I think I finally figured out the solution to NA data center congestion.

[Aidorouge]

And it doesn't involve merges, lockdowns, or a cross-DC feature the developers are powerless to conceive. Just do the same thing they already do with Ranked PVP and rotate access to the party finder onto specific data centers "per season". Yes, the whole party finder, so that includes everything in the "Other" tab too because why not.

People always complaining about how Square-Enix needs to do something for us, because we can't be trusted to disperse and shatter our own self-inflicted community labels, so let's have them exert the power we know they have (to disable access to a feature data center-wide) and see what happens for a few months.

People can counter all they want that there's not that many people playing anymore, that congestion is a scam, and the gates should be blown wide open for anyone and everyone to keep traveling and transferring into Aether while other data centers languish for getting certain content done, but its pretty obvious by now that Square-Enix isn't going to budge on their "world population balancing initiative" and the more people keep pushing against them, the more often and longer they'll keep throwing up those gates because they're not going to accommodate us for a problem we gave ourselves, doubly so if it really IS a bad thing to just let people endlessly flow into Aether unmitigated. Their may truly be reasons beyond just trying to pretend the game is "too populated".

So they should stop wagging the finger already and grab the belt instead because I honest to god don't think anything short of forcing people to remember that party finder works on other data centers will ever make us stop. And let's be honest... it would be pretty funny to watch people cope with the idea that no one world was ever intended to be the Source of the FF14 universe and that you can in fact enjoy the entire game beyond Aether.

[Alicie]

Crystal roleplayers surely will be happy when raiding horde forcibly intrudes into their data center, rendering every world literally unvisitable for several months
Doesn't takes a lot of brainpower to figure out why this won't work

[GraceHorizon]

Cloud datacenter. Expand resources on demand.

[Voidsent-Uchiha]

and rotate access to the party finder onto specific data centers "per season".

Yoshi P already said in an interview that they're not doing this because it burdens native people on a given world/data center with logins etc. and they don't want to do that. PvP community is small enough to where that side effect doesn't happen.

[Jeeqbit]

It's all about load balancing. For those who don't understand what it means, it's exactly like it sounds - if you have 2 containers, you want each of them to be equally filled with water, as opposed to 1 of the containers overflowing.

Now, people will argue "game is dead" and stuff like that. But realistically, it has a higher population than it did earlier in the game's history, to this day. It only might feel dead for some because there are more data centers and worlds and thus people are more "load balanced" and diluted.

So, some will suggest merging worlds and data centers - but this doesn't take into account potential spikes in activity at patch releases and expansion launches, especially when new raids release which are good at bringing people to the game enough to congest Novice Networks.

What rather needs to happen is for the Party Finder and Duty Finder system itself to do this load balancing - by temporarily sending the party to the data center with least activity when queueing up.

So that raises the question of why they haven't done this. It's technically challenging. There are a number of technical questions it raises, with lots of different potential answers, each with their own security concerns. That said, it would probably only take a day to figure this out doodling a presentation in MS Paint, given I've suggested various of these comprehensive technical solutions myself on these forums. In writing those posts, I was able to think of all the potential issues with those suggestions, and their respective solutions, in just 1 day.

In fairness, due to the player data risks involved with World Visit and DC Travel, it is absolutely fair to provide an entire patch or more worth of QA testing for such a feature and it's quite common for them to push such features back to the final patch before the expansion release, so that it releases during a patch lull.

I noticed that while they don't have really any new FFXIV jobs going (except 1), they have lots of infrastructure jobs (for all their games including MMORPGs) which is good, because this will involve improving their terrible server structure that heavily hinders this game in so many ways - you know, stuff like not being able to access certain features in duties or on other worlds. That's all because of their hardware setup and not using cloud servers for any of the game's features. They even have a job going to improve their terrible payment interface which includes the one for FFXIV and FFXI that was literally designed in like 2000 and somehow still EXISTS.

[Kaurhz]

This won't work.

You're forcing all players to congregate on a single DC / set of servers.

Anything short of region-wide PF/duty queue is just a band aid.

[Aidorouge]

Crystal roleplayers surely will be happy when raiding horde forcibly intrudes into their data center, rendering every world literally unvisitable for several months
Doesn't takes a lot of brainpower to figure out why this won't work

That's why I brought up the "Other" tab because when they temporarily disable Aether PF, why not take Crystal's with it, rendering Primal and Dynamis the only PF destinations for a time unless people want to group up "the old fashioned way" as direct partying/queuing/shouting would still be available for those who refuse to travel for a bit. People want to keep acting like PFs are broken and they can ONLY do stuff on specific data centers they personally labeled "raiding only" or "roleplaying only" so let's see what happens when its actually true and Square-Enix dictates what content people can do and where because apparently we all live and die by the labels presented to us.

But even if Aether was the only PF shuttered for a while, there's no telling what the actual distribution of raiders across the other three data centers would be, so that doesn't mean Crystal would be the only one flooded. If anything I imagine the hardcore crowd would actively avoid the data center most infamous for "people just AFKing in a major city all day not playing".
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Cloud datacenter. Expand resources on demand.

They did experiment with cloud data center technology at one point, but it was forever ago and I'm not sure if they considered it successful enough to be worth investing into further.

In an ideal world, all of the NA playerbase would probably just be on one giant mega server with infinitely generating houses as wards filled up... but this is the same company that got stumped on Viera and Hrothgar hats for 7 years, so there's certain things that are just too unrealistic to ask of them. Which is why I have no littler trust in them implementing even just a cross-DC party and duty finder, especially when they admitted themselves that it would be super hard for them to do.
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Yoshi P already said in an interview that they're not doing this because it burdens native people on a given world/data center with logins etc. and they don't want to do that. PvP community is small enough to where that side effect doesn't happen.

Well, that sucks for Dynamis then, because Ranked PVP alone isn't going to be enough to make a difference when so few people engage with it versus overall PF content.

Though it also goes to show why they will constantly gate Aether no matter how much people whine that they can ONLY raid there, because it creates a similar "burden" on the natives and they're trying to politely encourage players from Primal/Crystal/Dynamis to realize that their data centers don't have content disabled.
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This won't work.

You're forcing all players to congregate on a single DC / set of servers.

Anything short of region-wide PF/duty queue is just a band aid.

People are already "forcing" themselves to congregate on a single data center though, the only difference is whether or not Square-Enix or the community dictates where everyone floods into, and since the idea is to keep at least Primal and Dynamis PFs open, SE isn't even corralling people to one single data center unless the players THEMSELVES decide that only Primal or Dynamis has a working PF function for some reason and then purposefully ignores the other.

And a region-wide PF/DF is like asking for a cure for cancer from these developers, it's just not something they can make happen or they would have done it already. People can keep hoping and holding out for it I suppose, but that's a long time to go without a band-aid, and in the meantime people will just keep trying to crowd into Aether anyway.

[Valence]

There is a reason in pvp they never set the ranked season on specific DCs like Aether or Mana. They're so congested that it's not always possible to travel to them in the first place.

Imagine asking ALL the XIV population to move to another DC, even if a dead one. Raubahn Savage is back.

[Kaurhz]

People are already "forcing" themselves to congregate on a single data center though, the only difference is whether or not Square-Enix or the community dictates where everyone floods into, and since the idea is to keep at least Primal and Dynamis PFs open, SE isn't even corralling people to one single data center unless the players THEMSELVES decide that only Primal or Dynamis has a working PF function for some reason and then purposefully ignores the other.

And a region-wide PF/DF is like asking for a cure for cancer from these developers, it's just not something they can make happen or they would have done it already. People can keep hoping and holding out for it I suppose, but that's a long time to go without a band-aid, and in the meantime people will just keep trying to crowd into Aether anyway.

Thing is, this is optional and cultural congregation, not mandated congregation... If you make it mandatory then you exacerbate the issue a lot more, and you don't give people a choice.. You are basically going with a design that is completely contradictory to the purpose of having data centers. In addition, you are limiting peoples' ability to do retainers, ventures, unspoiled and folklore nodes, or Cosmic/Firmament, if they want to do any of these meanwhile.

[Aidorouge]

There is a reason in pvp they never set the ranked season on specific DCs like Aether or Mana. They're so congested that it's not always possible to travel to them in the first place.

Imagine asking ALL the XIV population to move to another DC, even if a dead one. Raubahn Savage is back.

Aether already gets bombarded by countless players and it hasn't blown up, but it DOES frequently stop people at the door to avoid letting them in for long stretches of time, either as travelers or transfers. Worst that happens is Primal or Dynamis does the same depending on which one gets full first and then people use the other one. I doubt the combined player total of Aether and Crystal would render Primal and Dynamis unable to function when Primal/Crystal/Dynamis combined doesn't send Aether up in smoke. (Thanks to SE, not us though.)

It's also intended to be temporary, not permanent, with the intent of reminding people that they can in fact use PFs on other NA data centers, and then when all PFs re-open after a season or two, folks on Primal/Crystal/Dynamis will hopefully be more inclined to use their own DCs for content instead of obsessively believing they can only do anything on Aether ever.

The alternative is people continuing to whine about how they need one specific data center to live, in which case I hope SE leaves them stuck whining forever because this is 100% a player created problem that we do to ourselves on NA, and this pie in the sky cross-DC party & duty finder is, at best, several years away from now if it ever happens at all.
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Thing is, this is optional and cultural congregation, not mandated congregation... If you make it mandatory then you exacerbate the issue a lot more, and you don't give people a choice.. You are basically going with a design that is completely contradictory to the purpose of having data centers. In addition, you are limiting peoples' ability to do retainers, ventures, unspoiled and folklore nodes, or Cosmic/Firmament, if they want to do any of these meanwhile.

But people already limit themselves on those things. In fact its one of their biggest complaints once they get into Aether, that they're "forced" to go back to their home world after a while to deal with those things. We already treat the other NA data centers like they only exist to hold our stuff and Aether is the only one we can play on.

Also...?

Self-inflicted hobbling of getting content done by only doing it in one place: Perfectly acceptable.
Company mandated reminder that content can be done anywhere: Absolutely terrible.

...No wonder Square-Enix doesn't listen to us, we literally don't make any sense and constantly engage in self-sabotage. Well then, here's hoping they keep the congestion locks and transfer blocks ongoing because its clear we can't regulate ourselves in the NA and if given the chance, we would break Aether entirely.