer than Crystal but they’re usually acceptable, within 10 minutes or so. (Of course, I always queue on the role that has need bonus; on the one hand that gives me a faster queue, on the other Dynamis has a healthier variety of need bonuses rather being 2/3 tank need, 1/3 healer like Crystal.) The duties skew lower level because there are so many new characters on Dynamis, but my only real issue is that alliance raid roulette is essentially always Crystal Tower. Current content such as Arcadion Heavyweight pops reasonably quickly too. So, as far as dailies go, Dynamis isn’t thriving but it’s not dead either.

On the other hand, I have tried to help friends do specific duties on Dynamis that aren’t current, and the queues were hopeless. As a specific example, I tried to help someone do Copied Factory on her alt for the 2B glamour set, and we waited over half an hour without queue pop; after that we went to Crystal and got queue pop in 10-15 minutes. So for people who are actually trying to do this game’s big library of past content, it’s still more or less necessary to travel to another datacenter. To turn that last paragraph around, Dynamis is not dead, but it’s not thriving either.

All told, I think the best solution for the OP’s problem, and the issues of both Aether and Dynamis, is to have Party Finder and Duty Finder unified across all datacenters in a region. PF raiders won’t have to travel to Aether, Aether residents won’t be bothered by congestion from folks traveling to their worlds, and Dynamis queues would be quick even for old content.

[mallleable]

I think they should reduce the time travelers can remain on a DC before they automatically get sent back to their home DC from 30 days to a week or even 24 hours.

[Aidorouge]

As long as Aether remains the main raiding server, people will find ways to circumvent any obstacles SE puts in place to squeeze themselves into it.

True, but that only holds so long as Square-Enix themselves provides any holes to squeeze through. Right now they're barring transfers and new character creation on Aether (and Crystal), and keeping the congestion gates up during peak hours, but they DO have the power to COMPLETELY shut off data center traveling entirely as they proved during Dawntrail launch when they locked down Dynamis for almost a month. (Nobody could leave, only enter, and sure enough practically nobody came over.)

With that in mind, there's nothing stopping SE from shutting the gate to Aether indefinitely (as in nobody can travel in ever again), or shutting people from Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis out for good after kicking them all back where they came from.

A detail a lot of people probably forget is that Square-Enix calls their transfer bonuses "World Population Balancing Incentives" and calls them "Preferred" worlds because in their eyes, the issue is that there are not enough "locals" on certain worlds and data centers and they want equilibrium. They likely don't care what the total population is no matter how many times people keep screaming that the player count is below Shadowbringers again, because they still want those total numbers spread out period.

Another thing is that Square-Enix at no point in time ever designated Aether as "the main raiding server" and this was entirely a community created label that came about for reasons that nobody can probably even remember because I'm almost certain people were raiding (and RPing) on Primal just fine long before there was data center traveling, world traveling, and Crystal didn't even exist yet. Players created this problem for themselves by stubbornly sticking to a label they poofed out of thin air, and Square-Enix clearly doesn't care to encourage or endorse this labeling and in fact keeps pushing AGAINST it.

Same with PVP and RP. They don't care if Primal is where most of the sweaties congregated, they'll make people travel for Ranked CC anyway, even to dirty old Dynamis. They don't care if there's not even apartments left on Crystal for venues, they're not making anymore wards/housing districts.
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Wait, why punish members of the lower pop DCs even more like this would only drain the other worlds to force them to do paid transfer once Aether is unlocked because they can't do X content now for no reason like they pay the same sub price to use the PF and DF as everyone else.

Players will always go to aether since it's like the city for the same reasons for more opportunities and more ways to play the X content that they liked from savage raiding, Field ops, and to like even just visiting some RP venues/friends on diff DCs too.

I speak from experience that the Dawntrail lockdown did very little if anything to improve the state of Dynamis, and in fact encouraged some people to flee the first chance they got. Another example of "world locked" content screwing over Dynamis was Cosmic Exploration, where the constant project failures once again compelled many of our long-time DoL/DoHs to finally give up and move (the fact that parts of Aether and Crystal were open at the time did not help matters).

Even I myself finally gave in and moved from Maduin to Excalibur after 3 years because I was so, so, soooooo very tired of ALWAYS having to travel just to do PVP, even Crystalline Conflict, or how once the MSQ kept forcing me into trials I couldn't just unsync solo to progress, my PFs/queues were left barren on Dynamis while they filled in minutes on Aether/Crystal. I also wasn't fond of people constantly trying to suggest the "solution" to fixing Aether/Dynamis was to lock me in again, so I fled before Square-Enix was dumb enough to try the same stunt twice. Even now though I debate if I would move to Aether/Crysyal given the chance because I only picked Primal due to no other choice, so I don't even see this as a permanent relocation, and I'm probably not the only Primal resident that would scramble the instant a single world opened up, to say nothing of Dynamis players.

...Which of course only increases the odds that Aether and Crystal stay closed for new players/transfers (and Aether and Balmung stay congested for travel) indefinitely because Square-Enix knows the kind of people we are, they've seen the way we've flooded into already crammed spaces like hmm... some kind of bright and glowing element? I think there was an entire expansion explaining why that's a bad thing and needs "correction". (That the data center is called "aether" only adds to our self-inflicted irony.) We are currently at the "begging at the gates for meol" phase of the situation we created for ourselves because again, it's the NA community's own fault that data center labels exist at all or that we continue to uphold them even at our own expense.

[Jojoya]

Because they need to PF, which means they aren't a full static, and if you have to PF at all .. the only place where you can get people in a timely manner is aether.

Which doesn't make sense since players from the other data centers can no longer travel to Aether, and characters can't be transferred to Aether to get access. There must be some data center where they are meeting to create their PFs.

As long as Aether remains the main raiding server, people will find ways to circumvent any obstacles SE puts in place to squeeze themselves into it.

So how are they doing it right now with all of Aether congested?

[TeresaFortell]

So how are they doing it right now with all of Aether congested?

They travel before the congestion occurs, before peak time, to be specific. Then when it does happen, they're already there.

[MayuAmakura]

Same as Chaos. It's so bad there that I transferred to Light with my friend. I couldn't hold it anymore and it is big depression there. Devs won't fix it since its free transfer money for htem.