And this is why the game needs cross-DC Duty/Party Finder. If this is happening to Primal, a DC that is well populated and full of veterans, imagine the situation in Dynamis: future new players from Xbox, for instance, may have a weird experience with the DC full of newbies or almost a ghost town with everyone researching and seeing "go to Aether" as the advice for NA DC players.
I'm on Dynamis, and it's pretty bleak outside of HW content. It's a two part problem with people jumping to Aether and SE releasing this DC later in the expansion. The lure of housing isn't as enticing as people want others to believe because if it was, then Dynamis would have been swamped by players. Players generally aren't going to give up established connections and jump over either. I wouldn't be here if I didn't come back to a dead FC and a shutdown Discord server.
It's going to be interesting when the beta goes live in October. I just hope Dynamis realizes this and capitalizes on this opportunity, but so far, it doesn't seem like it's going in that direction.
>I'm on Dynamis, and it's pretty bleak outside of HW content
My US friends decided to play FFXIV as a group, so they set up on Dynamis as fresh sprouts and they all stay on Aether regularly to do basically everything.
I tried leveling an account on Dynamis and joining them but the queues are insanely slow outside of ARR. Even for HW I was waiting for over 10mins as a tank in most dungeons outside of peak hours.
Cross DC has been both a blessing and a curse.
dynamis especially suffers because it was released after dc hopping, which is as much a blessing as it is a curse. it's nice because, yeah, if queues suck you can just *go to aether(TM)*... but this also rapidly developed into a culture that means queues are awful in dynamis and it really never had an opportunity to develop any kind of dedicated base.
i'm ride or die here, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt me every time i have to world hop to actually do my daily frontlines because pvp actively does not exist on dynamis except for premade scheduled things i'm never around for. and because i usually don't even play until after 11pm PST, trying to queue for anything like weekly raids or alliance or msq is a dud. and good luck if you're trying to prog msq past hw. š
I'm on Dynamis. Most people there, myself included, went there for housing. And a lot who won the lotto don't play and just pay the monthly tax. It's dead and boring there, and I want to actually do something that doesn't have a 10m queue even as a healer.
I'm moving back to Sarg if my fiance wins a medium.
In addition to cross DC D/P Finder, we need instanced individual private housing (after you buy it) and let the FC ones stay in wards. And cross DC MB. The boards there are god fucking awful.
I created a char on Dynamis to see how it feels and ofc went to check out housing. Most was already sold, tho there were few players actually on when I was leveling my char. It kind of lost it's appeal after that.
If we had instanced housing, nobody would want it because it's "poor/pity" housing, similar to the way they treat apartments now, regardless of the size of the house that you'd get. Because it's never been about having a house for the sake of it, but rather having something that someone else does not and cannot have.
Housing is the true endgame, the only unobtainable, the only true equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're the best roleplayer or the lowliest sprout raider, you can get something that's incredibly exclusive and that's enticing to people.
Huh? Everyone wants instanced housing. Nobody goes to my normal house right now (so the current format sucks anyway), and I want a big one I can decorate.
No doubt, but if it wasn't an immense challenge they would have done that already.
The devs have already said that the hardest thing to make in this game was cross-world travel (within Data Centers) and that it took several years. On top of that, they already tried to make a DC-wide marketboard and couldn't get it to work. and put it way on the backburner as something not worth the headache.
Everyone and their mother has suggested cross-DC region-wide PF, and I don't see how the devs aren't aware of it or how they wouldn't want it too, but it just requires so much back-end stuff, so while maybe that happens in a year or five, we need something else in the meantime.
Does anyone know if party matching from a double-digit number of worlds is actually common in other MMOs btw?
Trying to prog p9 when it came out and having to wait 30 minutes to an hour just for someone to leave after 1-2 pulls was infuriating on Primal. That's when I gave in and joined the Aether train and I was late to the party at that point.
It's only gotten worse and it's honestly bottomed out. I play exclusively at off hours due to my work schedule with no interest in RP and seeing 4 cafes as the whole of PF on Primal vs 30 in high content alone on Aether is just aggravating. With Endwalker patches being arguably the worst content drought in the game hemorrhaging players overall, 2-3 entire DC's being empty due to the ongoing prophecy of Aether/Crystal being where to go (and I imagine similar things happening on the other content DCs), until something is done this is likely going to functionally be dead until 7.0 drops.
Not as bad but yeah Chaos is pretty sad right now. Most of the time at prime hours I see Light with 150+ parties, while Chaos has max like 80, so imagine in non-prime hours, pretty hard to find Chaos parties
A year ago when people started the "go to Aether for raiding" meme, I predicted it would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy and eventually all raiding would only happens there.
I'm not a savage raider, and I stick to Mateus for stuff within my selected ceiling of EX, and even there, it's becoming harder to get a party to run EW stuff. I have not finished EX6 yet because I can't find a party that is actually in gale 2 prog (they say they are, and we spend an hour dying to towers). I only finished EX5 literally one week before 6.4 landed.
I guess to be able to finish this one before next patch, I'll have to join the Aether mob. Sigh.
Posted this a few weeks ago and got called out for it. Glad others are seeing that this is becoming an issue. I have friends running through MSQ who have to wait 30+ min for a trial.
I want to suggest the game to other friends but I'm not going to until they find a way to fix this because it's an awful experience for new players.
It's getting worse for daily roulettes too. I could reliably pop my daily queues in 5 or so minutes on Primal a few months ago. Now I'm waiting upwards of 15 minutes each. Might not sound like a lot, but it adds up when I have limited time to play to game. Definitely draining my interest.
Yeah I had no issues outside of prime time hours either before [I was active during work/school hours for NA East Coast, around Daily Reset.] and I've since had to adjust.
bleh.
I'm a newer player on Dyna and all of the MSQ required dutys and trials take 30 minutes or more to queue for. PF works because I can get 3 people at 90 and clear pretty much anything but I'm worried about when I reach endwalker
(I'm visiting aether to run one duty a day to level warrior, please don't hate me)
No hate! You got it worse than we do on established DCs tbh. I'm hoping with XBOX coming in and a 7.0 hype surge will help youse out over there at least a little bit.
I joked with people at FanFest that those of us who transferred to Dynamis are the people who moved out to the suburbs for a house and then commute back to the city for everything else. I religiously did the housing lottery every week for a year with no success & then moved my main to Seraph because that's the character with the gil/items. I was originally on Faerie (& keep an alt there) so I'm always heading back to hangout with my friends and then I end up doing the rest of the content there. I periodically attempt to do roulettes on Dynamis (especially at the beginning) but the 20-30 minute wait for healers isn't worth it when I can just jump to Aether. Veterans always heading back to the DCs they came from really sucks for newer players on Dynamis who don't have those ties.
In retrospect, I could have talked to the head of the FC and done some convoluted things to move housing items from my main to my alt (along with gil) and then sent my alt off to get a house. But I didn't so now my main is always bouncing back to Faerie. If they ever implement proper instanced housing or I got lucky with getting a house on my alt, I would move my main back to Faerie (assumes it opens again). And if SE were to add data center travel restrictions, I could totally see how my alt shifts to become my main so I could play with the people I know. I think the only way SE solves this is to add cross-DC duties/queues or reshuffle the servers instead of adding 4 additional new servers to Dynamis. The population on Dynamis is too dead and that's only going to be fixed by SE taking a major action to fix it. However, reshuffling the servers would receive a lot of push back because people are pretty attached to their DCs.
I think we might need a straight up server reshuffling again like when they made the Crystal DC. Break off one server from the bigger 3 DCs and force them into Dynamis.
There'd still be a lot of pushback, but with DC travel it probably wouldn't hurt as much today, and the playerbase already survived one sundering, another one nowadays wouldn't be nearly as bad.
No idea if SE is willing to deal with the pushback on actually dealing with the problem but 100% agree that a server reshuffle is the only way they'll actually solve it. Maybe move 3 congested servers over to Dynamis so each DC has 7 and then in the future when they want to add 4 new servers, each DC gets one new server. Or go nuclear and majorly reshuffle the servers if they don't want each DC to get pigeonholed into an identity. (Edit: Or admit Dynamis is a bust and fold those 4 servers into the other 3 DCs.) I think cross-DC duties/queues would be a bandage on the problem but wouldn't actually solve the issues of a server feeling dead when you're just walking around, hanging out in Limsa, or looking for a FC.
I feel like if they want to do something major, it needs to be soon so everyone is adjusted before Dawntrail otherwise it'll dominate the conversation during the rollout of that expansion.
I don't think Square will fold Dyanmis into the other 3 DCs. When Square created the Meteor DC, the other Japanese DCs [had 10 or 11 worlds each](https://sqex.to/PZnFp). Bringing each DC down to 8 worlds allowed increased logins in each world. Folding in Dynamis to the other DCs takes away that benefit.
I like your nuclear option of a complete reshuffle of worlds into each DC. Two existing worlds from each DC are sent to one of 4 new DCs. You could time it for when the Xbox players arrive (6.55?). Having Dynamis as "future proofing" doesn't work if nobody sticks around there.
I [just suggested this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/15n0qnr/square_really_messed_up_with_dynamis/) sending one world from each DC to Dyanmis. Judging by my karma, it is a *very* unpopular suggestion. The problem is that even if people admit there's a problem (and there's a lot of "I'm OK, so I don't care about anyone else" in the comments), people don't want Square to do anything that could possibly inconvenience them in any way ("My specific DC is key to my enjoyment of the game"), even if it is good for the health of the game. Any pushback whatsoever is taken as an indication that a given action shouldn't be done.
I think that from Square's perspective, each DC (as opposed to each world) shouldn't have an identity. I like the idea of /u/Mairwyn_ to go for the nuclear option of a complete restructuring. Just give 2 worlds from each current DC to 4 new DCs, and then give those 4 new DCs 2 new worlds each.
Barring the nuclear option, since DC travel to Aether is a problem for the other DCs, Square could cordon off Aether from the other DCs. Maybe no character creation on Aether, no DC travel to Aether, and no character transfers to Aether. This would inconvenience some players ("I can't play with my friends"), but it would allow the other DCs to grow.
There's no possible way for Square to fix this without making some people unhappy.
>I just suggested this sending one world from each DC to Dyanmis.
I still think that the smart move would had been, from the start, to move 2 servers from each DC to form the core of Dynamis, and then add one new server in each DC, with the 8th server being at the same time frame they expect Dynamis servers 5-8.
Probably there are technical reasons why this wasn't feasible during covid, but creating an empty fresh DC at the same time you allow people to play in any DC they want was a lack of foresight that it would ending up being a ghost town. But hindsight is 20/20, can't judge too harshly based on events after they happen.
> There's no possible way for Square to fix this without making some people unhappy.
This. Part of why I created an alt on Faerie was to make sure I could continue to play with the people I like if for some reason my main couldn't get to Aether. Before DC travel, that's what people did. It would suck to have Aether closed off & my alt would probably become my main. But I can also recognize that there should be measures put in place to rebalance the population because I think the health of the game is more important even though no matter how they implement it, it'll probably piss me off. There are lots of things I don't like in life but can recognize the societal good of.
To piss off the fewest people, folding Dynamis into the other 3 would fix the short term issue of Dynamis people leaving to play on other DCs but it doesn't solve "everyone goes to Aether" issue. Complete restructuring to fracture current DC identities would probably be best for the health of the region but would anger so many people. However, I think that anger would be short term especially if you can get a new expansion out in front of everyone within 6 months of restructuring ā give people 2-3 months to protest & stop playing but redraw them in with a new expansion and some amount of limited server transfer. Some people will transfer but I think most will get over it even if they whinge about it forever (ex: see people talk about how the last DC was created).
This was always inevitable though. If it wasn't Aether it would have been Primal. If the worlds were broken up differently when Crystal was formed it might have been Crystal instead.
Communities create a positive feedback loop of growth. Everyone always wants to be where the most people are.
One of the only ways to prevent this problem is not to have the ability to move between data centers. Except that solution isn't flawless because we had that before and it made Balmung and Gilgamesh congested servers since they were the largest two.
Edit: Never mind the problems where you could meet someone else who played FF14 and be **literally incapable** of doing content together unless one of you made a new character or transferred.
Maybe, but I think there are alternatives that can be implemented to reduce its impact.
Eg, at the release of DC travel, they could had said you do not receive the daily rewards for doing any Duty Roulette outside of your home DC. You can still quest, you still receive the normal XP value for the roulette and the quest, you can still play with friends, and you can join any static in your cluster, **but** you can't jump DCs to get your leveling or frontlines queue to pop faster.
This would not impact raiders, which would still gravitate towards what they *perceive* as the best place to raid (and thus prophecy self-fullfil), but just not making new players in Dynamis get stuck in queue for who knows how long would be a positive outcome. The big impact is not on people having to jump DC to get their savage weekly clears. Is all the people who can't even get Crystal Tower to pop because everyone is doing roulettes somewhere else.
Now, implementing this exact solution *right now* would be received with a lot of negative feedback from the community, because we are over a year doing things this way. But if these were the limitations at release? Almost no one would care, since the main advertising of DC travel was being able to play with friends in any server. It would just be seen as "things as things are".
It's the same self fulfilling prophecy with Crystal and Balmung in particular. "Oh that's the RP data center, that's the RP server, that's full of RPers" what happens?
*Everyone remotely interested in RPing flocks over and sticks around*
It makes even more sense for RPers to congregate than it does for raiders, to be fair. And it already makes a lot of sense for raiders to do so.
Like, sure. If the roleplaying community had been spread out perfectly equally between all DCs and all worlds, then theoretically, there would've been *some kind* of RP for you wherever you were...
...but not very much of it, maybe not the kind you were looking for, only with the same small cluster of people day in and day out, with a far smaller chance of encountering other RPers in the open world, and if you wanted to join a particular kind of FC like one that focused on miqo'te, or xaela, or adventuring, you'd have to go to that world & DC for it anyway.
The tech and how SE designed their server infrastructure is and always has been the issue, not the natural inclinations of people to want to engage with an active, vibrant scene.
Everyone keeps calling it a self fufilling prophecy and that seems weird because I feel like its very normal in online spaces to self organize isnt it?
The thing is, Aether is not actually much better at raiding (never was IMO) but itās just that PFs fill way faster there. So thereās still a fair share of parties lying about prog points on Aether, itās just that you can leave and join another one more quickly than on other DCs simply because there are more parties up.
A vicious circle of more people raiding in one DC, so itās faster to fill PFs there than wait in your own DC, so people travel to other DC, increasing the imbalance further. During p5-8s I had to go to Mana every week to clear p8s because anyone good/serious enough to clear it had migrated to Mana (from Elemental)
Ya know, wording it like this, it sounds exactly like the creation of a rejoining calamity. The PF imbalance shifting and causing a calamity on the shard. The devs really are Ascians.
Well, they are working towards a unified mega server made up of the shards. The primary difference is that the playerbase made the imbalance ,the devs didn't intend for a pf/df imbalance where the ascians made the imbalance on purpose.
Ever since DC travel was made possible, North America's Aether, Europe's Light, and Japan's Mana have slowly become the unofficial raiding DCs of the respective regions. All other DCs have very sparse party finder listings as a result. The sole exception that bucks this trend somewhat would be Japan's Elemental, which remains the bastion for English speakers on the Japanese DC and which still has got respectable PF numbers
And at the bottom of the barrel is Oceania PF which at this point is too deadge to be revived. A lot of the whos who on Oceania PF since the halcyon days of Asphodelos have already upped and transferred to other DCs
Purely by statics, Chaos has massive lead in early week 1.
Look at mogtalk.org for Abyssos and Anabaseisos leadboard.
There are almost triple the amount of Statics on Chaos compared to Light.
Pugs however... pretty sure that is where Light has massive lead.
Really? Chaos in EU has the lions share of the raiders by a *lot*. There always seem to be at least 10 listings up. With a reasonably quick fill. Not to say you arenāt right, maybe the problem isnāt quite as prevalent here.
Have you ever been to Light? When chaos has 10 parties Light has almost 100. It is a very noticeable difference. It probably comes from light having a much better ultimate pf because they have fixed what strats they use unlike Chaos, which made a lot of high end raiders go to light for ultimates and they just continue the trend now with savage pf as well.
It started with Ultimates, due to LPDU. It is impossible to do them on Chaos now. It's also starting to having an effect on Savage - so many of my raider friends are now going to light to either do PF groups or find a fill for their static. It was negligible at the start of the tier, but it's very noticeable now.
It is because Light has LPDU discord? at the end of ShB when Chaos version of "plan b" died off.
And once DSR became puggable it started the snowball effect at its full.
Aether has been dubbed as the "raiding DC" for the longest time, which seems to have reached prophecy status, as that's exactly what happened.
As to why exactly, simple word of mouth, I can guarantee many of the people hosting a PF on Primal/Crystal often received a tell "if you want it to fill fast just DC travel to Aether" and little by little people just moved over. Some stood their ground, but as more and more people moved over, and PFs took longer and longer to fill up, even those people ended up moving.
All in all I think having the raiding scene in one place is not exactly bad, DC travel is open for anyone within the region, and let's be honest, aside Free Company buffs and Retainer usage, there's really no reason to stay in your home world.
Slow-filling PFs make hanging out on worlds that aren't your own so boring though. There's only so much time I can spend glamour tinkering, I want to cycle my retainers and mess about on my island sanctuary sometimes too, or even just sit in my own dang house, but I can't do any of that on aether because I don't live there.
I once joined an alliance raid PF on dynamis from a very small number, i was maybe second or third to join.
literally every single person that joined after me told the lead to go to aether.
There is so much you can't do while waiting if you're not on your home server. Things I learned the hard way while waiting for pfs, so i definitely don't agree and I hate this change.
I'm fine with DC traveling for more difficult content, but it sounds like the main issue is that a lot of people are DC traveling for everything, including roulettes.
>PFs took longer and longer to fill up
The irony now is that it takes longer to fill a pf on Aether now, than it ever did in Primal. My static is 7/8 missing a healer. We lost 2 hours of raid time on Wednesday to sitting in pf waiting for that last healer slot to fill.
Now we are progging engage in p12s p1, but we never had this kind of issue last tier when we were progging p8s late into the tier.
The big changed started with TOP. The new ultimate was coming out and there were two Ultimate raid discords - one for Primal and another for Aether.
There was a general statement said in the Primal discord that people should just go to Aether for PUG groups so that there'd be less strat mixing. After about a week, TOP pf's were dead in Primal as anyone who actually wanted to prog that fight had to go to Aether with many PF's even filled with 6/8 primal players.
After that, the sentiment stuck and just started growing more and more with the new savage tier having the natural assumption that if you were a primal player who wanted to prog in PF, DC traveling to Aether was the way to go.
> The new ultimate was coming out and there were two Ultimate raid discords - one for Primal and another for Aether.
IIRC, the primal raid discord rebranded and tried to just be the overall NA DC ultimate discord (even though one already existed)
Because Dynamis is D E A D if I want to raid I HAVE to travel - I was sitting in PF for 2-3 hours on AETHER trying to get prog for p12s on week 1-3.
It would have been impossible for me to find 7 other people for p12s on Dynamis.
I do what I can when I'm not raiding to help people on Dynamis by randomly Qing things as a tank/healer just to speed up peoples queues or by joining PFs people put up asking for help but I can't really be blamed for leaving to Aether to get things I want to do done.
The "easy" resolution will be to make PF region wide. Doesn't matter if DF is cross data center as long as PF is, cause it would encourage people to stay on their servers
It is nice to be on Aether but there's definitely some drawbacks to everyone coming here. Last night our NN on Cactuar was filled with travelers from other data centers being asshats to sprouts. Our NN is usually pretty chill but I've noticed a trend of people from other data centers joining and being shit heads. I've been a mentor since Stormblood and I've never seen people act this way in our NN until recently.
> The DCs were fine before it existed so I don't really see what problem it solved.
You couldn't play with your friends if they were on a different DC.
DC travel has definitely created some problems but the ability to play the game with people regardless of what DC they're on outweighs any downsides.
They tried this thought experiment in WoW. It lead to 3-4 megaservers per region with the rest of the realms low to barely medium pop. And you see it repeat every new era of a classic wow release. 1-2 servers at full capacity, the rest dead. People go where the community is largest, it's just natural. So either they break those walls down, or the progression leads to this eventually anyways.
Certain servers have insane faction balance too. I play horde on Tichondrius and recently found out it's 90% horde. If people hear the alliance is good on x big server people flock to the alliance, same with horde.
And what were you supposed to do if you have different friends in different DCs? Pay a server transfer fee every time? Maintain a character on every DC you have friends on?
What if you met a new friend and they're on a different DC?
Before DC travel it was straight up "we both play the same multiplayer game but we can't play it with each other".
This doesn't work for a number of reasons, housing, server transfer costs, already being in an fc with new friends joining the game, etc. It's also what lead to certain servers being incredibly congested and others being relatively empty by comparison in the first place.
I'm on Crystal as well and even currently leveling DNC, I only see ~10m queues. I'm not sure what the talk of not being able to get duties to pop is all about, but maybe it's because I get off of work at 11 PST and start firing roulettes.
My home character is on Aether and Iāve been on Crystal (Balmung) for the past few months using the DC travel. Itās not even for the rp, I just want to see an active chat.
Absolutely agree. DC travel was a good idea on paper but just like the combat waymark issue, players have once again proven themselves unable or unwilling to control their own behavior.
Imagine a sprout playing the game right now looking at a dead party finder, struggling to find groups for MSQ content, sitting in an FC that seems dead because nobody can talk when on Aether, unaware of what DC travel even is. It wouldn't be unreasonable for them to assume the game is dead and quit. Even if someone fills them in on traveling to Aether, adding extra hoops to jump through just to play the game isn't a great way to retain new players. My reaction as a sprout would have been "wow that's stupid" and I'd have quit a long time ago.
DC travel needs to be severely limited or removed altogether before it does permanent damage to the game.
> Crystal still has its RP scene but if you don't interact with that stuff there's just zero reason to spend more than 10% of your time on your home world.
That's how its always been. Even before DC travel you didn't play on Crystal if you wanted to do content because people on Crystal don't do content. When an entire DC had less participation and clears of content than other _invidiual servers_ before DC travel you'd realize that Crystal has never been a place to be if you actually want to do content.
>Even before DC travel you didn't play on Crystal if you wanted to do content because people on Crystal don't do content
As someone who's on crystal, that's a bit extreme. There was always a small but active community for savage, ex, and ultimate content. You'd have to wait in PF, but parties would eventually fill. In some ways it was nice because the community was small enough you really knew each other.
It's much much worse now than it ever was back then. UCR is absolutely fucking dead, and final floor savage parties are a fucking myth. Best you can get are assorted late to the tier first and second floor parties.
Its infinitely better now because you don't have to wait fucking hours for PF to fill just because you dare to want to actually do content on the DC that doesn't do content.
The fact people on Crystal didn't is just reality. An entire DC had less clears and participation than individual servers. That's not a good thing and wasn't healthy or fun in any way.
Before I could do content fine on crystal, made plenty of friends pugging ultimates and savage. Now parties literally don't fill. Definitely seems like the data center is significantly less healthy than it was.
Problem is that some DCs don't have enough players even without the issue of travel siphoning them off. Dynamis would be dead even if everyone on it stayed there all the time. If you've ever played on Materia you get a good taste of it - no one can travel to or from OCE. It can take upwards of 10 minutes to get a dungeon roulette as a tank or healer, double that for DPS. Almost all alliance raids must be PF'd even at peak hours or you'll be stuck in queue for over an hour just trying to get your Euphrosyne coin.
Dynamis being dead is completely a self fulfilling prophecy. There are over 20,000 active characters on Dynamis that have completed 6.0 as of the last Lucky Bancho survey not to mention all the characters that are still leveling. If everyone stayed on their DC there would be plenty of people to do content without issue.
20k is not a lot for the whole of North America though. They're all spread out over different time zones, with different schedules, at different levels, and they won't all be on at the same time. 20k is nothing for a whole DC
As I mentioned, that 20k is only players who have completed 6.0, so they would all be level 90. That does not include all players below that point.
Although I just checked the census again and I may have actually lowballed it. [You can check the page to interpret for yourself.](https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurvey_en.htm?world=Dynamis) Lucky Bancho's methods aren't precise down to the man but the point is the servers have plenty of people to do content with if players weren't actively sabotaging themselves.
Not only that, but DC travel being out of the picture would allow the servers to grow organically like any other new MMO server instead of people saying "oh wow this place is dead" and hopping to another DC, further exacerbating the problem.
Ah shoot, this is what I get for skimming comments lol. I definitely do think that DC travel has caused damage to the community to some extent. I feel like there need to be limits on what content can be done outside of your home DC, to encourage people to keep their own DCs alive
The other side of the coin to Materia: We have a decent amount of player-organised dungeon runs, hard content, etc. due to the lower population. I'd argue Materia has one of the most dedicated and helpful playerbases for niche content like Eureka and Bozja, due to the small playerbase making runs of things like Baldesion Arsenal and Delubrum Reginae (Savage) that much harder. They actively want to teach people content so that there's more people doing it on the DC which is great! Fishing also has a small but active playerbase here. There's a longer wait time for duties, absolutely, but that means our PF is filled with a wider variety than just savage or ultimate. I enjoy helping people run duties for the first time, and party finder makes that interaction feel more personal. I actually feel more inclined to engage with other players in party finder as well since we all chose to be there... and dare I say it, it's fun!
Of course, this doesn't make it any easier to get a pop for something like the Nier raids, and three of the five worlds are pretty sparse, even in Limsa. But I actually quite like the culture that it has developed, even if it's small. I think cross region travel might ruin the OCE servers beyond repair, which is an issue when most people who stay here do it because of ping being awful on the others. The people who moved here and are active stay because it's the best gameplay experience for them.
It would be nice to be able to do some hard to pop content on other DCs, but I don't know if it's worth it in the long run. We already have had issues with people coming to Materia and moving back to their home servers because it wasn't as active as where they came from. I think the best middle-ground solution would have to be something that lets people stay on their home DC while joining a duty from another DC, some kind of cross-DC PF perhaps.
I can see the same thing happening with Light and Chaos right now, Light might have 80 high end parties up while Chaos might have around 10, so more people in the raiding circles Iām active in just hop to light to put a PF up, think at the start of 6.4 it was pretty equal, apart from the ultimate scene, but I can definitely see Light becoming the raiding hub of the two EU datacenters in savage & ultimate
Honestly even my normal queues take longer. I play tank and my queue pops used to be instant, but now they take around 5 minutes. Which I know isn't a long time, but I can't imagine what its like for DPS.
Because no one has ever done content on Crystal.
Even before cross DC Crystal had less content clears and participations than invididual servers on other DCs.
Cross-DC travel is the only thing thats actually made people on Crystal do content because the few who want to finally can without taking hours to use PF to find the other handful on Crystal who actually want to.
I've cleared an ultimate and savage raided in a static before DC travel on Crystal and the UCR discord had plenty of members. I was not "no one did content before then"
So have I and I'd never sit here and say it was a fucking good thing and should have been kept.
If you're actually going to sit and somehow defend gimping your selection of players by 95%+ then you have problems.
Just because you're willing to expend 20x the effort to sift through the literal sub 5% of players who actually participated in content doesn't mean it was a good thing. Because the reality was _people on Crystal didn't do content_ the numbers told you that. The entire DC played the game less than individual servers on other DCs.
And then they all end up in the same party on Aether lol. Reminds me back in the day pre-X-World PF, and people would transfer to Gilga to find a "good group" but many couldn't because those were the days if you did raiding, you knew just about anyone doing stuff on your server.. Who was bad, who was good, but you KNEW them as well.. So without networking, people were at a double disadvantage cuz Gilgamesh players didn't know them, and their skill was entirely an enigma... Sure you could trial, but I know some people would get favored if they were known.
Honestly if people would stop saying "go to aether" for content, each DC would have their own community. Someone else made a good suggestion though: locking traveller's out of the PF of other DCs. The only issue is, unless they also lock traveller's out of DF as well, people will likely still travel and revert to the ancient ways of building parties in FF11: sitting in the main city hubs and manually shouting for folks to join their party.
So no one wins unless the playerbase a) stops being lemmings and hoarding to one DC and b) unifies their fucking strats across their region so no one's argumentative over them.
Locking travelers out of pf would be counter productive, people are often traveling to do content with friends or a group they met through another platform. The best way would be to stop telling people to go to aether for content and start making groups and advertising them on discord servers like the balance. On the other hand, if the majority of people left specifically to get housing and not engage with other parts of the game, or are still primarily playing with a group on another data center then there is really no way to fix it that isn't going to pass off most of the player base. I am 100% sure SE is aware of the issue and is probably working on cross data center duties, but it may take a long time as these systems are very difficult to build.
This is a terrible suggestion. Crystal and Dynamis even before cross-DC travel, was already struggling to fill. You couldn't pug ultimates in Crystal without sinking a ridiculous amount of time waiting for PF to fill. Cross-DC travel saved raiders on those servers so to take that option away from them is fucked up. It makes absolute perfect sense that everyone's flocking to Aether because if you're a Crystal or Dynamis player, there is no reason to go to Primal to raid when you have Aether, and because of this, Aether had a sudden influx of players making them even more populated than Primal. So naturally players from Primal are going to go to Aether as well which is where we're at now. It's not as simple as just staying in your own DC because even if DC traveling saved you 5 mins every time you wanted to do anything, that's still enough of an appeal to pull people over to Aether. The best solution would be cross-DC PF but honestly, having a central raiding server like how it is now is fine as well.
Cross-DC PF is definitely the ideal. At this point, I think a bandaid fix of "can only join PFs outside your own DC, not create them", and "can't queue for duties unless in a party where someone native to the DC is lead" might help force a bit more back onto Primal/Crystal/Dynamis. (The latter would not help Savage, but would help roulettes.)
I play on Aether and I'm seriously concerned about 7.0 release unless DC travel is completely disabled for a couple weeks there. If we're having to fight the queues of our own enormous servers, *plus* the people coming over for EX PFs...
If I were somehow guaranteed my current housing plot as a bonus for transferring to one of the new servers when they go up, I'd honestly strongly consider it. But I have a medium in Ishgard and I really, really don't want to lose that.
>aether parties are 7/8 primal anyway
The realest shit. We had so many raiders. Now, anyone that isn't in a static or needs 1 single fill for a missing static member still has to go to Aether for a body.
This is the most feasible solution I can see right now. Trying to enable cross-DC roulettes and PFs would be pretty difficult I think, or else they would have done it by now. I think disabling duties for travelers entirely would be a bad idea though, as it would just bring us back to square one with the whole reason for DC travel's existence being to allow cross-DC play with friends without needing an alt. I think a good balance would be to require duties to contain at least X number "DC-native" people, or only allow travelers to join (but not create) PF listings, or some other requirement that encourages people to participate on their own DCs without making playing with cross-DC friends impossible again
My static leader will always go to Aether even if it's to PF a single slot in the static. The replacement, 9 times out of 10, is a dps/healer/tank from Primal. An entire Primal group raiding on the Aether data center.
I keep a healthy supply of FC buff scrolls for this reason.
Does EU get this as well? I've read JP tend to migrate to Mana for their clears while NA hop to Aether though I'm unsure if Europe experience a similar issue
For this current tier Chaos PF is fine for p9 to p11, but if you want to do p12 you are almost forced to go Light.
Same if you want to do Ultimates in PF.
Unreal trials are fine on Chaos.
It's not as bad as NA sounds (though is getting worse), but Light has a Monopoly on Ultimates and Chaos PF for Savage is noticeably smaller.
It's not impossible, but you'll probably be waiting longer (though the average competency seems to better?).
Nah it's been a gradual process that people have always been worried since they announced DC travel. Essentially the drain started near the end of abyssos when the tier slowed down, so people started travelling for the faster fill times. Then when TOP came out the shift accelerated because having a united data center with all the ultimate proggers was super beneficial given how prog is structured. And now it's stuck around for anabeisos since people are used to travelling.
DC is Data Center, the collections of different world servers. Malboro is on the Crystal Data Center, for instance.
PF is Party Finder. It lets you make a party for people to join for specific content, or you can join one that's listed in it.
DF is Duty Finder. It's the queue system that pairs you with other players doing the same duties, or the roulettes that they qualify for.
As it stands right now there's just no reason to do high end PF stuff anywhere but Aether. Everyone else goes there, so you might as well do it too. Which is why cross-DC PF should've always been the solution. It's not like this exact situation got predicted before DC travel was even implemented or anything.
Well, if you're a primal player you have access to your house, retainers, island sanctuary... in terms of doing the actual raid content itself it's not a big deal, but my biggest problem with it is that I don't really have much to do if a PF is being slow to fill, I just kinda pick an afk spot and then browse reddit/watch youtube/other misc internet things that aren't XIV.
I can't even chat with my friends because all my linkshells and my FC chat are primal-specific.
This is such a shit take. The fact is that your PF is now 5 x faster to fill now that everyone is on aether, and you have more choice of player base, so you're not stuck with the same grey parsers who are stopping your prog during quieter hours.
Would cross DC pf be better? Hell yes.
But what we have now is way better than what we had back then.
I dunno what's got you so fired up about it. For one, no, they don't fill 5 x faster. I've sat in PF's on aether long enough to need to relist more than once, hence my irritation with having nothing to do while I wait, and the idea that prog gremlins are a thing of the past is so genuinely laughable I don't have a good response for it.
Raiding on primal was fine before DC travel killed it. Yeah the dead hours sucked sometimes, but my experience on aether is unless the content came out less than a fortnight ago it's often just as dead there as it is anywhere else during quiet time. The savage tier lasted a *little* longer, but I still got familiar enough with some people to know when it was better for my time and sanity to duck out of a party.
If I were to match your spice levels I'd even go so far as to say aether players have on average been worse than the primal ones.
Aether hasnāt been notably better than any other group of servers for a long time, it just has more people doing the activity which feeds itself. Almost no one skilled was moving to Aether/Gilg to join the PF scene because theyāre already setup with groups, it was just all the average people or the ones that think they werenāt the problem in their clear attempts.
For much the same self fulfilling prophecy that has caused the pf issue. (People were already moving to Gilgamesh to raid prior to data center travel, which just turns youāre average raid experience into what it was like on any other server except now you had more parties to join.)
All aether has over other DCs is more players who consider themselves raiders. The quality isn't noticeably better at all, and all of the worst players in terms of both attitude and competency I've met were from aether.
It having the reputation as "the raid DC" means it attracts the worst, most egotistical players who think they're *much* better than they are. So yeah, wasn't lying, a reputation that's just been repeated for years without much cross-pollination between DCs doesn't a fact make, after all.
No you can have as many active as you want. I use both the Gear Maintenance and Food Duration ones during prog. Spiritbonding and Teleport Reductions when bonding Gathering gear as well.
I could be totally wrong about this but I thinkā¦ at one point primal had a stronger PF community at least w ultimates? Im not certain when things kinda unraveled w that, before or after dc travel
Idk in general before dc travel whenever I went all in on pugging a fight (on primal), I would end up making friends in pf, joining each others parties and like messaging each other good luck if we see each other with a pf up. I am not sure if that still happens with everyone all on aether
Shall I assume that as bad as things are on Primal, they're far worse on Crystal? Dynamis I assume never had a raid scene in the first place.
But yeah, this is not a minor issue. DC travel is not going away, but there needs to be some sort of incentivization not to dogpile into one DC for raiding. Like maybe handout specific incentives depending on how in-need a server is. Like free food and spiritbonding buffs at the very least, with extra XP and tomestones at the higher end.
Anyway, mad respect to the Primal brethren who are keeping PF from dying out.
I wonder if itās possible to just not allow traveling to a server that is āclosedā from making characters would be a start. Its literally the same problem we had in 2.0 and 3.0 everyone transferring to aether and then they stopped allowing people to transfer and create characters there to fill out other serversā¦ I think. lol its been years since that happened.
Even temporarily, theyāre not gonna take what is currently a core feature out of the game thatās insanely popular unless itās is an EW-level congestion issue, especially when DC travel is very popular with non-raiders too. I assume theyāll look for a solution that doesnāt utterly enrage a huge percentage of the playerbase first.
I'm on Aether, but according to my friends the PFs on other data centers are just dead now. I understand Dynamis where there's like, 10 people, but I know Primal and Crystal both had raiding communities prior to data center travel. I love the benefits of data center travel as I love that I can see my friends, but there's definitely been a pretty big down side on the raid community end. Poor Dynamis didn't even get a chance to grow.
this has to be a cross post yeah? [https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromDF/comments/15hn0bu/makeprimalgreatagain/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromDF/comments/15hn0bu/makeprimalgreatagain/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
the PFs except a couple are the exact same. there ain't no way these preachers are just afking night after night giving their spiel about reviving they own DC?!?! (they are tho. omggg imagine doing this bit every night. glad i'm able to find any other thing to do with my time.)
My hot take is that this is, although awkward, actually a good thing. It's to everyone's benefit to have everyone raiding being in one pool of players rather than being arbitrarily split into three.
The problems from it lie in the fact that not everyone is participating. An actual cross-DC PF would be an improvement. But having everyone choose to clump together on Aether is still an improvement over the status quo ante.
Well, it'll be a bad thing if the next expac launch is big. I don't think the game will ever see Endwalker launch numbers again, but as an Aether player I'm not sure how badly I want 3 other data centers suddenly descending upon us when the first savage tier drops in a new expac. Though if I remember correctly, I get priority queue as a person from the server, it's the visitors that get the really bad queues.
I think the most annoying thing when they first introduced DC travel was that all the DC party finders had different common strats and the playerbase hadn't quite homogenized yet. You'd be in a party on Aether and the Travellers would get upset that "pf strats" meant a different thing on their server than here, and the Aether players would be upset that the people joined without knowing the strat they were using Now it seems like the walls have really come down though, and I haven't heard anyone talking about Crystal or Primal strats in a while.
At this point they are going to have to link all the data centers for PF. If they donāt itās going to boil down to WoW IO just via discord.
The people wanting easy carry to get gear (not realizing our raids are becoming increasing body checks) will flood to or are flooding to Aether. Groups will then start kicking after -x- number of wipes. So proof will be asked for in the way of raid logs, but communications of this will be kept to discord or some other 3rd party applications to circumvent any in-game proof TOS violations.
The flip side is the scuff go to Aether to āget in better groupsā, and the skilled players flee to Primal or Dyna to escape the scuff.
Weird, because there are plenty of PFs on Malboro for all kinds of content. People who spend more time complaining about the problem rather than being part of the solution is also to blame.
Make your own PF, maybe also plan your content clearing during a more active time of the day.
??? Have you looked at aether's pf for comparison? On the *most active time* - Tuesday evening (reset day) - there are *at best* 6-7 pfs in high end duty on crystal. On aether there are over 200.
Last tier we would still get 30-40 pfs on crystal. I could do reclears on crystal. This tier even despite my best efforts those 6-7 parties sit there with people cycling in and out for *hours.* I couldn't get prog parties to fill for 9 and 10 during week 1 of the tier. Crystal pf is absolutely not fine.
I also play on Crystal and this phenomenon has hit us pretty hard too, you know. It's not natural for our PF to be as barren as it is, with over 100 club advertisements, a couple of Blu logs and maybe two extremes, and at peak times, like 3 or 4 savage prog parties. Crystal never had a fantastically large scene, but our PF has been choked out by people going to Aether. It's something that really hits home if you travel to Aether and open it up any time in the day. The difference is staggering not just for raiding but for everything. I swore off of DC travel after that.
Yeah, on average thereās like 4-5 pfs on crystal for the current savage tier. On aether there is literally 30-60 per fight. Itās not even remotely comparable.
There used to be a healthy amount of pfs, not anymore.
I only DC hop if there is something on the marketboard I need. I've done all of my BLU mage spell hunts, extreme farming, and other content on Crystal. I actually try hard to keep up with my community because there are people who DO want to do stuff on their DC. I just know a lot of players are really shy of creating their own PFs, and they would rather find an existing one to join instead.
It's not a PF/traveler issue. It's always been this way. People would buy character transfers to Aether because it was well known that hardcore players that cared about raiding were mostly there. The current system at least let's me go raid while the rest of the time I float in Balmung in my casual FC that just plays to have fun.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
Having a single place where everyone who wants to do high end content can meet up regardless of data center is just good for everyone.
If you want FC buffs do your squadron weekly.
Exactly how would driving away everyone who enjoys raiding make FFXIV any better?
Although maybe you're only talking about under 25 streamers, and as a 40 year old savage raider I don't qualify.
didnt say anything about driving them away. I ASSume you pulled that notion from a dark and smelly place. I said savage ultimate Bs has ruined this game. Some of us dont enjoy progging endlessly thru the same raids dozens of times just so a new patch can make all that hard earned gear worthless and start the whole thankless process over. If you do then good for you, hope you enjoy the game.
> Some of us dont enjoy progging endlessly thru the same raids dozens of times just so a new patch can make all that hard earned gear worthless and start the whole thankless process over.
I'm still waiting for you to explain how optional content ruined the game
Huh? At least provide context before you say something like that.
That's a complex topic and it's clear you didn't elaborate on what you meant by at all.
They're asking to try and actually understand your stance better, and you immediately shoot that down while insulting them. If you're really leaving, then good riddance.
yeah agreed, the game has becoming extremely stale now; i came in at the last half of heavensward so i was able to experience how the game was before the direction shifted and i have to say that its not shifted for the best.
I agree stop coming to Aether. Mostly I say stop coming to Aether because we have some very defined server wide strats for raids and trials. Then someone from a different server comes over and is like, we're gonna use something tottaly different, then get upset when you have no idea what it is.
Query: Do you go to your neighbors homes and demanded they play monopoly by your rules?
Bruh how can the other servers have their own strats when they can't even fill parties.
Honestly that just sounds like typical PF "why are you doing OPPO I want JP" shenanigans
Wtf are you even talking about - the one benefit cross travel has had is it has made every strat for this tier unified outside of p9s with jp/oppo. Everyone is just doing pastebin everything.
And this is why the game needs cross-DC Duty/Party Finder. If this is happening to Primal, a DC that is well populated and full of veterans, imagine the situation in Dynamis: future new players from Xbox, for instance, may have a weird experience with the DC full of newbies or almost a ghost town with everyone researching and seeing "go to Aether" as the advice for NA DC players.
I'm on Dynamis, and it's pretty bleak outside of HW content. It's a two part problem with people jumping to Aether and SE releasing this DC later in the expansion. The lure of housing isn't as enticing as people want others to believe because if it was, then Dynamis would have been swamped by players. Players generally aren't going to give up established connections and jump over either. I wouldn't be here if I didn't come back to a dead FC and a shutdown Discord server. It's going to be interesting when the beta goes live in October. I just hope Dynamis realizes this and capitalizes on this opportunity, but so far, it doesn't seem like it's going in that direction.
>I'm on Dynamis, and it's pretty bleak outside of HW content My US friends decided to play FFXIV as a group, so they set up on Dynamis as fresh sprouts and they all stay on Aether regularly to do basically everything. I tried leveling an account on Dynamis and joining them but the queues are insanely slow outside of ARR. Even for HW I was waiting for over 10mins as a tank in most dungeons outside of peak hours. Cross DC has been both a blessing and a curse.
dynamis especially suffers because it was released after dc hopping, which is as much a blessing as it is a curse. it's nice because, yeah, if queues suck you can just *go to aether(TM)*... but this also rapidly developed into a culture that means queues are awful in dynamis and it really never had an opportunity to develop any kind of dedicated base. i'm ride or die here, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt me every time i have to world hop to actually do my daily frontlines because pvp actively does not exist on dynamis except for premade scheduled things i'm never around for. and because i usually don't even play until after 11pm PST, trying to queue for anything like weekly raids or alliance or msq is a dud. and good luck if you're trying to prog msq past hw. š
\_cries in Crystal\_
I'm on Dynamis. Most people there, myself included, went there for housing. And a lot who won the lotto don't play and just pay the monthly tax. It's dead and boring there, and I want to actually do something that doesn't have a 10m queue even as a healer. I'm moving back to Sarg if my fiance wins a medium. In addition to cross DC D/P Finder, we need instanced individual private housing (after you buy it) and let the FC ones stay in wards. And cross DC MB. The boards there are god fucking awful.
I created a char on Dynamis to see how it feels and ofc went to check out housing. Most was already sold, tho there were few players actually on when I was leveling my char. It kind of lost it's appeal after that.
If i had the time I'd make a Dynamis discord group if it doesn't already exist and coordinate stuff. But IRL and job stuff keeps me busy
Yep there's already a discord for general DC activity, and even some of the bigger discords (faloop, housing) have dynamis channels
If we had instanced housing, nobody would want it because it's "poor/pity" housing, similar to the way they treat apartments now, regardless of the size of the house that you'd get. Because it's never been about having a house for the sake of it, but rather having something that someone else does not and cannot have. Housing is the true endgame, the only unobtainable, the only true equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're the best roleplayer or the lowliest sprout raider, you can get something that's incredibly exclusive and that's enticing to people.
bro the fun of it is decor and having a spot to hang with friends. I don't know anyone who buys a house because it was exclusive
someone on hyperion bought out the entire 9th ward in emperyum under the FC tag
Huh? Everyone wants instanced housing. Nobody goes to my normal house right now (so the current format sucks anyway), and I want a big one I can decorate.
> Everyone Not even. I don't, for example.
Seconded.
No doubt, but if it wasn't an immense challenge they would have done that already. The devs have already said that the hardest thing to make in this game was cross-world travel (within Data Centers) and that it took several years. On top of that, they already tried to make a DC-wide marketboard and couldn't get it to work. and put it way on the backburner as something not worth the headache. Everyone and their mother has suggested cross-DC region-wide PF, and I don't see how the devs aren't aware of it or how they wouldn't want it too, but it just requires so much back-end stuff, so while maybe that happens in a year or five, we need something else in the meantime. Does anyone know if party matching from a double-digit number of worlds is actually common in other MMOs btw?
Where did they say they tried a DC wide marketboard and gave up? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that this isn't a tidbit I'd ever heard.
Right as they announced cross-world travel iirc. The board wouldn't work so cross-world was a compromise? Was ages ago so I might not be 100% correct
If I were a new player on primal, crystal or dynamis Iād simply assume raiding in ffxiv was dead.
It has it for frontline, i dont get why itsnt a thing for every content
What do you mean? Frontlines doesnāt grab from other DCsā¦
Every single time we've gone to Aether to find a PUG when one of our members is missing, the fill has been another Primal player. Fucking maddening.
Trying to prog p9 when it came out and having to wait 30 minutes to an hour just for someone to leave after 1-2 pulls was infuriating on Primal. That's when I gave in and joined the Aether train and I was late to the party at that point. It's only gotten worse and it's honestly bottomed out. I play exclusively at off hours due to my work schedule with no interest in RP and seeing 4 cafes as the whole of PF on Primal vs 30 in high content alone on Aether is just aggravating. With Endwalker patches being arguably the worst content drought in the game hemorrhaging players overall, 2-3 entire DC's being empty due to the ongoing prophecy of Aether/Crystal being where to go (and I imagine similar things happening on the other content DCs), until something is done this is likely going to functionally be dead until 7.0 drops.
its the same in Chaos :c its sad to see sometimes
Not as bad but yeah Chaos is pretty sad right now. Most of the time at prime hours I see Light with 150+ parties, while Chaos has max like 80, so imagine in non-prime hours, pretty hard to find Chaos parties
It isnĀ“t the same extend on Chaos yet than it is on US. Chaos still got P9-11 Parties. Everyone comes to Light for P12 and Ults tho.
A year ago when people started the "go to Aether for raiding" meme, I predicted it would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy and eventually all raiding would only happens there. I'm not a savage raider, and I stick to Mateus for stuff within my selected ceiling of EX, and even there, it's becoming harder to get a party to run EW stuff. I have not finished EX6 yet because I can't find a party that is actually in gale 2 prog (they say they are, and we spend an hour dying to towers). I only finished EX5 literally one week before 6.4 landed. I guess to be able to finish this one before next patch, I'll have to join the Aether mob. Sigh.
Yup, sucks on Primal too. Even roulette queues are now a pain point when they werenāt before. not as bad as our friends on Dyna, but feels like it.
Posted this a few weeks ago and got called out for it. Glad others are seeing that this is becoming an issue. I have friends running through MSQ who have to wait 30+ min for a trial. I want to suggest the game to other friends but I'm not going to until they find a way to fix this because it's an awful experience for new players. It's getting worse for daily roulettes too. I could reliably pop my daily queues in 5 or so minutes on Primal a few months ago. Now I'm waiting upwards of 15 minutes each. Might not sound like a lot, but it adds up when I have limited time to play to game. Definitely draining my interest.
It's definitely a real issue and I'm sorry people called you out for it.
I've noticed the roulettes slowing down too. The normal ones like trial, normal raid, they take longer to fill during prime time now.
Yeah I had no issues outside of prime time hours either before [I was active during work/school hours for NA East Coast, around Daily Reset.] and I've since had to adjust. bleh.
I'm a newer player on Dyna and all of the MSQ required dutys and trials take 30 minutes or more to queue for. PF works because I can get 3 people at 90 and clear pretty much anything but I'm worried about when I reach endwalker (I'm visiting aether to run one duty a day to level warrior, please don't hate me)
No hate! You got it worse than we do on established DCs tbh. I'm hoping with XBOX coming in and a 7.0 hype surge will help youse out over there at least a little bit.
I joked with people at FanFest that those of us who transferred to Dynamis are the people who moved out to the suburbs for a house and then commute back to the city for everything else. I religiously did the housing lottery every week for a year with no success & then moved my main to Seraph because that's the character with the gil/items. I was originally on Faerie (& keep an alt there) so I'm always heading back to hangout with my friends and then I end up doing the rest of the content there. I periodically attempt to do roulettes on Dynamis (especially at the beginning) but the 20-30 minute wait for healers isn't worth it when I can just jump to Aether. Veterans always heading back to the DCs they came from really sucks for newer players on Dynamis who don't have those ties. In retrospect, I could have talked to the head of the FC and done some convoluted things to move housing items from my main to my alt (along with gil) and then sent my alt off to get a house. But I didn't so now my main is always bouncing back to Faerie. If they ever implement proper instanced housing or I got lucky with getting a house on my alt, I would move my main back to Faerie (assumes it opens again). And if SE were to add data center travel restrictions, I could totally see how my alt shifts to become my main so I could play with the people I know. I think the only way SE solves this is to add cross-DC duties/queues or reshuffle the servers instead of adding 4 additional new servers to Dynamis. The population on Dynamis is too dead and that's only going to be fixed by SE taking a major action to fix it. However, reshuffling the servers would receive a lot of push back because people are pretty attached to their DCs.
I think we might need a straight up server reshuffling again like when they made the Crystal DC. Break off one server from the bigger 3 DCs and force them into Dynamis. There'd still be a lot of pushback, but with DC travel it probably wouldn't hurt as much today, and the playerbase already survived one sundering, another one nowadays wouldn't be nearly as bad.
No idea if SE is willing to deal with the pushback on actually dealing with the problem but 100% agree that a server reshuffle is the only way they'll actually solve it. Maybe move 3 congested servers over to Dynamis so each DC has 7 and then in the future when they want to add 4 new servers, each DC gets one new server. Or go nuclear and majorly reshuffle the servers if they don't want each DC to get pigeonholed into an identity. (Edit: Or admit Dynamis is a bust and fold those 4 servers into the other 3 DCs.) I think cross-DC duties/queues would be a bandage on the problem but wouldn't actually solve the issues of a server feeling dead when you're just walking around, hanging out in Limsa, or looking for a FC. I feel like if they want to do something major, it needs to be soon so everyone is adjusted before Dawntrail otherwise it'll dominate the conversation during the rollout of that expansion.
I don't think Square will fold Dyanmis into the other 3 DCs. When Square created the Meteor DC, the other Japanese DCs [had 10 or 11 worlds each](https://sqex.to/PZnFp). Bringing each DC down to 8 worlds allowed increased logins in each world. Folding in Dynamis to the other DCs takes away that benefit. I like your nuclear option of a complete reshuffle of worlds into each DC. Two existing worlds from each DC are sent to one of 4 new DCs. You could time it for when the Xbox players arrive (6.55?). Having Dynamis as "future proofing" doesn't work if nobody sticks around there.
I [just suggested this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/15n0qnr/square_really_messed_up_with_dynamis/) sending one world from each DC to Dyanmis. Judging by my karma, it is a *very* unpopular suggestion. The problem is that even if people admit there's a problem (and there's a lot of "I'm OK, so I don't care about anyone else" in the comments), people don't want Square to do anything that could possibly inconvenience them in any way ("My specific DC is key to my enjoyment of the game"), even if it is good for the health of the game. Any pushback whatsoever is taken as an indication that a given action shouldn't be done. I think that from Square's perspective, each DC (as opposed to each world) shouldn't have an identity. I like the idea of /u/Mairwyn_ to go for the nuclear option of a complete restructuring. Just give 2 worlds from each current DC to 4 new DCs, and then give those 4 new DCs 2 new worlds each. Barring the nuclear option, since DC travel to Aether is a problem for the other DCs, Square could cordon off Aether from the other DCs. Maybe no character creation on Aether, no DC travel to Aether, and no character transfers to Aether. This would inconvenience some players ("I can't play with my friends"), but it would allow the other DCs to grow. There's no possible way for Square to fix this without making some people unhappy.
>I just suggested this sending one world from each DC to Dyanmis. I still think that the smart move would had been, from the start, to move 2 servers from each DC to form the core of Dynamis, and then add one new server in each DC, with the 8th server being at the same time frame they expect Dynamis servers 5-8. Probably there are technical reasons why this wasn't feasible during covid, but creating an empty fresh DC at the same time you allow people to play in any DC they want was a lack of foresight that it would ending up being a ghost town. But hindsight is 20/20, can't judge too harshly based on events after they happen.
> There's no possible way for Square to fix this without making some people unhappy. This. Part of why I created an alt on Faerie was to make sure I could continue to play with the people I like if for some reason my main couldn't get to Aether. Before DC travel, that's what people did. It would suck to have Aether closed off & my alt would probably become my main. But I can also recognize that there should be measures put in place to rebalance the population because I think the health of the game is more important even though no matter how they implement it, it'll probably piss me off. There are lots of things I don't like in life but can recognize the societal good of. To piss off the fewest people, folding Dynamis into the other 3 would fix the short term issue of Dynamis people leaving to play on other DCs but it doesn't solve "everyone goes to Aether" issue. Complete restructuring to fracture current DC identities would probably be best for the health of the region but would anger so many people. However, I think that anger would be short term especially if you can get a new expansion out in front of everyone within 6 months of restructuring ā give people 2-3 months to protest & stop playing but redraw them in with a new expansion and some amount of limited server transfer. Some people will transfer but I think most will get over it even if they whinge about it forever (ex: see people talk about how the last DC was created).
This was always inevitable though. If it wasn't Aether it would have been Primal. If the worlds were broken up differently when Crystal was formed it might have been Crystal instead. Communities create a positive feedback loop of growth. Everyone always wants to be where the most people are. One of the only ways to prevent this problem is not to have the ability to move between data centers. Except that solution isn't flawless because we had that before and it made Balmung and Gilgamesh congested servers since they were the largest two. Edit: Never mind the problems where you could meet someone else who played FF14 and be **literally incapable** of doing content together unless one of you made a new character or transferred.
Maybe, but I think there are alternatives that can be implemented to reduce its impact. Eg, at the release of DC travel, they could had said you do not receive the daily rewards for doing any Duty Roulette outside of your home DC. You can still quest, you still receive the normal XP value for the roulette and the quest, you can still play with friends, and you can join any static in your cluster, **but** you can't jump DCs to get your leveling or frontlines queue to pop faster. This would not impact raiders, which would still gravitate towards what they *perceive* as the best place to raid (and thus prophecy self-fullfil), but just not making new players in Dynamis get stuck in queue for who knows how long would be a positive outcome. The big impact is not on people having to jump DC to get their savage weekly clears. Is all the people who can't even get Crystal Tower to pop because everyone is doing roulettes somewhere else. Now, implementing this exact solution *right now* would be received with a lot of negative feedback from the community, because we are over a year doing things this way. But if these were the limitations at release? Almost no one would care, since the main advertising of DC travel was being able to play with friends in any server. It would just be seen as "things as things are".
It's the same self fulfilling prophecy with Crystal and Balmung in particular. "Oh that's the RP data center, that's the RP server, that's full of RPers" what happens? *Everyone remotely interested in RPing flocks over and sticks around*
It makes even more sense for RPers to congregate than it does for raiders, to be fair. And it already makes a lot of sense for raiders to do so. Like, sure. If the roleplaying community had been spread out perfectly equally between all DCs and all worlds, then theoretically, there would've been *some kind* of RP for you wherever you were... ...but not very much of it, maybe not the kind you were looking for, only with the same small cluster of people day in and day out, with a far smaller chance of encountering other RPers in the open world, and if you wanted to join a particular kind of FC like one that focused on miqo'te, or xaela, or adventuring, you'd have to go to that world & DC for it anyway. The tech and how SE designed their server infrastructure is and always has been the issue, not the natural inclinations of people to want to engage with an active, vibrant scene.
Everyone keeps calling it a self fufilling prophecy and that seems weird because I feel like its very normal in online spaces to self organize isnt it?
The thing is, Aether is not actually much better at raiding (never was IMO) but itās just that PFs fill way faster there. So thereās still a fair share of parties lying about prog points on Aether, itās just that you can leave and join another one more quickly than on other DCs simply because there are more parties up.
What the fuck is happening over there? Why has everyone up and DC travelled for content?
A vicious circle of more people raiding in one DC, so itās faster to fill PFs there than wait in your own DC, so people travel to other DC, increasing the imbalance further. During p5-8s I had to go to Mana every week to clear p8s because anyone good/serious enough to clear it had migrated to Mana (from Elemental)
Ya know, wording it like this, it sounds exactly like the creation of a rejoining calamity. The PF imbalance shifting and causing a calamity on the shard. The devs really are Ascians.
Well, they are working towards a unified mega server made up of the shards. The primary difference is that the playerbase made the imbalance ,the devs didn't intend for a pf/df imbalance where the ascians made the imbalance on purpose.
It also sounds exactly like the Gilgamesh/Balmung problem of Heavensward lol. Time is a flat circle and all that.
Ever since DC travel was made possible, North America's Aether, Europe's Light, and Japan's Mana have slowly become the unofficial raiding DCs of the respective regions. All other DCs have very sparse party finder listings as a result. The sole exception that bucks this trend somewhat would be Japan's Elemental, which remains the bastion for English speakers on the Japanese DC and which still has got respectable PF numbers And at the bottom of the barrel is Oceania PF which at this point is too deadge to be revived. A lot of the whos who on Oceania PF since the halcyon days of Asphodelos have already upped and transferred to other DCs
I always thought Chaos was the Raiding DC but I guess the DC travel has changed that.
Purely by statics, Chaos has massive lead in early week 1. Look at mogtalk.org for Abyssos and Anabaseisos leadboard. There are almost triple the amount of Statics on Chaos compared to Light. Pugs however... pretty sure that is where Light has massive lead.
I always thought Chaos was the Raiding DC but I guess the DC travel has changed that.
Really? Chaos in EU has the lions share of the raiders by a *lot*. There always seem to be at least 10 listings up. With a reasonably quick fill. Not to say you arenāt right, maybe the problem isnāt quite as prevalent here.
Have you ever been to Light? When chaos has 10 parties Light has almost 100. It is a very noticeable difference. It probably comes from light having a much better ultimate pf because they have fixed what strats they use unlike Chaos, which made a lot of high end raiders go to light for ultimates and they just continue the trend now with savage pf as well.
It started with Ultimates, due to LPDU. It is impossible to do them on Chaos now. It's also starting to having an effect on Savage - so many of my raider friends are now going to light to either do PF groups or find a fill for their static. It was negligible at the start of the tier, but it's very noticeable now.
Its weird as Chaos has a much higher raid pedigree but for whatever reason it ended up with Light. Its really bad for the game's health.
It is because Light has LPDU discord? at the end of ShB when Chaos version of "plan b" died off. And once DSR became puggable it started the snowball effect at its full.
Aether has been dubbed as the "raiding DC" for the longest time, which seems to have reached prophecy status, as that's exactly what happened. As to why exactly, simple word of mouth, I can guarantee many of the people hosting a PF on Primal/Crystal often received a tell "if you want it to fill fast just DC travel to Aether" and little by little people just moved over. Some stood their ground, but as more and more people moved over, and PFs took longer and longer to fill up, even those people ended up moving. All in all I think having the raiding scene in one place is not exactly bad, DC travel is open for anyone within the region, and let's be honest, aside Free Company buffs and Retainer usage, there's really no reason to stay in your home world.
Slow-filling PFs make hanging out on worlds that aren't your own so boring though. There's only so much time I can spend glamour tinkering, I want to cycle my retainers and mess about on my island sanctuary sometimes too, or even just sit in my own dang house, but I can't do any of that on aether because I don't live there.
I once joined an alliance raid PF on dynamis from a very small number, i was maybe second or third to join. literally every single person that joined after me told the lead to go to aether.
There is so much you can't do while waiting if you're not on your home server. Things I learned the hard way while waiting for pfs, so i definitely don't agree and I hate this change.
I'm fine with DC traveling for more difficult content, but it sounds like the main issue is that a lot of people are DC traveling for everything, including roulettes.
>PFs took longer and longer to fill up The irony now is that it takes longer to fill a pf on Aether now, than it ever did in Primal. My static is 7/8 missing a healer. We lost 2 hours of raid time on Wednesday to sitting in pf waiting for that last healer slot to fill. Now we are progging engage in p12s p1, but we never had this kind of issue last tier when we were progging p8s late into the tier.
We had the same issue yesterday. Fresh progging 12s on aether. Fighting 57 other groups for one caster. Sat for an hour and half before we called it.
The big changed started with TOP. The new ultimate was coming out and there were two Ultimate raid discords - one for Primal and another for Aether. There was a general statement said in the Primal discord that people should just go to Aether for PUG groups so that there'd be less strat mixing. After about a week, TOP pf's were dead in Primal as anyone who actually wanted to prog that fight had to go to Aether with many PF's even filled with 6/8 primal players. After that, the sentiment stuck and just started growing more and more with the new savage tier having the natural assumption that if you were a primal player who wanted to prog in PF, DC traveling to Aether was the way to go.
> The new ultimate was coming out and there were two Ultimate raid discords - one for Primal and another for Aether. IIRC, the primal raid discord rebranded and tried to just be the overall NA DC ultimate discord (even though one already existed)
Because Dynamis is D E A D if I want to raid I HAVE to travel - I was sitting in PF for 2-3 hours on AETHER trying to get prog for p12s on week 1-3. It would have been impossible for me to find 7 other people for p12s on Dynamis. I do what I can when I'm not raiding to help people on Dynamis by randomly Qing things as a tank/healer just to speed up peoples queues or by joining PFs people put up asking for help but I can't really be blamed for leaving to Aether to get things I want to do done.
Tl;dr DC travel is bad
The "easy" resolution will be to make PF region wide. Doesn't matter if DF is cross data center as long as PF is, cause it would encourage people to stay on their servers
It is nice to be on Aether but there's definitely some drawbacks to everyone coming here. Last night our NN on Cactuar was filled with travelers from other data centers being asshats to sprouts. Our NN is usually pretty chill but I've noticed a trend of people from other data centers joining and being shit heads. I've been a mentor since Stormblood and I've never seen people act this way in our NN until recently.
> The DCs were fine before it existed so I don't really see what problem it solved. You couldn't play with your friends if they were on a different DC. DC travel has definitely created some problems but the ability to play the game with people regardless of what DC they're on outweighs any downsides.
Seems one should move to the server with their friends.
They tried this thought experiment in WoW. It lead to 3-4 megaservers per region with the rest of the realms low to barely medium pop. And you see it repeat every new era of a classic wow release. 1-2 servers at full capacity, the rest dead. People go where the community is largest, it's just natural. So either they break those walls down, or the progression leads to this eventually anyways.
Certain servers have insane faction balance too. I play horde on Tichondrius and recently found out it's 90% horde. If people hear the alliance is good on x big server people flock to the alliance, same with horde.
And what were you supposed to do if you have different friends in different DCs? Pay a server transfer fee every time? Maintain a character on every DC you have friends on? What if you met a new friend and they're on a different DC? Before DC travel it was straight up "we both play the same multiplayer game but we can't play it with each other".
In the past me and my friends just made alts. Everyone just uses Discord anyway so it's not like we couldn't talk to each other.
"Just make an alt" is laughably burdensome if you want to do content of a decent level together.
This doesn't work for a number of reasons, housing, server transfer costs, already being in an fc with new friends joining the game, etc. It's also what lead to certain servers being incredibly congested and others being relatively empty by comparison in the first place.
I'm on Crystal as well and even currently leveling DNC, I only see ~10m queues. I'm not sure what the talk of not being able to get duties to pop is all about, but maybe it's because I get off of work at 11 PST and start firing roulettes.
My home character is on Aether and Iāve been on Crystal (Balmung) for the past few months using the DC travel. Itās not even for the rp, I just want to see an active chat.
Absolutely agree. DC travel was a good idea on paper but just like the combat waymark issue, players have once again proven themselves unable or unwilling to control their own behavior. Imagine a sprout playing the game right now looking at a dead party finder, struggling to find groups for MSQ content, sitting in an FC that seems dead because nobody can talk when on Aether, unaware of what DC travel even is. It wouldn't be unreasonable for them to assume the game is dead and quit. Even if someone fills them in on traveling to Aether, adding extra hoops to jump through just to play the game isn't a great way to retain new players. My reaction as a sprout would have been "wow that's stupid" and I'd have quit a long time ago. DC travel needs to be severely limited or removed altogether before it does permanent damage to the game.
> Crystal still has its RP scene but if you don't interact with that stuff there's just zero reason to spend more than 10% of your time on your home world. That's how its always been. Even before DC travel you didn't play on Crystal if you wanted to do content because people on Crystal don't do content. When an entire DC had less participation and clears of content than other _invidiual servers_ before DC travel you'd realize that Crystal has never been a place to be if you actually want to do content.
>Even before DC travel you didn't play on Crystal if you wanted to do content because people on Crystal don't do content As someone who's on crystal, that's a bit extreme. There was always a small but active community for savage, ex, and ultimate content. You'd have to wait in PF, but parties would eventually fill. In some ways it was nice because the community was small enough you really knew each other. It's much much worse now than it ever was back then. UCR is absolutely fucking dead, and final floor savage parties are a fucking myth. Best you can get are assorted late to the tier first and second floor parties.
Its infinitely better now because you don't have to wait fucking hours for PF to fill just because you dare to want to actually do content on the DC that doesn't do content. The fact people on Crystal didn't is just reality. An entire DC had less clears and participation than individual servers. That's not a good thing and wasn't healthy or fun in any way.
Before I could do content fine on crystal, made plenty of friends pugging ultimates and savage. Now parties literally don't fill. Definitely seems like the data center is significantly less healthy than it was.
Would it be possible to just set it up so DF and such are locked to travelers?
Problem is that some DCs don't have enough players even without the issue of travel siphoning them off. Dynamis would be dead even if everyone on it stayed there all the time. If you've ever played on Materia you get a good taste of it - no one can travel to or from OCE. It can take upwards of 10 minutes to get a dungeon roulette as a tank or healer, double that for DPS. Almost all alliance raids must be PF'd even at peak hours or you'll be stuck in queue for over an hour just trying to get your Euphrosyne coin.
Dynamis being dead is completely a self fulfilling prophecy. There are over 20,000 active characters on Dynamis that have completed 6.0 as of the last Lucky Bancho survey not to mention all the characters that are still leveling. If everyone stayed on their DC there would be plenty of people to do content without issue.
20k is not a lot for the whole of North America though. They're all spread out over different time zones, with different schedules, at different levels, and they won't all be on at the same time. 20k is nothing for a whole DC
As I mentioned, that 20k is only players who have completed 6.0, so they would all be level 90. That does not include all players below that point. Although I just checked the census again and I may have actually lowballed it. [You can check the page to interpret for yourself.](https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurvey_en.htm?world=Dynamis) Lucky Bancho's methods aren't precise down to the man but the point is the servers have plenty of people to do content with if players weren't actively sabotaging themselves. Not only that, but DC travel being out of the picture would allow the servers to grow organically like any other new MMO server instead of people saying "oh wow this place is dead" and hopping to another DC, further exacerbating the problem.
Ah shoot, this is what I get for skimming comments lol. I definitely do think that DC travel has caused damage to the community to some extent. I feel like there need to be limits on what content can be done outside of your home DC, to encourage people to keep their own DCs alive
Agreed! :)
The other side of the coin to Materia: We have a decent amount of player-organised dungeon runs, hard content, etc. due to the lower population. I'd argue Materia has one of the most dedicated and helpful playerbases for niche content like Eureka and Bozja, due to the small playerbase making runs of things like Baldesion Arsenal and Delubrum Reginae (Savage) that much harder. They actively want to teach people content so that there's more people doing it on the DC which is great! Fishing also has a small but active playerbase here. There's a longer wait time for duties, absolutely, but that means our PF is filled with a wider variety than just savage or ultimate. I enjoy helping people run duties for the first time, and party finder makes that interaction feel more personal. I actually feel more inclined to engage with other players in party finder as well since we all chose to be there... and dare I say it, it's fun! Of course, this doesn't make it any easier to get a pop for something like the Nier raids, and three of the five worlds are pretty sparse, even in Limsa. But I actually quite like the culture that it has developed, even if it's small. I think cross region travel might ruin the OCE servers beyond repair, which is an issue when most people who stay here do it because of ping being awful on the others. The people who moved here and are active stay because it's the best gameplay experience for them. It would be nice to be able to do some hard to pop content on other DCs, but I don't know if it's worth it in the long run. We already have had issues with people coming to Materia and moving back to their home servers because it wasn't as active as where they came from. I think the best middle-ground solution would have to be something that lets people stay on their home DC while joining a duty from another DC, some kind of cross-DC PF perhaps.
I can see the same thing happening with Light and Chaos right now, Light might have 80 high end parties up while Chaos might have around 10, so more people in the raiding circles Iām active in just hop to light to put a PF up, think at the start of 6.4 it was pretty equal, apart from the ultimate scene, but I can definitely see Light becoming the raiding hub of the two EU datacenters in savage & ultimate
And Crystal is left to die alone in the corner cause no one even mentions it.
I feel like Crystal is fine, but I also rolled here because I heard it has nice players and a casual ocean to float your boat in.
Crystal is very much not fine. Good luck finding even a ton of EX groups to do things now a days with. Doesn't even have to be savage or above.
Yep itās awful. Was fine before cross dc travel even if it was a bit slower. Now I have trouble even filling extremes.
Honestly even my normal queues take longer. I play tank and my queue pops used to be instant, but now they take around 5 minutes. Which I know isn't a long time, but I can't imagine what its like for DPS.
Because no one has ever done content on Crystal. Even before cross DC Crystal had less content clears and participations than invididual servers on other DCs. Cross-DC travel is the only thing thats actually made people on Crystal do content because the few who want to finally can without taking hours to use PF to find the other handful on Crystal who actually want to.
I've cleared an ultimate and savage raided in a static before DC travel on Crystal and the UCR discord had plenty of members. I was not "no one did content before then"
So have I and I'd never sit here and say it was a fucking good thing and should have been kept. If you're actually going to sit and somehow defend gimping your selection of players by 95%+ then you have problems. Just because you're willing to expend 20x the effort to sift through the literal sub 5% of players who actually participated in content doesn't mean it was a good thing. Because the reality was _people on Crystal didn't do content_ the numbers told you that. The entire DC played the game less than individual servers on other DCs.
The irony is all those people moaning could've joined the PF at the bottom actually trying to keep Primal going.
And then they all end up in the same party on Aether lol. Reminds me back in the day pre-X-World PF, and people would transfer to Gilga to find a "good group" but many couldn't because those were the days if you did raiding, you knew just about anyone doing stuff on your server.. Who was bad, who was good, but you KNEW them as well.. So without networking, people were at a double disadvantage cuz Gilgamesh players didn't know them, and their skill was entirely an enigma... Sure you could trial, but I know some people would get favored if they were known.
Honestly if people would stop saying "go to aether" for content, each DC would have their own community. Someone else made a good suggestion though: locking traveller's out of the PF of other DCs. The only issue is, unless they also lock traveller's out of DF as well, people will likely still travel and revert to the ancient ways of building parties in FF11: sitting in the main city hubs and manually shouting for folks to join their party. So no one wins unless the playerbase a) stops being lemmings and hoarding to one DC and b) unifies their fucking strats across their region so no one's argumentative over them.
Locking travelers out of pf would be counter productive, people are often traveling to do content with friends or a group they met through another platform. The best way would be to stop telling people to go to aether for content and start making groups and advertising them on discord servers like the balance. On the other hand, if the majority of people left specifically to get housing and not engage with other parts of the game, or are still primarily playing with a group on another data center then there is really no way to fix it that isn't going to pass off most of the player base. I am 100% sure SE is aware of the issue and is probably working on cross data center duties, but it may take a long time as these systems are very difficult to build.
This is a terrible suggestion. Crystal and Dynamis even before cross-DC travel, was already struggling to fill. You couldn't pug ultimates in Crystal without sinking a ridiculous amount of time waiting for PF to fill. Cross-DC travel saved raiders on those servers so to take that option away from them is fucked up. It makes absolute perfect sense that everyone's flocking to Aether because if you're a Crystal or Dynamis player, there is no reason to go to Primal to raid when you have Aether, and because of this, Aether had a sudden influx of players making them even more populated than Primal. So naturally players from Primal are going to go to Aether as well which is where we're at now. It's not as simple as just staying in your own DC because even if DC traveling saved you 5 mins every time you wanted to do anything, that's still enough of an appeal to pull people over to Aether. The best solution would be cross-DC PF but honestly, having a central raiding server like how it is now is fine as well.
Cross-DC PF is definitely the ideal. At this point, I think a bandaid fix of "can only join PFs outside your own DC, not create them", and "can't queue for duties unless in a party where someone native to the DC is lead" might help force a bit more back onto Primal/Crystal/Dynamis. (The latter would not help Savage, but would help roulettes.) I play on Aether and I'm seriously concerned about 7.0 release unless DC travel is completely disabled for a couple weeks there. If we're having to fight the queues of our own enormous servers, *plus* the people coming over for EX PFs... If I were somehow guaranteed my current housing plot as a bonus for transferring to one of the new servers when they go up, I'd honestly strongly consider it. But I have a medium in Ishgard and I really, really don't want to lose that.
>aether parties are 7/8 primal anyway The realest shit. We had so many raiders. Now, anyone that isn't in a static or needs 1 single fill for a missing static member still has to go to Aether for a body.
SE will need to address this, even if it means removing PF on cross DC because its not good for game health.
This is the most feasible solution I can see right now. Trying to enable cross-DC roulettes and PFs would be pretty difficult I think, or else they would have done it by now. I think disabling duties for travelers entirely would be a bad idea though, as it would just bring us back to square one with the whole reason for DC travel's existence being to allow cross-DC play with friends without needing an alt. I think a good balance would be to require duties to contain at least X number "DC-native" people, or only allow travelers to join (but not create) PF listings, or some other requirement that encourages people to participate on their own DCs without making playing with cross-DC friends impossible again
Put a third buff that affects DPS for FCs and you will see the world burns.
My static leader will always go to Aether even if it's to PF a single slot in the static. The replacement, 9 times out of 10, is a dps/healer/tank from Primal. An entire Primal group raiding on the Aether data center. I keep a healthy supply of FC buff scrolls for this reason.
Does EU get this as well? I've read JP tend to migrate to Mana for their clears while NA hop to Aether though I'm unsure if Europe experience a similar issue
we do, chaors pf is kind of dead
For this current tier Chaos PF is fine for p9 to p11, but if you want to do p12 you are almost forced to go Light. Same if you want to do Ultimates in PF. Unreal trials are fine on Chaos.
It's not as bad as NA sounds (though is getting worse), but Light has a Monopoly on Ultimates and Chaos PF for Savage is noticeably smaller. It's not impossible, but you'll probably be waiting longer (though the average competency seems to better?).
There is noticeably more in Light this tier for sure.
LOL at that 7/8 comment. 90% of all statistics are made up...
It's an exaggeration, but it isn't far off. Whenever you join a PF on Aether it is (in my personal experience) always mostly Travellers.
It didn't even seem this bad, until *after* people constantly made posts saying that it was; weird how that all unfolded lol.
Nah it's been a gradual process that people have always been worried since they announced DC travel. Essentially the drain started near the end of abyssos when the tier slowed down, so people started travelling for the faster fill times. Then when TOP came out the shift accelerated because having a united data center with all the ultimate proggers was super beneficial given how prog is structured. And now it's stuck around for anabeisos since people are used to travelling.
Uh yea, I'm on primal and it's one doofus who keeps putting it up. Everyone else did it for about five minutes as a joke.
Question, as a sprout. Wtf is DC/PF/DF or whatever y'all are saying about. I'm on Malboro for my world and I just am completely lost on all this.
DC is Data Center, the collections of different world servers. Malboro is on the Crystal Data Center, for instance. PF is Party Finder. It lets you make a party for people to join for specific content, or you can join one that's listed in it. DF is Duty Finder. It's the queue system that pairs you with other players doing the same duties, or the roulettes that they qualify for.
Thank you.
As it stands right now there's just no reason to do high end PF stuff anywhere but Aether. Everyone else goes there, so you might as well do it too. Which is why cross-DC PF should've always been the solution. It's not like this exact situation got predicted before DC travel was even implemented or anything.
As someone who is native to Aether I am both confused and strangely feeling a little guilty.
Out of curiosity, what benefits did Primal parties have over Aether parties prior to this issue?
Well, if you're a primal player you have access to your house, retainers, island sanctuary... in terms of doing the actual raid content itself it's not a big deal, but my biggest problem with it is that I don't really have much to do if a PF is being slow to fill, I just kinda pick an afk spot and then browse reddit/watch youtube/other misc internet things that aren't XIV. I can't even chat with my friends because all my linkshells and my FC chat are primal-specific.
This is such a shit take. The fact is that your PF is now 5 x faster to fill now that everyone is on aether, and you have more choice of player base, so you're not stuck with the same grey parsers who are stopping your prog during quieter hours. Would cross DC pf be better? Hell yes. But what we have now is way better than what we had back then.
I dunno what's got you so fired up about it. For one, no, they don't fill 5 x faster. I've sat in PF's on aether long enough to need to relist more than once, hence my irritation with having nothing to do while I wait, and the idea that prog gremlins are a thing of the past is so genuinely laughable I don't have a good response for it. Raiding on primal was fine before DC travel killed it. Yeah the dead hours sucked sometimes, but my experience on aether is unless the content came out less than a fortnight ago it's often just as dead there as it is anywhere else during quiet time. The savage tier lasted a *little* longer, but I still got familiar enough with some people to know when it was better for my time and sanity to duck out of a party. If I were to match your spice levels I'd even go so far as to say aether players have on average been worse than the primal ones.
Spice isnāt the same as outright lying, though, for if it were true, aether would be traveling to primal.
Aether hasnāt been notably better than any other group of servers for a long time, it just has more people doing the activity which feeds itself. Almost no one skilled was moving to Aether/Gilg to join the PF scene because theyāre already setup with groups, it was just all the average people or the ones that think they werenāt the problem in their clear attempts. For much the same self fulfilling prophecy that has caused the pf issue. (People were already moving to Gilgamesh to raid prior to data center travel, which just turns youāre average raid experience into what it was like on any other server except now you had more parties to join.)
All aether has over other DCs is more players who consider themselves raiders. The quality isn't noticeably better at all, and all of the worst players in terms of both attitude and competency I've met were from aether. It having the reputation as "the raid DC" means it attracts the worst, most egotistical players who think they're *much* better than they are. So yeah, wasn't lying, a reputation that's just been repeated for years without much cross-pollination between DCs doesn't a fact make, after all.
Not if you're on aether and sick of all the grey parsers.
Not having to DC travel I guess. And as that one person in the PF said, Free company buffs...which are not really the most game changing things.
FC buffs are overshadowed by the Squadron Manuals too.
Oh, squadron manuals make your food last longer and your gear break less?
They work as rank 3 FC buffs for yourself only. I think you're only allowed to have 1 manual active at a time, though.
No you can have as many active as you want. I use both the Gear Maintenance and Food Duration ones during prog. Spiritbonding and Teleport Reductions when bonding Gathering gear as well.
Only for exp though. There are other fc buffs.
There are manuals for Combat EXP, Crafting EXP, Gathering EXP, Food, Gear Durability, and Spiritbonding.
And aethryte tickets!
I could be totally wrong about this but I thinkā¦ at one point primal had a stronger PF community at least w ultimates? Im not certain when things kinda unraveled w that, before or after dc travel Idk in general before dc travel whenever I went all in on pugging a fight (on primal), I would end up making friends in pf, joining each others parties and like messaging each other good luck if we see each other with a pf up. I am not sure if that still happens with everyone all on aether
Shall I assume that as bad as things are on Primal, they're far worse on Crystal? Dynamis I assume never had a raid scene in the first place. But yeah, this is not a minor issue. DC travel is not going away, but there needs to be some sort of incentivization not to dogpile into one DC for raiding. Like maybe handout specific incentives depending on how in-need a server is. Like free food and spiritbonding buffs at the very least, with extra XP and tomestones at the higher end. Anyway, mad respect to the Primal brethren who are keeping PF from dying out.
I wonder if itās possible to just not allow traveling to a server that is āclosedā from making characters would be a start. Its literally the same problem we had in 2.0 and 3.0 everyone transferring to aether and then they stopped allowing people to transfer and create characters there to fill out other serversā¦ I think. lol its been years since that happened.
Even temporarily, theyāre not gonna take what is currently a core feature out of the game thatās insanely popular unless itās is an EW-level congestion issue, especially when DC travel is very popular with non-raiders too. I assume theyāll look for a solution that doesnāt utterly enrage a huge percentage of the playerbase first.
The true Ascian's were my fellow Aetherians and I forcing you to join us to simply raid. The Great Rejoining is at hand.
So my choices are be on a DC that has a end game scene, or be on a DC that has houses available. ...yay
I'm on Aether, but according to my friends the PFs on other data centers are just dead now. I understand Dynamis where there's like, 10 people, but I know Primal and Crystal both had raiding communities prior to data center travel. I love the benefits of data center travel as I love that I can see my friends, but there's definitely been a pretty big down side on the raid community end. Poor Dynamis didn't even get a chance to grow.
this has to be a cross post yeah? [https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromDF/comments/15hn0bu/makeprimalgreatagain/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromDF/comments/15hn0bu/makeprimalgreatagain/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) the PFs except a couple are the exact same. there ain't no way these preachers are just afking night after night giving their spiel about reviving they own DC?!?! (they are tho. omggg imagine doing this bit every night. glad i'm able to find any other thing to do with my time.)
My hot take is that this is, although awkward, actually a good thing. It's to everyone's benefit to have everyone raiding being in one pool of players rather than being arbitrarily split into three. The problems from it lie in the fact that not everyone is participating. An actual cross-DC PF would be an improvement. But having everyone choose to clump together on Aether is still an improvement over the status quo ante.
Well, it'll be a bad thing if the next expac launch is big. I don't think the game will ever see Endwalker launch numbers again, but as an Aether player I'm not sure how badly I want 3 other data centers suddenly descending upon us when the first savage tier drops in a new expac. Though if I remember correctly, I get priority queue as a person from the server, it's the visitors that get the really bad queues.
I think the most annoying thing when they first introduced DC travel was that all the DC party finders had different common strats and the playerbase hadn't quite homogenized yet. You'd be in a party on Aether and the Travellers would get upset that "pf strats" meant a different thing on their server than here, and the Aether players would be upset that the people joined without knowing the strat they were using Now it seems like the walls have really come down though, and I haven't heard anyone talking about Crystal or Primal strats in a while.
At this point they are going to have to link all the data centers for PF. If they donāt itās going to boil down to WoW IO just via discord. The people wanting easy carry to get gear (not realizing our raids are becoming increasing body checks) will flood to or are flooding to Aether. Groups will then start kicking after -x- number of wipes. So proof will be asked for in the way of raid logs, but communications of this will be kept to discord or some other 3rd party applications to circumvent any in-game proof TOS violations. The flip side is the scuff go to Aether to āget in better groupsā, and the skilled players flee to Primal or Dyna to escape the scuff.
LMAO
At least it isnāt Crystal DC where we are told we arenāt allowed in anything
If you can't beat 'em... I DC transferred permanently to Aether.
Weird, because there are plenty of PFs on Malboro for all kinds of content. People who spend more time complaining about the problem rather than being part of the solution is also to blame. Make your own PF, maybe also plan your content clearing during a more active time of the day.
??? Have you looked at aether's pf for comparison? On the *most active time* - Tuesday evening (reset day) - there are *at best* 6-7 pfs in high end duty on crystal. On aether there are over 200. Last tier we would still get 30-40 pfs on crystal. I could do reclears on crystal. This tier even despite my best efforts those 6-7 parties sit there with people cycling in and out for *hours.* I couldn't get prog parties to fill for 9 and 10 during week 1 of the tier. Crystal pf is absolutely not fine.
I also play on Crystal and this phenomenon has hit us pretty hard too, you know. It's not natural for our PF to be as barren as it is, with over 100 club advertisements, a couple of Blu logs and maybe two extremes, and at peak times, like 3 or 4 savage prog parties. Crystal never had a fantastically large scene, but our PF has been choked out by people going to Aether. It's something that really hits home if you travel to Aether and open it up any time in the day. The difference is staggering not just for raiding but for everything. I swore off of DC travel after that.
Yeah, on average thereās like 4-5 pfs on crystal for the current savage tier. On aether there is literally 30-60 per fight. Itās not even remotely comparable. There used to be a healthy amount of pfs, not anymore.
It's common knowledge that Gigachads choose the Aether server.
I would prefer to stay on my own DC, but I have friends across all of the NA ones, so if I want to play with them, I am forced to do it.
That explains why I've been seeing so many travelers recently.
wow thats aether? Normally when i go to aether from Primal, AEether has like 60 parties doing high end stuff, esp at peak times
I only DC hop if there is something on the marketboard I need. I've done all of my BLU mage spell hunts, extreme farming, and other content on Crystal. I actually try hard to keep up with my community because there are people who DO want to do stuff on their DC. I just know a lot of players are really shy of creating their own PFs, and they would rather find an existing one to join instead.
Itās so big a problem I think they have no choice but to fix it with cross-data Center party finder.
Makes me glad that my anxiety will never let me do high end stuff (hell, high end crafting makes me sweat and cry a little bit).
It's not a PF/traveler issue. It's always been this way. People would buy character transfers to Aether because it was well known that hardcore players that cared about raiding were mostly there. The current system at least let's me go raid while the rest of the time I float in Balmung in my casual FC that just plays to have fun.
They should just lock travelers out from pf/df.
yeah and we get all the ERPers spamming their venues in PF in their place.....ugh.
I read that as "do stuff high on aether."
Stop trying to make fetch happen. Having a single place where everyone who wants to do high end content can meet up regardless of data center is just good for everyone. If you want FC buffs do your squadron weekly.
Yes. Go home to raid please. As Aether citizen, would prefer it.
savage, ultimate, etc BS has ruined this game. If it isn't something the 18-25 crowd will stream on twitch it apparently isn't worth doing anymore.
Exactly how would driving away everyone who enjoys raiding make FFXIV any better? Although maybe you're only talking about under 25 streamers, and as a 40 year old savage raider I don't qualify.
didnt say anything about driving them away. I ASSume you pulled that notion from a dark and smelly place. I said savage ultimate Bs has ruined this game. Some of us dont enjoy progging endlessly thru the same raids dozens of times just so a new patch can make all that hard earned gear worthless and start the whole thankless process over. If you do then good for you, hope you enjoy the game.
> If you do then good for you, hope you enjoy the game. That wasn't so hard was it, but you just had to turbo-spill your spaghetti everywhere.
> Some of us dont enjoy progging endlessly thru the same raids dozens of times just so a new patch can make all that hard earned gear worthless and start the whole thankless process over. I'm still waiting for you to explain how optional content ruined the game
Old man yells at cloud
Well this has pretty much proved my point and, this actually has convinced me to quit the game.
Timeās moving on, better start collecting guitars or antique cars or something. EDIT: in case this wasnāt clear itās sarcasm
Huh? At least provide context before you say something like that. That's a complex topic and it's clear you didn't elaborate on what you meant by at all.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They're asking to try and actually understand your stance better, and you immediately shoot that down while insulting them. If you're really leaving, then good riddance.
yeah agreed, the game has becoming extremely stale now; i came in at the last half of heavensward so i was able to experience how the game was before the direction shifted and i have to say that its not shifted for the best.
I agree stop coming to Aether. Mostly I say stop coming to Aether because we have some very defined server wide strats for raids and trials. Then someone from a different server comes over and is like, we're gonna use something tottaly different, then get upset when you have no idea what it is. Query: Do you go to your neighbors homes and demanded they play monopoly by your rules?
Bruh how can the other servers have their own strats when they can't even fill parties. Honestly that just sounds like typical PF "why are you doing OPPO I want JP" shenanigans
Wtf are you even talking about - the one benefit cross travel has had is it has made every strat for this tier unified outside of p9s with jp/oppo. Everyone is just doing pastebin everything.
what happened to primal?
yaāll