An alternative solution could be cross-region dedicated DCs, where we can play with people from other regions but it's not actually a DC you can have as a home. That way people can play together without everyone being encouraged to flock to the same location and without disturbing DC and world cultures.
This is a good idea, I do however wonder if this would cause a lot of players to simply go to these DCs for the majority of their sessions and just visit home when they have to! I do think it is a good idea though!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh another idea on top of this could be to have a global pf category and that world wide DC be used solely for the instances and party chat relay, upon queueing in a Cross region party, all players are migrated to the global DC for the instance that way players are still hubbed to their homeworld, but can play cross region
GW1 did something of the sort, with everyone playing originally in their geographically assigned district, but if they wanted to, they could play on an international one as well.
The idea of a "King" datacenter is the single worst problem that DC travel has introduced to the game, and is very likely the largest reason why they are not implementing a worldwide DC travel. People flocking to a single DC to do PFs and even DFs is killing any server that wasn't chosen by the hivemind, and it's especially apparent during the lull until Dawntrail, where if you aren't on the "hub" DC, the world is generally dead, especially in PF listing, but also in any other content you do, any roulettes you want to run, and even in hangout areas like Limsa. I personally believe that at this point, DC travel, while well intentioned, has done more severe harm to the community on XIV than any other change they have made to the game. It has fractured communities, killed DCs, ruined queue times, and I have heard complaints from sprouts who complain about DF queue times, who are then told by Mentors to simply "DC travel to Aether". I can't imagine how many people quit a game that legitimately has plenty of people playing it because there is a perceived (and real) dearth of players on their home world because DC travel has just become such a natural part to so many people. DC travel has good ideas. Being able to play with your friends on their home world is a good idea in general. But the unrestricted nature of being able to not only join DF and PF listings, but also to be able to create them or run them solo when traveling was a shortsighted decision with longlasting consequences. I don't believe DC travel can be simply turned off at this point, but the only savior at this point that *might* restore a community that has been trampled by DC travel would be the implementation of Cross-DC DF/PF, which would allow people to queue for roulettes and get much shorter queue times on any server, rather than just the "King" DC, and which would allow people to browse PF listings from the comfort of a server where they can actually participate in their FC, or use their retainers, or chat with their friends. I know that a lot of people will simple think or say "It exists so just deal with it and DC travel", but no, that is a bad mindset and is incredibly narrow-minded. This game is built on its community, and to allow for the degeneration of that community, and to sit by while it happens, is exactly what kills communities, and when the community dies, so does the game.
Indeed, I came to sort of the same conclusion, that what we need first and foremost, long before worldwide DC travel, is region df / pf to deter the king DC problem! 😊
what if there was friction or tradeoff for being in a guest DC such as retainers suspending market sales while in a DC other than one's home, or implementing travel cooldowns between travels ( including returning to home DC ) (eg: 1 hour before one can return to home DC, and 4 hours (after returning) before one can visit another DC again), of course, such a thing would just reintroduce the hivemind pre DC travel and people just home xfer and clog up the king world to get around the cooldowns
@@Diddz Honestly the only reason it's as bad as it is is because of the lack of downsides. Right now, the only limits are no FC chat, no retainers, no timed gathering nodes, and that's about it. People care a bit about FC chat, but for the most part people care more about being able to participate in PF. If proper restrictions were added that would make it a burden to use DC Travel for the exclusive purpose of migrating any and all PF (and to an extent DF content) to a single server, some people would indeed put their money where their mouth is and permanently transfer, but I wager that the vast majority of players would simply resume doing PF listings on their home server, the same way it was done before DC Travel. Regardless of how it turns out, however, if nothing is done, the perceived lack of PF listings for new content in Dawntrail could spell a mass exodus of players who want to participate in end-game content, but either don't want to DC travel, or whom don't realize *why* all of the PF listings are gone. We're already seeing it, but it could get tremendously worse if mere weeks after the expansion launches, people sign into their home worlds, open PF listings, and see few or even no listings for high end content. "I guess no one plays this game. Why should I play it myself?" I think this is probably one of the single most pressing concerns that the game has outright. Worse than the NTT issue, worse than overturned fights. If this is nor properly addressed, XIV could lose serious volumes of players. I just really hope between now and Dawntrail, this gets blasted louder and louder by the community as a problem.
Dynamis solo queue times are long, but if you put up a party finder asking for help with something or even just to do dailies, it will usually fill up faster than DPS queues on Crystal. And on Halicarnassus, the Novice Network is also a source for hooking up trial players into parties so they can do content together, helping find people to do content, answering questions, etc... not just a meme chat. We often have unsynced Crystal tower party finders so people can get it done without traveling. I suppose this is just an adaptation to DC travel draining people away, but it's also an active attempt by the player base to counter it.
Dynamis PF is cozy. I had more fun doing the Mhach raids on there than I had doing CT on Crystal's DF, in large part because getting to chat with my alliance before the raid helps build up rapport. (It does help that, because the alliance PF is usually put up for individual raids rather than roulettes, it makes it much less likely that some impatient player will pull while a sprout's in the middle of the pre-boss cutscene.)
I met some of the coolest and kindest people in Dynamis, and yes, I think despite all odds, they're doing their best to keep it alive. I once joined a treasure hunt PF there one day when I mistook the dates of a friend's upcoming art party, and the pf party I joined ended up encountering a hunt train in Elpis. It was a fun experience seeing so many players together.
While not directly linked to Worldwide travel, I think cross-region data centre party finder is definitely a needed thing to get rid of the "king" server mentality. Playing on Chaos, it's been such a shame seeing PF slowly dying over the last year and being forced to DC travel if I want to run anything even slightly difficult.
Indeed! It is not the same as worldwide travel, but would deal with an issue that sort of originated from region wide travel! 😅 I suppose if we ever got worldwide travel, that it would necessitate worldwide pf as well (although sorting between region and worldwide would probably be needed here too!)
@@andrejvlajic8800 huh? I've never seen that sort of attitude on light :o - it's more like anyone who expects PF group to be any good is fooling themselves :p
Honestly, I'm almost to the point where, if I see someone from my same Crystal DC on Aether and they try to join my party, I want to kick them. Lol. I had a PF up on Crystal for a long time before I traveled over, only to have it fill entirely with other Crystal players on Aether. It is SUCH a huge problem that even non-high end parties are hard to find anymore.
Raiding in NA is basically as you described it. PF listings would say what strategy we're using to resolve a mechanic and if that required positions to be known, markers would be placed down to emulate where you'd be and that may indicate how you're responsible for whatever else the mechanic throws at you. Like P12S superchain 2a, markers get placed in a half circle with melees and tanks picking the front two then ranged and healers picking the back two. Ideally it would alternate light parties but it's whatever. Some party finders would forego this and assume you know how to collapse based on your clock spots for superchain 1, which also uses markers to designate who goes where.
as JP DC player, queueing solo straight into extreme/unreal has significantly higher success rate for me personally. even when the party composition is jumbled (same class, all melee dps, all ranged, etc.) it just works because everyone know what they're doing.
My friend group is mostly european people but we all play on NA purely because the first couple friends in the group got dragged there by american friends and suddenly I'm stuck having to contort to american schedules to raid and deal with awful ping, I would love cross region dc travel so I could take my main character to play on eu without losing all my friends.
It's an issue some friends and I have talked about quite a few times. Though our home world is Phantom on Chaos, as of late we've exclusively been on Light simply because of how many more High End PFs there are. At one point we had like 17 PFs on Chaos in total, traveled to Light, and were met with over 100 High End PFs alone. We've even had entire parties on Light made out of people who DC traveled there from Chaos and lamented they had to do it. It's a real shame in my opinion, and I can imagine that wouldn't get much better if Worldwide DC travel were to be added
I just want to pose another concept that I don't believe was mentioned in the video: The Marketboard. Prices vary wildly between regions from what I've seen. (I have characters in every region for fun.) Things like current level treasure maps are peanuts on JP compared to NA, where you have to give your entire life savings and your cat to buy a few. (Okay, not that bad, but still pretty expensive in general.) I think this has a big impact on cross region travel, because it could easily change the regional economy of the game.
Gonna do this as a separate comment. I feel like there are several things they need to do to fix DC travel before they think of expanding it: 1. Limit marketboard use to your own DC. 2. Limit PF creation to your own DC. 3. Bring back the AFK timeout feature for people who are travellers.
An AFK timeout for travellers is actually a great idea. The marketboard access might be a good idea as well, however, both that, and PF creation feels like it is something that people would find out of game ways to circumvent. For example, you could get a friend to purchase an item on a different DC for you, and just trade them. And it just leads to something that feels like awkward and janky game design. I'm not saying that it might not help, I am just saying that it is very possible it might not! ^^ Also quite funny I have a better Aether ping than you! xD
That's fair! The main thing I've heard "described" was markers for partners or light parties, so I had to guess for the clock positions😅it was not intended to make it look "goofier" than it actually is!
I think the best compromise here would be to avoid cross-region travel, but instead break down the barriers between inter-region DCs. I am from Crystal, and I have to go to Primal when I want to play Rival Wings, and Aether when I want to do Bozja. If instead all 4 NA DCs could mingle when queuing, it would be a huge quality of life improvement for everybody. It might even save modes like Rival Wings which generally cannot exist outside of the moogle tomestone event.
If the problem is both culture and latency. Why not making a big enormous server in each region? Or like you said, being able to see and join all the parties in your regions from the party finder without the need to move to another data center. That would solve the problem and we wouldn't have to worry about housing, same could be applied so we could use our retainers, FC buffs and so on in a big region data center. I'm speaking of course without any knowledge about the technical conditions and problems about this, but it would be ideal.
I've been saying for quite some time that regional party matching is a must. I'm on Aether and, well, it's a huge benefit for us, but the situation also sucks for everyone else. I've traveled to Dynamis to give people healer ques and gave up after waiting 20 minutes for a single basic activity to pop. As far as world-wide is concerned, perhaps they could ease into that by preventing certain activities; AKA, it's tourist-only mode.
Tourist-only mode sounds like an interesting idea! I imagine like, only able to be in "safe zones" like cities and housing areas! That could at least allow you to "visit" 🤔😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh mhm or at the very least, you can't que for content. This would create a test bed for cultural complications without leading to arguments in trials, ultimates, or whatever.
Dynamis might look "dead" on first glance but surprinsingly enough, it is actually very active. The thing is that, compared to other DCs where you just queue for things on Duty Finder or just go through an endless catalog of activities being run on Party Finder, on Dynamis a lot of the stuff that is organized is being done either on CWLS or Dynamis-focused communities on Discord. If you frequent activities like Hunts or FATE trains, you probably are already acquainted with these community-driven CWLS which opens up so many doors for activities organized for Dynamis players, from Hunts, FATE trains, to mount farms, treasure chests, Alliance Raid runs, daily/weekly activities, all of this is enhanced even more if you are on an active FC, to the point that most of the time you won't even need to DC travel to do stuff. I did my first Savage on Dynamis, most of my Eureka/Bozja progress was done on Dynamis, all Hunt/FATE trains are being done pretty regularly on Dynamis, and so on. The only reason I find myself doing DC travel for is if I want to farm, lets say, NieR raid glams and I just feel like spending an entire day running those raids, but everything else is being done mostly on Dynamis. Even several venues have been opening up on Dynamis recently. So I think Dynamis looks "dead" on the surface but there is so many things going on underground.
according to a friend, JP not just queue for extremes, they also do that for savage and even ultimates. And on top of that, partyfinder is commonly used for prog while a queue is for clears and farms. They even said the japan community would blacklist you if you try to attempt a clear and perform badly. So getting carried is not really a thing on the long run. When they did the beta test of cloud servers, my hope was they would use that as a compromise, but i think it is really just for server congestions during early expansion and patches in the future.
I think something that would help the "dead DC" issue would be if queues had a time limit where they'd combine the low-pop DC with one or several other DC queues. I recently moved from Aether DC to Dynamis to join a bunch of friends who weren't able to make characters on my server, and I've waited over 30 minutes in queue for MSQ-required duties. Things like the current Alliance Raid are done primarily through Party Finder because the queue will simply never pop. If they could join our queue with another DC after, say, 5 or 10 minutes though, I think a lot less people would use the DC Travel system and the problem would be helped a bit simply by keeping our players within our own queues, at least for those first few minutes. I think this would be useful even for highly populated DCs during off hours, where queueing especially for Alliance Raids can still take up to 20-30 minutes depending on your role. This would probably run into whatever issue is keeping cross-DC Party Finder from existing, though, so maybe if they some day add that feature they'll also figure out how to combine the queues together so that fewer people feel the need to travel to another DC in the first place.
Maybe i missed mention of issue of marketboards? People are already traveling between servers to hawk cheaper purchases, so cross world would further cause traffic just to save gil.
Many forget this but the Gamecube release of Phantasy Star Online Episodes I&II had worldwide servers meaning you could jump from US to EU and JP and back again without any issues. Lag wasn't an issue since things were processed locally rather than on remote servers. There were no cultural issues as far as I'm aware in that example. One thing that I'm concerned about is if Cloud servers become a thing, will they be able to connect to the per-existing datacenter servers, even if cloud is region restricted within each region.
In Elemental data centre in JP, there is a mixture of JP strat, EU strat and NA strat, where different player bases trying to deal with the content in different ways and at the same time many cannot communicate in Japanese, while the only thing JP players there could do is to "deal with it". I definitely don't want to see that chaos expand to all JP data centres.
Never attempted this (so can't tell if true) but i've heard you can transfer to different DC but just cooldown to do this again is like month or longer which sounds pretty fair as a feature used for when moving to different countries to not deal with high latency as now you're living in different part of the Earth. The way it works now is fine as i'd not like to play with ppl that don't speak English and have huge latency, there is no reason for us to interact with each other with these huge walls in place.
You can indeed move your home dc that way! I don't know if there's a cooldown, but I do know it is a paid service 😊 but it would also remove other things such as your house if you have one and such! 😅
I read somewhere (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that on most JP data centers, aside from the ones you mentioned, people will kick you from parties if you don't speak Japanese in chat and that a lot of the JP playerbase is still a bit xenophobic towards foreign players. So I can imagine that might be something the dev team will consider too when implementing it. I do think it would be nice to play with my friends on EU data centers without them having to make alts and vise versa though. You're also correct about the feedback loop of 'Dynamis is dead' and "Aether is where you go to raid". After DC travel became a thing, my home DC of Primal is pretty dead in terms of high end content in PF. On Primal in mid day, you're lucky to see maybe 10-20 party finders for Ultimate or Savage raids. On Aether, there's anywhere from 70 to 90 at any given time.
I believe PART of the story with JP kicking non Japanese speakers was related to communication problems. And this has culminated in what we see now, where they are likely to kick someone for having the game in English in the first place, and sometimes specifically not allowing anyone from Elemental (the known "English" DC in JP. I know that makes little sense 😅) but this would indeed not get better with world wide travel!
well if you were going to play on a JP server, you should consider learning Japanese for communication purposes; it is not about foreign players, is about not able to communicate.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I can see why communication problems would just cause someone to start booting non Japanese speakers from parties to spare them the grief honestly
Aye, as someone on Dynamis (Maduin), I learned real quick how to data center travel when I was waiting 20+ minutes just for a Trial roulette to pop (on tank no less, and as someone who started playing as Gladiator/Paladin ... yeah... not comforting), and don't even get me started on PVP being completely non-existent here. Hell, there's a long-standing joke among some on Dynamis that Square-Enix will upgrade us to "Road to 90" once Dawntrail hits because our servers are still too empty and we're not sure the inclusion of Xbox players will help as many of them are already eyeballing Aether or Primal instead, "recommended" server bonuses be damned.
You're correct about Materia, that is how it works. It took me 2 months (often queued for 4-6 hrs daily) to get a duty finder group for Void Ark/M'Nach for example, before I realised everyone just uses Party Finder and manually forms groups. I think it has improved a bit with new content and tomestone events etc but yeah.
you mentioned in the end of your video about how WoW players would gravitate to a specific faction for the benefits it entails. i used to play WoW for 10+ yeara before moving to ffxiv and you are exactly right. in tbc i raided as horde because that's where the raiding scene was. there are (i haven't played in years so i can't attest to there still being) a lot of horde racials that are beneficial (orc hunters have the "command" racial passive which helps pet damage). i can't help but wonder if that min-maxing played a part in this, too. on another server i was on, there was a shortage of horde players, so my dungeon queues in late woltk onwards took forever as dps. anyway! what I'm trying to say here is: you're absolutely right. it was a thing lol
Indeed! I recall in particular that blood elves having the "better" seal of blood compared to alliance having seal of truth in tbc was a reason that sometimes is brought up. Blood elves (again) also having an aoe silence, that generates resources, certainly didn't help either! 😅
Honestly the biggest surprise for me in this whole discussion is how many people actually do high-end content in PF. Everyone I know either finds a static or doesn't raid, because PF is seen as a crapshoot where you're unlikely to accomplish much. I've never bothered to leave Primal so I thought the relative lack of high-end PFs was normal. Not saying that anyone else is wrong for PF'ing raids, you do you. I'm just surprised it's so popular.
As someone whose homeworld is in Elemental (Gungnir, specifically) servers, I mostly raid on Mana, but hop on Elemental PF's for specifically P9S. The strat for LC1 vastly differs on Elemental and Mana. Elemental does the "Braindead" strat involving not much rotation. Mana strats involved the "Mario Kart" strat, with a ton of rotation. Most of the other Savage raids don't have other differing strats that would make me raid on a different server for a specific region, but most likely if I took the time to learn the Mario Kart strat, I'd raid exclusively on Mana, since there's so many PF's there and you can just get in. Though, I have been questioned by many PF"s if I could speak Japanese. Thankfully, I do speak a little, which saved me from getting kicked, I assume. JP Mana players are very vigilant to foreigners playing in the Mana server, you see.
Different strats between DCs in the same region is quite interesting, but I see how elemental specifically would be the unique outlier with what I know 😊
Imposing restrictions on party and duty finder (but not the duties themselves) for people traveling across region is something worth considering. Cultural differences is far less of a concern among preexisting friend groups. It would also prevent large amounts of people from server hopping as they would simply have no reason to without existing friends there to play with.
This was already answered from a network perspective, I believe. They said they need the server clusters to be close to each other for their current DS travel implementation. TLDR: network infrastructure. As the video stated, there are probably implications on cultures as well. Im sure there are a lot more implications we dont see
6:18 Agreed so much on the latency point. I love my EU alt, but sometimes the latency gets so bad that I start worrying about people thinking I’m griefing.
I wonder how bad the latency is for that to happen, but I am pretty sure you can play at least certain jobs to a level where it is unnoticeable by other players, at 200ms. But you could have it worse of course!
I love just to travel around to just meet new people so i am all in favour for enabling worldwide travel between DC's. A gradual plan for this should be in place though, where in the first versions probably most "standard" content should not be included to make the necessary adjustments before implementing any further options for joining parties, dungeons etc. As someone who currently and always has played on a "king" datacenter i would rather however square fixes al the problems that latest iterations of the current system has introduced than shaking the foundations even more. I can wait for a long time if need be as it is not something "crucial" for many players i think and more a "nice" to be able to.
As someone who plays on Materia, region travel is a touchy subject here. Some people feel that it'd make the DC much more populated, as an *immense* amount of OCE region players refuse to move to Materia (not wanting to be separated from their communities and social circles they've known for years, or for Savage/Ultimate raiding purposes), while some people feel that so many people have already jumped ship to JP/NA, that if it was released everyone else would ditch the DC too. I think the latter concern isn't much of a real issue, because there's not much stopping people from leaving anyways. If you're well off enough to pay a monthly sub, you're probably well off enough to do a world transfer to JP/NA. Heaps of people are still sticking around because we like not having abysmal latency as our regular day-to-day experience, and I'm convinced a lot of the OCE-region folks who aren't willing to transfer to Materia full-time would be happy to region travel for duties, raiding, etc with a better ping; while it's true some existing Materia players might end up moving to JP for whatever reason after being able to see how things work there on an end-game character, we'd probably see some of those folks on other DC's decide to transfer to Materia for good too, knowing they can travel back to their original home worlds to keep in touch with their social circles. I think region travel would benefit Materia a lot, but the issues with other regions ending up having one "dominant" Data Center causing the other DC's to suffer should probably be tackled first. I remember hearing they wanted to try and implement some kind of cross-DC DF/PF, but that they needed to figure out how they were going to design and implement such a system first, on a technical level. I do hope they sort that stuff out whether we get region travel or not, since I do want to make an alt on NA in the future to play with old friends I used to play with before Materia was a thing, and it'd make my experience there better too.
One of my friend's concern is the market prices and how it would dramatically change with cross region datacenter, since some have different prices between region and some are just way cheaper compared to the rest
Great points as always! I would just want continent-wide party finder and duty finder it really sucks that queues on Chaos take ages since everyone goes to Light for content. And crossing to other regions for me would be a maybe? I honestly think EU and NA would get along much easier than with JP, considering there are not that many differences barring PF strats maybe as far as I could see.
As someone who started playing this game with my EU friends even though I live in NA, I created a character on EU. Now I have some NA friends that started to play, so I created a NA character so that I can play with them. It just kind of sucks that everything that I worked so hard for on my main account can't be on my NA account while playing on that character, with that being said it sucks even more that some of the things that I bought from the MOG station is character based and not account based. I've gotten use to the ping to the point that's not even an issue from me. I will say it wild to me when I did a hunt for the first time in NA, in EU there's just a stream of "lfg" in chat. In NA, parties for the hunt all happen in the party finder, if you put lfg in chat people is going to look at you weird. lol
It almost feels like unrestricted player travel will always be an issue when there are incentives to be in specific places. I remember in the early days of Guild Wars 2 it had a similar issue, particularly to the frontline example. Originally, the game was split into servers in a fairly typical way, with players restricted to interacting with only players on their own server, with permanent transfers to other servers costing premium currency. There was a planned server guesting feature that did not make it in at launch and since the majority of the game was focused around open world game play with large groups of players, transfer fees were waived so people could actually play with their friends. Additionally, the game has a server based open world PvP mode called World vs World where players from three servers will vie for control of four connected battlefields over the course of a week. Players on servers that performed particularly well in their match ups would gain bonuses to experience, gold, magic find, and other things regardless of whether they participated in the game mode or not. Suffice to say, these things combined lead to a lot of transferring between servers, to the point that Anet would end up implemented a 1 day, and eventually full week ban on participating in WvW after a transfer. My original server, Eredon Terrace, ended up being one of the hotspot servers for WvW thanks to the organizational efforts of one of the larger guilds on it, and it would regularly rank in the top 4 or 5 of all servers when it came to WvW. As such it also became a popular server for players of all stripes, and no matter where you went in the world you could be sure you'd find other people to play with. At some point however, the guild leading the war efforts imploded due to internal drama, and without their guiding hand the server's WvW performance quickly fell through the floor. The first to leave were the hardcore WvW players who immediately left for greener pastures. Then left the people who were not primarily WvW players but still liked the buffs they'd get for being on a good server, and then the players who liked having large groups to play with. As more people left and the remaining population got spread more and more thinly, more people would leave until eventually the server was like a ghost town. By the time the guesting system was implemented and transfer fees were introduced about half a year later, the damage was done and there were practically more bots than players on the server in any particular zone. This would remain a problem for Eredon Terrace as well as other underperforming servers for over a year until Anet introduced the megaserver system, which simply shoved all the players in a particular zone into the same map regardless of their home server, effectively making server choice meaningless except for WvW, but to my knowledge ET is still considered a lower pop server even to this day almost 10 years later.
That is quite a story! And it absolutely checks out with other stories I've heard or seen from other mmos. If there is an advantage to being on a specific team, or server, or otherwise, then people will congregate there! And once there are enough people, because it is an mmo, other factors start to play in, almost like a gravitational force, players will come to the server (or team etc) simply because there's more players to play with there! And then, it can be difficult to stop it 😅
Even though I live in Denmark, I play on Primal to play together with my friend. But now I'm in this situation where I wanna do extremes, but the party finder is so completely barren. Like, most times there's 2 or 3 postings, and they're just advertisements. I'd love so much for there to be a region wide party finder
100% agree on the "hub DC" thing. It's awful as a Chaos player to see people leave for Light when we had a perfectly fine raiding scene just a few years ago before LDPU decided to destroy the balance and annihilate us, not because Chaos was bad, but because the sheep decided en mass to think the grass were greener on the other side. This is _THE_ biggest issue in FFXIV now with these hub DCs and SQEX need to acknowledge and address it at some point with a proper shared PF or downright go the drastic route of disabling joining PFs on other data centers to save the other DCs from dying completely.
also a now already big problem is the language yes it was generally agreed on english on eu but there are people who can not speak english for example a buddy ignores the chat in dungeons or raid because he can not speak english
It's complicated to explain, but my best friend lives in Denmark, I live in the US East Coast, and our server is in the US because the people we were joining live in Canada (Also East Coast). Then we have two other friends playing who are in Argentina and England respectively. The fall guys event was awful for me on the east coast, it must have been pure hell for everyone else outside of North America. Guy in Argentina has the worst time ping wise as it frequently spikes up to 1000ms. I would LOVE it if we could visit other world data centers, just so that we could take turns being on the crap ping. We joke we're all going to move to Denmark some day cause it's the nicest country between all of us. I don't understand how "the cloud" works or will work, but if it can help with ping for everyone even a little bit it would be great. A toggle would also be nice then people can self select into or out of global/regional party finding. (so make it so grouping can be by region, datacenter, or global. Both in accepting or being placed with parties) The way server client communication works for this game makes me feel like even if it becomes possible to go to any region, it is hard to imagine 'one server to rule them all' happening. I think that might be the key difference between WoW and FF14 in that regard.
What I know from the cloud server beta test, is that players who commonly had bad connections in NA, had very good connections on the cloud servers. Overall, as I understood it, somehow everyone there might have had good connections, but I don't know the whole story, and it does sound like a magical wonderland 😅 The main reason I am concerned we would end up with not just a "king" DC, but a "king region", is that players already appear to be willing to put up with ping, and not being on their home dc, if it comes with some sort of advantage in the other end. And all it takes is enough people observing this "advantage" and the snowball of people going to the "king DC" in a specific region starts rolling, and just like we see now and have seen for a while, you either play ball and do it too, or sit on your home dc that might not have even a fraction of the groups available! 😕 It's not guaranteed this is how it would play out, but it is a possibility, and other things in ffxiv, and even other mmos, suggest it is more likely than we'd hope 😕
i feel like they do need to do gradual steps towards this start with unlocking pf and duty roulette queues to the same region so it doesnt matter which dc you play on you can still do content on your home world within the same region then after that ease into a global data centre pf and roulette queues then finally global dc travel
What I don't understand is why they have yet to rework party finder and duty queues to be cross data center. Well I kinda understand as it would likely require standing up a new server to manage all the queues and figure out who goes where. Not to mention the network portion that needs to play nice. Not sure what their infrastructure is like already for duties. Maybe that's a server per data center? Lots to undo and lots of potential problems.
I do miss representing Gridania in pvp, but i get the change and glad it happened. I heavily agree that at least party finder needs to be fixed so i don't have to data center travel just do do content. Hopefully this gets fixed sooner rather than later.
I say data travel between US and EU would be enough since both usually share same main language English. I am in Ireland and all DCs in US give me a ping of 150ms which is not great but its not bad either for a game lik FF14, since its not a fps that required millisecond type of reactions.
Yeah it was added in 6.4 from what I recall, the tag for worldwide travelers is "Voyager", they're just sitting on it for some reason. At least let the English DCs play with each other if it's that much of a concern, we can figure the rest out ourselves.
This is definitely one of the few times where they've underestimated how a part of their playerbase seems to sort of "act out." While I don't think they're out of touch with how the western community is, it is kind of a mess how things have ended up and I hope they somehow fix the state of things lol I think region culture should be a substantial reason for their decisions on servers considering that for the longest time until we got OCE servers there was a big culture clash on the JP side and the misunderstandings that came from that where some pfs would literally exclude ElementalDC in their description for raids. I would've taken back DC travel or at least let it sit in the oven a bit longer
Yeah that also makes sense. The clashes that happened as a result of DC travel that we have now is a pretty good example of a milder version of what could happen if we suddenly got it worldwide! 🤔
I don't think we are ready for worldwide data travel for a variety of reasons. But region wide party finder would be nice. I haven't gotten into savage raids yet, but being on primal, and having been corrected about queueing for extremes, I would like the wider pool option. Especially since I like to at least attempt a blind run for the first try.
Yeah, regionwide PF would not only just be more convenient overall, but would also make it much easier if you are progressing through something else in the game, where you might not want to be "away from home", that you can be in the PF with no downsides!
I like to point out, I am Swedish, but all my friends that play this game is NA, so I play on NA. Yes, the ping is bad, but I can manage it (Granted that's probably cause I am very good at learning mechanics, and remembering mechanics of just about all fights in the game). Even on Extremes or Savage content. Though it certainly is an uphill battle. I have recently tried to do the solo only challenge on EU and I definitely noticed that little bit of extra time to dodge mechanics. But yeah. The difference between 200 ping, and 20 in this game I have noticed is practically un-noticeable in the heat of things. Not like a game like DOTA2, CS:GO, or any other game where every single millisecond matters. Though PVP is probably a different matter entirely.
The NA marker thing isn't placing every marker and standing at one, it's placing one marker to serve as the center of the battlefield/the enemy and standing at your spot around it. It's just a quick way to both have everyone pick spots as well as confirm everyone knows those spots before you begin. It takes like 3 seconds if everyone knows what's up, and if it takes longer, you caught a problem before it began and can explain. That said, the cultural differences are for players to solve, not the dev team. We all played together just fine in FFXI. For a game all about understanding differing cultures, it kinda sounds like they don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
Also, jp people are completely fine with 1 pack pull in max level dungeon. NA players will lose their mind on this. If You want to do this on NA server, You got to hold the loot So You don't get vote dismissed
I haven't had an experience where a tank got kicked for 1 pack pulls in EU, but in fairness, I've seen it so little that I might not have a good sample size! 😅
They had the cloud datacenter test. I'm curious how that worked out.. Could eliminate the sub data centers and have regional cloud DCs.. And then have DC travel between regions
and generally there is some degree of consistency over which light party you're in and which spots you take, so sort of like eu macros, but it's not exactly guaranteed!
There are a lot of benefits of server travel when looking for things that are random in game, such as mobs and FATES. But I think the negatives almost outweigh the positives. I would actually be fine if they got rid of travel entirely.
I don't know about others, but for my part, if they release world travel, I would only use it for alternative content such as collab gpose with other players, madjong, chocobo racing, etc. In "serious" content like the main story I would do it on my server...
The main reason I know some players would not mind raiding across regions is that there are Europeans raiding in NA and vice versa! 😅 But I can see the way you would use it would be much less of a concern to make work! 😊
Oh I didn't actually know that! That is very interesting! ^^ I guess you would be even more hard pressed because I believe you can't queue Ranked while visiting, you'd have to actually switch home world completely right?
TL;DR I think implementing region-wide or cross-dc party finder/matchmaking, world-wide travel disable queuing for duties (Limited Job privileges) and a dedicated "cloud world server" instead of game-wide implementation, that would strike the right balance of everything we need. This would enable servers like Dynamis to be worth it to live there because your que-times are "normal" now, and it would even out the congested server's player counts which could theoretically reduce strain on the servers themselves, increasing stability. You can still have the "king" servers for social reasons, fc's in Crystal would still lean towards RP and Aether towards dungeoning/content, likewise for the other regions, but yeah. As for World-Center travel, I would personally make it exclusively for social reasons, and/or have the cloud data center be a SEPARATE thing from the others. Basically, if my Homeworld is on Crystal and I go to visit a friend on an EU datacenter (Sorry I don't know the names) then I would be reduced to a privileges of a Limited Job, like blue mage but with every job. However, if both me and my EU friend travel to a dedicated cloud "world server" then we would both be able to que normally.
I don’t think a raiding hub server is an issue mainly because I doubt raiders will go to a different region to prog/raid. Latency concerns will definitely make the hubs stay the way they are imho
I think the main counter argument I have against the lack of Worldwide DC Travel is that I can already make a character on those Data Centers. I would need to learn how they do things when I play on them, which is particularly useful because a new character has a sprout on their head, indicating they're new and probably don't know how things work. And it's not like I can't learn just because I don't have a sprout on my head, it's not that hard, I just want to play with my friends on EU, and I imagine that's what people mostly would want to use it for. I dunno why people would go to another region for and EX or Savage, only to deal with the unnecessary lag, when we already each have DC for that. I don't think it would exacerbate that problem
Another problem: Market value and if they allow cross region, I hope there will be trade/market restrictions. Because price difference is so high. I just watch video about goblin server sell certain items at 90k while other server on NA sell it at 200k - 300k. And what does that cost in Elemental (JP)? 42k. (My rule of thumb for price conversion: JP price will be about a third to a half of NA price) Also fun fact: JP will use ST (Sub-Tank) instead of OT (Off-Tank), and no R1/R2 here every DPS use D1 to D4. Why every DPS use D? Because Raid Finder for EX (and Unreal) doesn't guarantee melee or ranged or even non duplicate. For example, just a few hours ago I recleared Unreal with 2 PLD, AST, SGE, SAM, 3 SMN. (Some week, I even got double regen with triple phy-ranged 😂)
Very true! I imagine both region DC travel, and... World travel when that was originally added, both had massive impacts on each economy they suddenly strapped together with duct tape! 😅 It would be cataclysmic if we had worldwide travel! Right! The example with raid finder makes perfect sense, and matches up with the understanding that JP do this type of content with DF! 😊 Thank you for the clarification!
If I could create an endgame character in NA without having to do hundreds of hours of work or pay for the privilege, any desire for regional travel would actually evaporate.
Just make one data center per region. I’m sick of being in a different dater center to do content, not having access to my retainers and all the limitations is bad. They created a problem. They should solve it.
I will say this, on Materia the 'culture' of doing msq dungeons and trials in the party finder is because of the lack of players on Materia to actually use the duty finder. So many people are locked out of doing MSQ simply because they can't get, say, lakshmi trial to pop, so they go into PF to either unsych kill for the completion or wait to see if any bored players are willing to join the PF. I do a lot of PF helping during the day as that is when i'm most active but during prime (generally 7-10pm AEDT) it isn't so much of an issue. The REAL PROBLEM is being able to actually do content in those 3 hours. Trying to go from the organised Frontline queue's from 5-7pm to trying to get your roulette done ESPECIACLLY ALLIANCE RAID because if you dont do AR in that window you aint doing it period. But then also trying to do other activities such as Ex farming, eureka/bozja and raids you have to choose to do 1 thing and ignore the others simply because of thats when people are actually playing. I would love to see Materia and Materia alone be connected to NA, World of Warcraft forsore the inability for OCE to reach that critical mass a decade ago with the release of Warlords of Draenor and it REALLY HELPED keep the game playable during off-hours by being connected to NA. Even if the argument of it creating an even more heavy 'HUB' datacenter on Aether, the Ping alone for OCE players will be enough to warrant raiding here while also allowing us to be able to actually do basic content such as previously mentioned Alliance raid roulette during off hours with the ability to DC travel. I love Materia and the community it has fostered but seeing the luchy blancho report for 6.55 and seeing that the entirety of the players who have finished the MSQ is barely 10% that of every other Region hurts a lot and you can feel it when playing the game.
The effect of DC travel has been awful for the game and we're still suffering from it. What we need right now is regional party finder, not Worldwide DC travel. If Square ever wants to do Worldwide DC travel? I hope they lock the party finder for it.
I'd much rather have region-wide friend list or Party Finder sintead of DC hopping to find a good party finder, or losing my friend list access if i do that
I've had so many PF groups on Light that ended up all 8/8 Travellers from Chaos. And it's such a wasteland at this point that boycotting travel is almost out of the question now.
Did you hear about elemental dc not allowed in high end raiding on other jp dc party finder? Some troublemakers I guess. Non Japanese speaking weebs usually go in elemental. Taiwanese all in Typhon. I only do ex, unreal and stopped doing savage, doesn't matter to me. Not sure if it's still a thing. I only go to the other dc, recently to check on Baldesion Arsenal and Mentor roulette, because bored. Jp people are scared when they see your client with _E. hehe. Personally I only join if I know what I'm doing. When Yoshida said about cultural gap, it's definitely about JP dc's. On Materia, yes, it's better to make PF if you want to go in something. but queuing works too. but sometimes it will take a while. Alliance lv60+ might not even pop. Frontline is on a set usual time everyday. Usually 3pm GMT+9. Sometimes on sunday it doesn't pop at all lol. people doing normie stuff. On JP. You can even queue unreal and current EX. I'm not sure about savage. But there's a lot of PF as well. LV50, 60 ex will occasionally pop and usually with 4 mentors. Lv70 and 80 never pops, only rathalos. Older lv90 ex, no. I've taken a look at the queues. Only the current purple one will pop. Source, my 1500 mentor roulette. Almost there. World travel probably not going to happen because the JP population takes priority, sorry everyone else is an after thought. But please. Materia. dead dc. However, since the yen is weakening the execs should devise a plan to secure more international players that pay in USD, EUR, GBP that's like free money. If anyone dead serious to travel, they'll make an alt anyway. My Materia is an alt because I know it's going to be dead. Although the population seems to be increasing.
Indeed, I heard about the elemental situation in JP, which ultimately, would probably be the same deal if people were to go in pf over in the JP region I suppose! 😅
I think the cultural differences are a cover for actual technical difficulties they've been having. Party finder will eventually coalesce on a single set of Pastebin strats anyways, and I mourn the loss of UPR but the strategies will come naturally. Even if we have to go through some Happy Brambles every now and then. What I think should be always done though is that PF should ALWAYS go as far as you're able to travel. No matter if they do Worldwide Travel or not, it should IMMEDIATELT be accompanied by PF and DF matching your traveling capabilities. Having a "Hub" DC is infuriating for people that aren't from it and everyone should have as small a queue time from their own Home Worlds. I don't really think Worldwide Travel would be that handy though, if only for language barriers, latency issues, timezones and other minor technical difficulties like marketboard surfing. I say let the regions be locked, but let the PF and DF be regional. Let Dynamis queue, damn it.
I can see why jp doesn't wanna do something like that, just look at Logan's example in their country and many other that go there just to make a clow of themselves
Region-wide party finder is a feature I think is needed. I play at Chaos DC, and while Chaos is good enough to play casual content, it saddens me to see its PF to be half-dead. Personally, I don't see that much sense for Chaos players to flock to Light for high-end duty content. I've been doing that too, and most of the time when I have, I have ended up in parties in Light that are mostly, if not entirely, made up from Chaos players. This always raises me the question: why bother traveling to Light at all? When I asked this, the answer I got was that high-end duty raiding scene has migrated there. A lame reason imo. I think that every data center can have a healthy party finder if players would just take an effort to keep them that way, and I can give an example. One time, when I was in Light with my alt doing savage, I attempted to return to Chaos in order to play with my static. But just then data center travel broke, and I got stuck in transit for over 2 hours. By the time I got back to Chaos I checked the PF there to find 45 high-end duty parties looking for players. In comparison, Light had around 50 when I was leaving. To me it showed that Chaos and Light both can have a healthy party finder. But of course things returned to normal when the issue was fixed. And since data center travel isn't going anywhere, region-wide party finder may be the only way to see a healthy party finder in Chaos and other DCs with the same issue.
Please let JP/NA players visit Materia You don't have to let Materia players leave just let people visit us please please please please please please The main reason Materia is so empty is because half of the OCE players never transferred to Materia in the first place, preferring to stay on Tonberry/NA with their FC and statics The other half transferred back to Tonberry/NA when they realised they couldn't raid savage or play pvp whenever they wanted Yes, half of the Aus/NZ/SEA player base raids savage on JP despite the higher latency simply because its actually possible to form groups there If you allowed this one way travel I guarantee you, you would at the very least have full groups of OCE based JP players visiting Materia on their raid nights for the lower latency. Please.
I think regional data center travel is a good thing for the game and the community, but you mentioning king data centers is the one thing that i absolutely hate about it. I used to be on crystal before DC travel and thats when i started raiding. High end parties used to number in like the 80s to 100 during peak times. Now there's nothing.
I am guessing that the server infrastructure the game has simply isn't designed to do this 😅 Also I have heard lots of stories about how annoying layering can be in wow, so even if it is a good idea, it doesn't come without drawbacks 😅
As an NA player we do not need a culture of tanks single pulling in level 90 dungeons and a YPYT attitude (that I've heard is present in JP datacenters). No thanks. When I play healer if the tank is single pulling and isn't new I try to pull ahead and if the tank is toxic about it I have heals and can survive.
I don't think Data Centers are surviving just being able to jump between ones in your own region. I'm of the opinion that we probably be better off just sticking with our own.
This is not a technical issue but a cultural one and sadly will never happen. The Japanese players do not want it. At most we would probably get EU/NA cross travel. But not to JP.
@@Lily_Catt- Compared to Dynamis, we are dead. We have multiple empty wards, hour long que times during peak... That's why we are the target destination for the new world data center travel. They get to come to us, because we are so empty.
i think a way to fix the King DC problem is if you arent in your home DC, ALL EXP, tomes, currency, rewards etc are severely cut or just flat out not given to you. S rank hunts would get progress towards their achievements, but you would get much less tomes/seals etc if you clear an ultimate on a different data center, sure you get the achievement but you wouldnt get the shiny weapon. i think this would incentivise people to play on their own DC
The marker dance and pastebin stuff that NA does for raids is so interesting in a bad way, its such a waste of time and annoying it seems Im sure NA people can read macro just fine, its just the culture is marker dancing and everyone just rolls with it, has any of you in NA here ever tried dropping a macro instead? How'd that go?
Actually, I had someone in my discord (Cole) tell me that they had someone recently post a "huge" macro for P9S in a pf group in NA, and the group simply laughed, said "I'm not reading all that". He sent me the macro, and it was genuinely pretty normal sized to me. That's not to say that anything bad came of it, but just to say that I had exactly one story to answer your question! 😅 In regards to the culture thing, I have heard NA players said that the marker dance makes it easier to recognize your position. I also heard that in NA it is more common to use macros in the middle of a fight to remind what the strat is. (like one liners and such) Personally I have not seen that in EU, but I can imagine that would be quite handy as well 😅
It also depends on the fight a bit. I don't do a ton of high-end content that requires knowing dedicated positions, but in what I've done it is most common to assign clock spots and light party groups using markers, which is (usually) fast. Once people start fucking up mechanics, then you might see markers for a specific mechanic get dropped. Obviously, notoriously wipe-y mechanics might get placed at the start to try to make sure everyone is clear on it, but the PF description usually indicates which strats people need to follow for key mechanics.
My opinion on worldwide DC ? Don't implement it. Regional DC ? Make doing a PF be DC-locked, meaning only a Light DC originating character can open a PF and / or DF in Light, and if he goes to Chaos he needs to be invited in a Chaos player's party in order to join the fun. Because the Chaos player launched PF / DF. Also lock out any access to marketboard when in another DC.
Yea. NA drops marker, people grab clock positions around the marker and its done, Drop two markers for light parties and its done.. They dont use macros, you supose to do your homework. Not join party and then ask.... But simply said, its ping what prevents worldwide travel. I got 170-210 on US servers, even in other games its around 130, for some reason....probably depends on what coast servers are. On Japan server, my ping swipe over 300, which makes things extremely difficult. I did little bit of Savage on NA, it is harder but manageable with good prepositioning, but i can clearly forget it on JP servers, because how unpredictable it gets. You get snapped very easilly by big AoEs even if you run asap. Actually it happens very often to weave switfcast before spell only to find out you are hardcasting with Swiftcast active... thats how bad it can get. Thats probably why we'll never get worldwide datacenter travel. PS: More accurate ping meassurement is windows resource monitor than direct ping, since FFXIV network architecture is bit complicated. PSS: Even if you add worldwide PF, problem is instance hosting...one server has to be chosen to host instance. Even if it is posible to do, simply chose server that isnt overloaded, problem with ping remains. Its easier on Datacenter scale(its one physical server after all), but much more complicated on worldwide, or even region scale.
For me personally, Cross-Region DC travel is something that needs to be an option. I am Australian, and i flat out don't play in Australian Servers because the majority of my friends who play FFXIV are spread out between Aether, Primal and Crystal, I also have a few that are on the EU Data Centers that i wish i could play with, without having to create a new character. Cross-region travel would allow me to play with all my friends on one character. I also don't think that Cross-Region DC travel would cause anywhere near the 'hive-mind' King servers like regular DC travel has caused. You're not suddenly going to have all the US players suddenly flock to EU or vice versa, because the ping would be a nightmare. As an Aussie playing on NA, even the 150ms ping is enough that its almost impossible to double weave comfortably with 2.5s gcd, forget about it with any class that reduces their gcd.
Seriously, I dont care about region travel right now because they need to fix issue with the DC travel first. 1- Hunts. It's already a mess, it already congest areas and make it impossible to even tp in the zone, so world wide DC? No. If it were just for me, Id make hunt server exclusive. Sorry not sorry for the achievement hunters. 2- DC wide PF before any expansion to DC travel. Having to travel to aether to raid because PF is dead on the other 3 DC is annoying. Cant check retainers between pulls or break or if you do, you have an annoying amount of loading to do. So... fix those issues first. Until thats fixed, Idc about other regions because we all know the vast majority of people are all gonna come to NA. So do you wanna kill EU because everyone is gonna come and raid on Aether? And I find it funny people think JP is gonna carry them. If they see you're there for a carry here's what they'll do: Kick you out without a word.
EU /s chat Is extremely dead, I have no idea what you're talking about.. and the macro is not very common since most people follow guides from discords.
![Scholar Starter Guide for Level 30-50: New to the Job? Start Here! [FFXIV 6.38+]](/img/1.gif)
An alternative solution could be cross-region dedicated DCs, where we can play with people from other regions but it's not actually a DC you can have as a home. That way people can play together without everyone being encouraged to flock to the same location and without disturbing DC and world cultures.
This is a good idea, I do however wonder if this would cause a lot of players to simply go to these DCs for the majority of their sessions and just visit home when they have to!
I do think it is a good idea though!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh another idea on top of this could be to have a global pf category and that world wide DC be used solely for the instances and party chat relay, upon queueing in a Cross region party, all players are migrated to the global DC for the instance that way players are still hubbed to their homeworld, but can play cross region
GW1 did something of the sort, with everyone playing originally in their geographically assigned district, but if they wanted to, they could play on an international one as well.
The idea of a "King" datacenter is the single worst problem that DC travel has introduced to the game, and is very likely the largest reason why they are not implementing a worldwide DC travel. People flocking to a single DC to do PFs and even DFs is killing any server that wasn't chosen by the hivemind, and it's especially apparent during the lull until Dawntrail, where if you aren't on the "hub" DC, the world is generally dead, especially in PF listing, but also in any other content you do, any roulettes you want to run, and even in hangout areas like Limsa.
I personally believe that at this point, DC travel, while well intentioned, has done more severe harm to the community on XIV than any other change they have made to the game. It has fractured communities, killed DCs, ruined queue times, and I have heard complaints from sprouts who complain about DF queue times, who are then told by Mentors to simply "DC travel to Aether". I can't imagine how many people quit a game that legitimately has plenty of people playing it because there is a perceived (and real) dearth of players on their home world because DC travel has just become such a natural part to so many people.
DC travel has good ideas. Being able to play with your friends on their home world is a good idea in general. But the unrestricted nature of being able to not only join DF and PF listings, but also to be able to create them or run them solo when traveling was a shortsighted decision with longlasting consequences. I don't believe DC travel can be simply turned off at this point, but the only savior at this point that *might* restore a community that has been trampled by DC travel would be the implementation of Cross-DC DF/PF, which would allow people to queue for roulettes and get much shorter queue times on any server, rather than just the "King" DC, and which would allow people to browse PF listings from the comfort of a server where they can actually participate in their FC, or use their retainers, or chat with their friends.
I know that a lot of people will simple think or say "It exists so just deal with it and DC travel", but no, that is a bad mindset and is incredibly narrow-minded. This game is built on its community, and to allow for the degeneration of that community, and to sit by while it happens, is exactly what kills communities, and when the community dies, so does the game.
Indeed, I came to sort of the same conclusion, that what we need first and foremost, long before worldwide DC travel, is region df / pf to deter the king DC problem! 😊
They could always just... make those things function across the entire data center instead of just any given server. Wild, I know!
what if there was friction or tradeoff for being in a guest DC such as retainers suspending market sales while in a DC other than one's home, or implementing travel cooldowns between travels ( including returning to home DC ) (eg: 1 hour before one can return to home DC, and 4 hours (after returning) before one can visit another DC again), of course, such a thing would just reintroduce the hivemind pre DC travel and people just home xfer and clog up the king world to get around the cooldowns
@@Diddz Honestly the only reason it's as bad as it is is because of the lack of downsides. Right now, the only limits are no FC chat, no retainers, no timed gathering nodes, and that's about it. People care a bit about FC chat, but for the most part people care more about being able to participate in PF. If proper restrictions were added that would make it a burden to use DC Travel for the exclusive purpose of migrating any and all PF (and to an extent DF content) to a single server, some people would indeed put their money where their mouth is and permanently transfer, but I wager that the vast majority of players would simply resume doing PF listings on their home server, the same way it was done before DC Travel.
Regardless of how it turns out, however, if nothing is done, the perceived lack of PF listings for new content in Dawntrail could spell a mass exodus of players who want to participate in end-game content, but either don't want to DC travel, or whom don't realize *why* all of the PF listings are gone. We're already seeing it, but it could get tremendously worse if mere weeks after the expansion launches, people sign into their home worlds, open PF listings, and see few or even no listings for high end content. "I guess no one plays this game. Why should I play it myself?"
I think this is probably one of the single most pressing concerns that the game has outright. Worse than the NTT issue, worse than overturned fights. If this is nor properly addressed, XIV could lose serious volumes of players. I just really hope between now and Dawntrail, this gets blasted louder and louder by the community as a problem.
Is it possible for them to add a regional PF/DF instead? So people can queue faster/find party faster. But without the long loading to DC travel
Dynamis solo queue times are long, but if you put up a party finder asking for help with something or even just to do dailies, it will usually fill up faster than DPS queues on Crystal. And on Halicarnassus, the Novice Network is also a source for hooking up trial players into parties so they can do content together, helping find people to do content, answering questions, etc... not just a meme chat. We often have unsynced Crystal tower party finders so people can get it done without traveling.
I suppose this is just an adaptation to DC travel draining people away, but it's also an active attempt by the player base to counter it.
Dynamis PF is cozy. I had more fun doing the Mhach raids on there than I had doing CT on Crystal's DF, in large part because getting to chat with my alliance before the raid helps build up rapport. (It does help that, because the alliance PF is usually put up for individual raids rather than roulettes, it makes it much less likely that some impatient player will pull while a sprout's in the middle of the pre-boss cutscene.)
I met some of the coolest and kindest people in Dynamis, and yes, I think despite all odds, they're doing their best to keep it alive. I once joined a treasure hunt PF there one day when I mistook the dates of a friend's upcoming art party, and the pf party I joined ended up encountering a hunt train in Elpis. It was a fun experience seeing so many players together.
While not directly linked to Worldwide travel, I think cross-region data centre party finder is definitely a needed thing to get rid of the "king" server mentality. Playing on Chaos, it's been such a shame seeing PF slowly dying over the last year and being forced to DC travel if I want to run anything even slightly difficult.
Indeed! It is not the same as worldwide travel, but would deal with an issue that sort of originated from region wide travel! 😅 I suppose if we ever got worldwide travel, that it would necessitate worldwide pf as well (although sorting between region and worldwide would probably be needed here too!)
And soo many players have a negative stigma on light on anyone that travels from chaos. Like all chaos players are bad and things like that.
@@andrejvlajic8800 huh? I've never seen that sort of attitude on light :o - it's more like anyone who expects PF group to be any good is fooling themselves :p
Honestly, I'm almost to the point where, if I see someone from my same Crystal DC on Aether and they try to join my party, I want to kick them. Lol. I had a PF up on Crystal for a long time before I traveled over, only to have it fill entirely with other Crystal players on Aether. It is SUCH a huge problem that even non-high end parties are hard to find anymore.
Dynamis also uses the party finder to do msq, but yeah the negative feedback of people going to other servers for queues still exist.
That at least means there's hope, if some of the players are trying to make it work!
Raiding in NA is basically as you described it. PF listings would say what strategy we're using to resolve a mechanic and if that required positions to be known, markers would be placed down to emulate where you'd be and that may indicate how you're responsible for whatever else the mechanic throws at you. Like P12S superchain 2a, markers get placed in a half circle with melees and tanks picking the front two then ranged and healers picking the back two. Ideally it would alternate light parties but it's whatever. Some party finders would forego this and assume you know how to collapse based on your clock spots for superchain 1, which also uses markers to designate who goes where.
Quite interesting! It is completely different from how we do it in EU! 😊
as JP DC player, queueing solo straight into extreme/unreal has significantly higher success rate for me personally. even when the party composition is jumbled (same class, all melee dps, all ranged, etc.) it just works because everyone know what they're doing.
解説ありがとうございました！とても分かりやすかったです。
前からリージョン間テレポのことが気になっていたので、助かります。
これからも応援しています！
Thank you
My friend group is mostly european people but we all play on NA purely because the first couple friends in the group got dragged there by american friends and suddenly I'm stuck having to contort to american schedules to raid and deal with awful ping, I would love cross region dc travel so I could take my main character to play on eu without losing all my friends.
Sounds like you can say bye bye to sleeping :D
Highly doubt they were dragged
It's an issue some friends and I have talked about quite a few times. Though our home world is Phantom on Chaos, as of late we've exclusively been on Light simply because of how many more High End PFs there are. At one point we had like 17 PFs on Chaos in total, traveled to Light, and were met with over 100 High End PFs alone. We've even had entire parties on Light made out of people who DC traveled there from Chaos and lamented they had to do it. It's a real shame in my opinion, and I can imagine that wouldn't get much better if Worldwide DC travel were to be added
That entire chaos group situation is particularly unfortunate of an example of the problem 😢
I just want to pose another concept that I don't believe was mentioned in the video: The Marketboard. Prices vary wildly between regions from what I've seen. (I have characters in every region for fun.) Things like current level treasure maps are peanuts on JP compared to NA, where you have to give your entire life savings and your cat to buy a few. (Okay, not that bad, but still pretty expensive in general.) I think this has a big impact on cross region travel, because it could easily change the regional economy of the game.
Gonna do this as a separate comment. I feel like there are several things they need to do to fix DC travel before they think of expanding it:
1. Limit marketboard use to your own DC.
2. Limit PF creation to your own DC.
3. Bring back the AFK timeout feature for people who are travellers.
Your aether ping is better than mine, btw lmao
An AFK timeout for travellers is actually a great idea. The marketboard access might be a good idea as well, however, both that, and PF creation feels like it is something that people would find out of game ways to circumvent. For example, you could get a friend to purchase an item on a different DC for you, and just trade them. And it just leads to something that feels like awkward and janky game design. I'm not saying that it might not help, I am just saying that it is very possible it might not! ^^
Also quite funny I have a better Aether ping than you! xD
Can confirm the marker dance is a thing. Usually you just put down the 1 marker and people position around it.
That's fair! The main thing I've heard "described" was markers for partners or light parties, so I had to guess for the clock positions😅it was not intended to make it look "goofier" than it actually is!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh To be honest, in my experience with my old static, we'd mostly do it just as a reminder for like "oh yeah, I'm ranged 2" etc.
I think the best compromise here would be to avoid cross-region travel, but instead break down the barriers between inter-region DCs. I am from Crystal, and I have to go to Primal when I want to play Rival Wings, and Aether when I want to do Bozja. If instead all 4 NA DCs could mingle when queuing, it would be a huge quality of life improvement for everybody. It might even save modes like Rival Wings which generally cannot exist outside of the moogle tomestone event.
I love it when you make videos where you answer a very interesting question about the game.
I'm glad to hear that! Thank you! 😊
Genuinely never thought about visiting another DC for Party Finder reasons. That feels obvious in hindsight though...
It's so obvious once you see it. I had a similar revelation at some point! 😅 So don't worry!
If the problem is both culture and latency. Why not making a big enormous server in each region? Or like you said, being able to see and join all the parties in your regions from the party finder without the need to move to another data center.
That would solve the problem and we wouldn't have to worry about housing, same could be applied so we could use our retainers, FC buffs and so on in a big region data center. I'm speaking of course without any knowledge about the technical conditions and problems about this, but it would be ideal.
I've been saying for quite some time that regional party matching is a must. I'm on Aether and, well, it's a huge benefit for us, but the situation also sucks for everyone else. I've traveled to Dynamis to give people healer ques and gave up after waiting 20 minutes for a single basic activity to pop. As far as world-wide is concerned, perhaps they could ease into that by preventing certain activities; AKA, it's tourist-only mode.
Tourist-only mode sounds like an interesting idea! I imagine like, only able to be in "safe zones" like cities and housing areas! That could at least allow you to "visit" 🤔😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh mhm or at the very least, you can't que for content. This would create a test bed for cultural complications without leading to arguments in trials, ultimates, or whatever.
Dynamis might look "dead" on first glance but surprinsingly enough, it is actually very active. The thing is that, compared to other DCs where you just queue for things on Duty Finder or just go through an endless catalog of activities being run on Party Finder, on Dynamis a lot of the stuff that is organized is being done either on CWLS or Dynamis-focused communities on Discord. If you frequent activities like Hunts or FATE trains, you probably are already acquainted with these community-driven CWLS which opens up so many doors for activities organized for Dynamis players, from Hunts, FATE trains, to mount farms, treasure chests, Alliance Raid runs, daily/weekly activities, all of this is enhanced even more if you are on an active FC, to the point that most of the time you won't even need to DC travel to do stuff. I did my first Savage on Dynamis, most of my Eureka/Bozja progress was done on Dynamis, all Hunt/FATE trains are being done pretty regularly on Dynamis, and so on. The only reason I find myself doing DC travel for is if I want to farm, lets say, NieR raid glams and I just feel like spending an entire day running those raids, but everything else is being done mostly on Dynamis. Even several venues have been opening up on Dynamis recently. So I think Dynamis looks "dead" on the surface but there is so many things going on underground.
That is good to hear at least, that Dynamis still has life! 😄
according to a friend, JP not just queue for extremes, they also do that for savage and even ultimates. And on top of that, partyfinder is commonly used for prog while a queue is for clears and farms. They even said the japan community would blacklist you if you try to attempt a clear and perform badly. So getting carried is not really a thing on the long run.
When they did the beta test of cloud servers, my hope was they would use that as a compromise, but i think it is really just for server congestions during early expansion and patches in the future.
Elemental have a blacklist google doc, yes. For en players who suck. Mana auto kick english game clients. Racism is strong.
I think something that would help the "dead DC" issue would be if queues had a time limit where they'd combine the low-pop DC with one or several other DC queues. I recently moved from Aether DC to Dynamis to join a bunch of friends who weren't able to make characters on my server, and I've waited over 30 minutes in queue for MSQ-required duties. Things like the current Alliance Raid are done primarily through Party Finder because the queue will simply never pop. If they could join our queue with another DC after, say, 5 or 10 minutes though, I think a lot less people would use the DC Travel system and the problem would be helped a bit simply by keeping our players within our own queues, at least for those first few minutes. I think this would be useful even for highly populated DCs during off hours, where queueing especially for Alliance Raids can still take up to 20-30 minutes depending on your role.
This would probably run into whatever issue is keeping cross-DC Party Finder from existing, though, so maybe if they some day add that feature they'll also figure out how to combine the queues together so that fewer people feel the need to travel to another DC in the first place.
Maybe i missed mention of issue of marketboards? People are already traveling between servers to hawk cheaper purchases, so cross world would further cause traffic just to save gil.
This is certainly an additional concern too!
Many forget this but the Gamecube release of Phantasy Star Online Episodes I&II had worldwide servers meaning you could jump from US to EU and JP and back again without any issues. Lag wasn't an issue since things were processed locally rather than on remote servers. There were no cultural issues as far as I'm aware in that example. One thing that I'm concerned about is if Cloud servers become a thing, will they be able to connect to the per-existing datacenter servers, even if cloud is region restricted within each region.
In Elemental data centre in JP, there is a mixture of JP strat, EU strat and NA strat, where different player bases trying to deal with the content in different ways and at the same time many cannot communicate in Japanese, while the only thing JP players there could do is to "deal with it". I definitely don't want to see that chaos expand to all JP data centres.
Never attempted this (so can't tell if true) but i've heard you can transfer to different DC but just cooldown to do this again is like month or longer which sounds pretty fair as a feature used for when moving to different countries to not deal with high latency as now you're living in different part of the Earth. The way it works now is fine as i'd not like to play with ppl that don't speak English and have huge latency, there is no reason for us to interact with each other with these huge walls in place.
You can indeed move your home dc that way! I don't know if there's a cooldown, but I do know it is a paid service 😊 but it would also remove other things such as your house if you have one and such! 😅
I just wanna visit the JP DC's so I can actually play Mahjong. Been times queueing has taken over an hour for a quick round on light.
Is the mahjong "mini" game much more popular in JP? That is an interesting detail I didn't know at least!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh ff14 is one of the best f2p mahjong clients
I read somewhere (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that on most JP data centers, aside from the ones you mentioned, people will kick you from parties if you don't speak Japanese in chat and that a lot of the JP playerbase is still a bit xenophobic towards foreign players. So I can imagine that might be something the dev team will consider too when implementing it. I do think it would be nice to play with my friends on EU data centers without them having to make alts and vise versa though.
You're also correct about the feedback loop of 'Dynamis is dead' and "Aether is where you go to raid". After DC travel became a thing, my home DC of Primal is pretty dead in terms of high end content in PF. On Primal in mid day, you're lucky to see maybe 10-20 party finders for Ultimate or Savage raids. On Aether, there's anywhere from 70 to 90 at any given time.
I believe PART of the story with JP kicking non Japanese speakers was related to communication problems. And this has culminated in what we see now, where they are likely to kick someone for having the game in English in the first place, and sometimes specifically not allowing anyone from Elemental (the known "English" DC in JP. I know that makes little sense 😅) but this would indeed not get better with world wide travel!
well if you were going to play on a JP server, you should consider learning Japanese for communication purposes; it is not about foreign players, is about not able to communicate.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I can see why communication problems would just cause someone to start booting non Japanese speakers from parties to spare them the grief honestly
Aye, as someone on Dynamis (Maduin), I learned real quick how to data center travel when I was waiting 20+ minutes just for a Trial roulette to pop (on tank no less, and as someone who started playing as Gladiator/Paladin ... yeah... not comforting), and don't even get me started on PVP being completely non-existent here.
Hell, there's a long-standing joke among some on Dynamis that Square-Enix will upgrade us to "Road to 90" once Dawntrail hits because our servers are still too empty and we're not sure the inclusion of Xbox players will help as many of them are already eyeballing Aether or Primal instead, "recommended" server bonuses be damned.
You're correct about Materia, that is how it works. It took me 2 months (often queued for 4-6 hrs daily) to get a duty finder group for Void Ark/M'Nach for example, before I realised everyone just uses Party Finder and manually forms groups. I think it has improved a bit with new content and tomestone events etc but yeah.
you mentioned in the end of your video about how WoW players would gravitate to a specific faction for the benefits it entails. i used to play WoW for 10+ yeara before moving to ffxiv and you are exactly right. in tbc i raided as horde because that's where the raiding scene was. there are (i haven't played in years so i can't attest to there still being) a lot of horde racials that are beneficial (orc hunters have the "command" racial passive which helps pet damage). i can't help but wonder if that min-maxing played a part in this, too. on another server i was on, there was a shortage of horde players, so my dungeon queues in late woltk onwards took forever as dps. anyway! what I'm trying to say here is: you're absolutely right. it was a thing lol
Indeed! I recall in particular that blood elves having the "better" seal of blood compared to alliance having seal of truth in tbc was a reason that sometimes is brought up. Blood elves (again) also having an aoe silence, that generates resources, certainly didn't help either! 😅
Honestly the biggest surprise for me in this whole discussion is how many people actually do high-end content in PF. Everyone I know either finds a static or doesn't raid, because PF is seen as a crapshoot where you're unlikely to accomplish much. I've never bothered to leave Primal so I thought the relative lack of high-end PFs was normal.
Not saying that anyone else is wrong for PF'ing raids, you do you. I'm just surprised it's so popular.
As someone whose homeworld is in Elemental (Gungnir, specifically) servers, I mostly raid on Mana, but hop on Elemental PF's for specifically P9S.
The strat for LC1 vastly differs on Elemental and Mana. Elemental does the "Braindead" strat involving not much rotation. Mana strats involved the "Mario Kart" strat, with a ton of rotation. Most of the other Savage raids don't have other differing strats that would make me raid on a different server for a specific region, but most likely if I took the time to learn the Mario Kart strat, I'd raid exclusively on Mana, since there's so many PF's there and you can just get in.
Though, I have been questioned by many PF"s if I could speak Japanese. Thankfully, I do speak a little, which saved me from getting kicked, I assume. JP Mana players are very vigilant to foreigners playing in the Mana server, you see.
Different strats between DCs in the same region is quite interesting, but I see how elemental specifically would be the unique outlier with what I know 😊
Imposing restrictions on party and duty finder (but not the duties themselves) for people traveling across region is something worth considering. Cultural differences is far less of a concern among preexisting friend groups. It would also prevent large amounts of people from server hopping as they would simply have no reason to without existing friends there to play with.
This was already answered from a network perspective, I believe. They said they need the server clusters to be close to each other for their current DS travel implementation. TLDR: network infrastructure. As the video stated, there are probably implications on cultures as well. Im sure there are a lot more implications we dont see
6:18 Agreed so much on the latency point. I love my EU alt, but sometimes the latency gets so bad that I start worrying about people thinking I’m griefing.
I wonder how bad the latency is for that to happen, but I am pretty sure you can play at least certain jobs to a level where it is unnoticeable by other players, at 200ms. But you could have it worse of course!
1:58 yes, l raided on jp server before pvp rework. They use macro and you call out the position you want like d1, d2, d3, and d4.
Indeed, same as EU then! Only difference is that in EU we use different notations for melee and ranged! 😊
I love just to travel around to just meet new people so i am all in favour for enabling worldwide travel between DC's. A gradual plan for this should be in place though, where in the first versions probably most "standard" content should not be included to make the necessary adjustments before implementing any further options for joining parties, dungeons etc. As someone who currently and always has played on a "king" datacenter i would rather however square fixes al the problems that latest iterations of the current system has introduced than shaking the foundations even more. I can wait for a long time if need be as it is not something "crucial" for many players i think and more a "nice" to be able to.
As someone who plays on Materia, region travel is a touchy subject here. Some people feel that it'd make the DC much more populated, as an *immense* amount of OCE region players refuse to move to Materia (not wanting to be separated from their communities and social circles they've known for years, or for Savage/Ultimate raiding purposes), while some people feel that so many people have already jumped ship to JP/NA, that if it was released everyone else would ditch the DC too.
I think the latter concern isn't much of a real issue, because there's not much stopping people from leaving anyways. If you're well off enough to pay a monthly sub, you're probably well off enough to do a world transfer to JP/NA. Heaps of people are still sticking around because we like not having abysmal latency as our regular day-to-day experience, and I'm convinced a lot of the OCE-region folks who aren't willing to transfer to Materia full-time would be happy to region travel for duties, raiding, etc with a better ping; while it's true some existing Materia players might end up moving to JP for whatever reason after being able to see how things work there on an end-game character, we'd probably see some of those folks on other DC's decide to transfer to Materia for good too, knowing they can travel back to their original home worlds to keep in touch with their social circles.
I think region travel would benefit Materia a lot, but the issues with other regions ending up having one "dominant" Data Center causing the other DC's to suffer should probably be tackled first. I remember hearing they wanted to try and implement some kind of cross-DC DF/PF, but that they needed to figure out how they were going to design and implement such a system first, on a technical level. I do hope they sort that stuff out whether we get region travel or not, since I do want to make an alt on NA in the future to play with old friends I used to play with before Materia was a thing, and it'd make my experience there better too.
There are also the possibility of having different Internet Laws for each region taken into account.
One of my friend's concern is the market prices and how it would dramatically change with cross region datacenter, since some have different prices between region and some are just way cheaper compared to the rest
Great points as always! I would just want continent-wide party finder and duty finder it really sucks that queues on Chaos take ages since everyone goes to Light for content. And crossing to other regions for me would be a maybe? I honestly think EU and NA would get along much easier than with JP, considering there are not that many differences barring PF strats maybe as far as I could see.
As someone who started playing this game with my EU friends even though I live in NA, I created a character on EU. Now I have some NA friends that started to play, so I created a NA character so that I can play with them. It just kind of sucks that everything that I worked so hard for on my main account can't be on my NA account while playing on that character, with that being said it sucks even more that some of the things that I bought from the MOG station is character based and not account based.
I've gotten use to the ping to the point that's not even an issue from me.
I will say it wild to me when I did a hunt for the first time in NA, in EU there's just a stream of "lfg" in chat. In NA, parties for the hunt all happen in the party finder, if you put lfg in chat people is going to look at you weird. lol
That hunt distinction is quite interesting! I've started to see that people post pf links in shout alongside the people saying lfg 😅
It almost feels like unrestricted player travel will always be an issue when there are incentives to be in specific places. I remember in the early days of Guild Wars 2 it had a similar issue, particularly to the frontline example.
Originally, the game was split into servers in a fairly typical way, with players restricted to interacting with only players on their own server, with permanent transfers to other servers costing premium currency. There was a planned server guesting feature that did not make it in at launch and since the majority of the game was focused around open world game play with large groups of players, transfer fees were waived so people could actually play with their friends. Additionally, the game has a server based open world PvP mode called World vs World where players from three servers will vie for control of four connected battlefields over the course of a week. Players on servers that performed particularly well in their match ups would gain bonuses to experience, gold, magic find, and other things regardless of whether they participated in the game mode or not. Suffice to say, these things combined lead to a lot of transferring between servers, to the point that Anet would end up implemented a 1 day, and eventually full week ban on participating in WvW after a transfer.
My original server, Eredon Terrace, ended up being one of the hotspot servers for WvW thanks to the organizational efforts of one of the larger guilds on it, and it would regularly rank in the top 4 or 5 of all servers when it came to WvW. As such it also became a popular server for players of all stripes, and no matter where you went in the world you could be sure you'd find other people to play with. At some point however, the guild leading the war efforts imploded due to internal drama, and without their guiding hand the server's WvW performance quickly fell through the floor. The first to leave were the hardcore WvW players who immediately left for greener pastures. Then left the people who were not primarily WvW players but still liked the buffs they'd get for being on a good server, and then the players who liked having large groups to play with.
As more people left and the remaining population got spread more and more thinly, more people would leave until eventually the server was like a ghost town. By the time the guesting system was implemented and transfer fees were introduced about half a year later, the damage was done and there were practically more bots than players on the server in any particular zone. This would remain a problem for Eredon Terrace as well as other underperforming servers for over a year until Anet introduced the megaserver system, which simply shoved all the players in a particular zone into the same map regardless of their home server, effectively making server choice meaningless except for WvW, but to my knowledge ET is still considered a lower pop server even to this day almost 10 years later.
That is quite a story! And it absolutely checks out with other stories I've heard or seen from other mmos. If there is an advantage to being on a specific team, or server, or otherwise, then people will congregate there! And once there are enough people, because it is an mmo, other factors start to play in, almost like a gravitational force, players will come to the server (or team etc) simply because there's more players to play with there! And then, it can be difficult to stop it 😅
Even though I live in Denmark, I play on Primal to play together with my friend. But now I'm in this situation where I wanna do extremes, but the party finder is so completely barren. Like, most times there's 2 or 3 postings, and they're just advertisements.
I'd love so much for there to be a region wide party finder
100% agree on the "hub DC" thing. It's awful as a Chaos player to see people leave for Light when we had a perfectly fine raiding scene just a few years ago before LDPU decided to destroy the balance and annihilate us, not because Chaos was bad, but because the sheep decided en mass to think the grass were greener on the other side. This is _THE_ biggest issue in FFXIV now with these hub DCs and SQEX need to acknowledge and address it at some point with a proper shared PF or downright go the drastic route of disabling joining PFs on other data centers to save the other DCs from dying completely.
also a now already big problem is the language yes it was generally agreed on english on eu but there are people who can not speak english for example a buddy ignores the chat in dungeons or raid because he can not speak english
It's complicated to explain, but my best friend lives in Denmark, I live in the US East Coast, and our server is in the US because the people we were joining live in Canada (Also East Coast). Then we have two other friends playing who are in Argentina and England respectively. The fall guys event was awful for me on the east coast, it must have been pure hell for everyone else outside of North America. Guy in Argentina has the worst time ping wise as it frequently spikes up to 1000ms.
I would LOVE it if we could visit other world data centers, just so that we could take turns being on the crap ping. We joke we're all going to move to Denmark some day cause it's the nicest country between all of us.
I don't understand how "the cloud" works or will work, but if it can help with ping for everyone even a little bit it would be great. A toggle would also be nice then people can self select into or out of global/regional party finding. (so make it so grouping can be by region, datacenter, or global. Both in accepting or being placed with parties)
The way server client communication works for this game makes me feel like even if it becomes possible to go to any region, it is hard to imagine 'one server to rule them all' happening. I think that might be the key difference between WoW and FF14 in that regard.
What I know from the cloud server beta test, is that players who commonly had bad connections in NA, had very good connections on the cloud servers. Overall, as I understood it, somehow everyone there might have had good connections, but I don't know the whole story, and it does sound like a magical wonderland 😅
The main reason I am concerned we would end up with not just a "king" DC, but a "king region", is that players already appear to be willing to put up with ping, and not being on their home dc, if it comes with some sort of advantage in the other end. And all it takes is enough people observing this "advantage" and the snowball of people going to the "king DC" in a specific region starts rolling, and just like we see now and have seen for a while, you either play ball and do it too, or sit on your home dc that might not have even a fraction of the groups available! 😕 It's not guaranteed this is how it would play out, but it is a possibility, and other things in ffxiv, and even other mmos, suggest it is more likely than we'd hope 😕
i feel like they do need to do gradual steps towards this start with unlocking pf and duty roulette queues to the same region so it doesnt matter which dc you play on you can still do content on your home world within the same region then after that ease into a global data centre pf and roulette queues then finally global dc travel
What I don't understand is why they have yet to rework party finder and duty queues to be cross data center. Well I kinda understand as it would likely require standing up a new server to manage all the queues and figure out who goes where. Not to mention the network portion that needs to play nice. Not sure what their infrastructure is like already for duties. Maybe that's a server per data center? Lots to undo and lots of potential problems.
Indeed, this is also what I don't know! Maybe it is a lot more entangled than we think!
I do miss representing Gridania in pvp, but i get the change and glad it happened. I heavily agree that at least party finder needs to be fixed so i don't have to data center travel just do do content. Hopefully this gets fixed sooner rather than later.
I say data travel between US and EU would be enough since both usually share same main language English. I am in Ireland and all DCs in US give me a ping of 150ms which is not great but its not bad either for a game lik FF14, since its not a fps that required millisecond type of reactions.
Never would have guessed you were from Denmark. But good to know we are out there in this game xD
There are dozens of us!! :D
@@CaetsuChaijiCh wheeeeerrrrrre? 😢 jeg føler mig alene i verdenen XD
Yeah it was added in 6.4 from what I recall, the tag for worldwide travelers is "Voyager", they're just sitting on it for some reason. At least let the English DCs play with each other if it's that much of a concern, we can figure the rest out ourselves.
This is definitely one of the few times where they've underestimated how a part of their playerbase seems to sort of "act out." While I don't think they're out of touch with how the western community is, it is kind of a mess how things have ended up and I hope they somehow fix the state of things lol
I think region culture should be a substantial reason for their decisions on servers considering that for the longest time until we got OCE servers there was a big culture clash on the JP side and the misunderstandings that came from that where some pfs would literally exclude ElementalDC in their description for raids.
I would've taken back DC travel or at least let it sit in the oven a bit longer
Yeah that also makes sense. The clashes that happened as a result of DC travel that we have now is a pretty good example of a milder version of what could happen if we suddenly got it worldwide! 🤔
I don't think we are ready for worldwide data travel for a variety of reasons.
But region wide party finder would be nice. I haven't gotten into savage raids yet, but being on primal, and having been corrected about queueing for extremes, I would like the wider pool option. Especially since I like to at least attempt a blind run for the first try.
Yeah, regionwide PF would not only just be more convenient overall, but would also make it much easier if you are progressing through something else in the game, where you might not want to be "away from home", that you can be in the PF with no downsides!
I like to point out, I am Swedish, but all my friends that play this game is NA, so I play on NA. Yes, the ping is bad, but I can manage it (Granted that's probably cause I am very good at learning mechanics, and remembering mechanics of just about all fights in the game). Even on Extremes or Savage content. Though it certainly is an uphill battle. I have recently tried to do the solo only challenge on EU and I definitely noticed that little bit of extra time to dodge mechanics. But yeah. The difference between 200 ping, and 20 in this game I have noticed is practically un-noticeable in the heat of things. Not like a game like DOTA2, CS:GO, or any other game where every single millisecond matters. Though PVP is probably a different matter entirely.
The NA marker thing isn't placing every marker and standing at one, it's placing one marker to serve as the center of the battlefield/the enemy and standing at your spot around it. It's just a quick way to both have everyone pick spots as well as confirm everyone knows those spots before you begin. It takes like 3 seconds if everyone knows what's up, and if it takes longer, you caught a problem before it began and can explain.
That said, the cultural differences are for players to solve, not the dev team. We all played together just fine in FFXI. For a game all about understanding differing cultures, it kinda sounds like they don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
Also, jp people are completely fine with 1 pack pull in max level dungeon. NA players will lose their mind on this. If You want to do this on NA server, You got to hold the loot So You don't get vote dismissed
I haven't had an experience where a tank got kicked for 1 pack pulls in EU, but in fairness, I've seen it so little that I might not have a good sample size! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh not all the time, but it happens. I have seen kicks on cure 1 usage. So one pack pull will definitely have people try to kick
NA players will and do lose their mind on this, but they need to learn some gd patience. ;P
Doing 1 pack pulls in max level dungeons is such a drag and time waster, youre max level, this isnt ARR or heavensward anymore
@@Venosyne "no body is asking you to save their time. They are just there to relax"
That's the response l got from a jp player.
4:05 Well dogs be darned, I need to mosey on over to JP. Damn nightclubers are doing everything to get around term filters in Yell and shout
They had the cloud datacenter test. I'm curious how that worked out.. Could eliminate the sub data centers and have regional cloud DCs.. And then have DC travel between regions
clockspots are chosen by standing around a single marker (usually a square one), thankfully not with 8 markers
That makes sense, both saves time, and means that whoever puts down the markers don't have to draw with 8 markers 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh yes, but then instead it's people cycling through four waymark sets to find the specific one for each mechanic
and generally there is some degree of consistency over which light party you're in and which spots you take, so sort of like eu macros, but it's not exactly guaranteed!
There are a lot of benefits of server travel when looking for things that are random in game, such as mobs and FATES. But I think the negatives almost outweigh the positives. I would actually be fine if they got rid of travel entirely.
I don't know about others, but for my part, if they release world travel, I would only use it for alternative content such as collab gpose with other players, madjong, chocobo racing, etc. In "serious" content like the main story I would do it on my server...
The main reason I know some players would not mind raiding across regions is that there are Europeans raiding in NA and vice versa! 😅 But I can see the way you would use it would be much less of a concern to make work! 😊
While aether is the raiding capital of NA, primal is the PVP capital of NA, I actually had to hop centers just to queue for CC ranked
Oh I didn't actually know that! That is very interesting! ^^ I guess you would be even more hard pressed because I believe you can't queue Ranked while visiting, you'd have to actually switch home world completely right?
@@CaetsuChaijiCh oops, you're right, i must have been thinking rival wings not CC!
TL;DR I think implementing region-wide or cross-dc party finder/matchmaking, world-wide travel disable queuing for duties (Limited Job privileges) and a dedicated "cloud world server" instead of game-wide implementation, that would strike the right balance of everything we need.
This would enable servers like Dynamis to be worth it to live there because your que-times are "normal" now, and it would even out the congested server's player counts which could theoretically reduce strain on the servers themselves, increasing stability. You can still have the "king" servers for social reasons, fc's in Crystal would still lean towards RP and Aether towards dungeoning/content, likewise for the other regions, but yeah.
As for World-Center travel, I would personally make it exclusively for social reasons, and/or have the cloud data center be a SEPARATE thing from the others. Basically, if my Homeworld is on Crystal and I go to visit a friend on an EU datacenter (Sorry I don't know the names) then I would be reduced to a privileges of a Limited Job, like blue mage but with every job. However, if both me and my EU friend travel to a dedicated cloud "world server" then we would both be able to que normally.
I don’t think a raiding hub server is an issue mainly because I doubt raiders will go to a different region to prog/raid. Latency concerns will definitely make the hubs stay the way they are imho
I think the main counter argument I have against the lack of Worldwide DC Travel is that I can already make a character on those Data Centers. I would need to learn how they do things when I play on them, which is particularly useful because a new character has a sprout on their head, indicating they're new and probably don't know how things work. And it's not like I can't learn just because I don't have a sprout on my head, it's not that hard, I just want to play with my friends on EU, and I imagine that's what people mostly would want to use it for. I dunno why people would go to another region for and EX or Savage, only to deal with the unnecessary lag, when we already each have DC for that. I don't think it would exacerbate that problem
Another problem: Market value and if they allow cross region, I hope there will be trade/market restrictions.
Because price difference is so high. I just watch video about goblin server sell certain items at 90k while other server on NA sell it at 200k - 300k. And what does that cost in Elemental (JP)? 42k.
(My rule of thumb for price conversion: JP price will be about a third to a half of NA price)
Also fun fact: JP will use ST (Sub-Tank) instead of OT (Off-Tank), and no R1/R2 here every DPS use D1 to D4.
Why every DPS use D? Because Raid Finder for EX (and Unreal) doesn't guarantee melee or ranged or even non duplicate. For example, just a few hours ago I recleared Unreal with 2 PLD, AST, SGE, SAM, 3 SMN. (Some week, I even got double regen with triple phy-ranged 😂)
Very true! I imagine both region DC travel, and... World travel when that was originally added, both had massive impacts on each economy they suddenly strapped together with duct tape! 😅 It would be cataclysmic if we had worldwide travel!
Right! The example with raid finder makes perfect sense, and matches up with the understanding that JP do this type of content with DF! 😊 Thank you for the clarification!
I honestly just want a region wide party finder/duty finder so I can have decent que times without having to travel to aether.
That is understandable, and I would appreciate the same so I wouldn't have to travel to Light! ^^
If I could create an endgame character in NA without having to do hundreds of hours of work or pay for the privilege, any desire for regional travel would actually evaporate.
Just make one data center per region. I’m sick of being in a different dater center to do content, not having access to my retainers and all the limitations is bad.
They created a problem. They should solve it.
a region party finder would fix all my problems rn,
Xbox peeps joining is going to help the Dynamis problem a lot.
I will say this, on Materia the 'culture' of doing msq dungeons and trials in the party finder is because of the lack of players on Materia to actually use the duty finder. So many people are locked out of doing MSQ simply because they can't get, say, lakshmi trial to pop, so they go into PF to either unsych kill for the completion or wait to see if any bored players are willing to join the PF.
I do a lot of PF helping during the day as that is when i'm most active but during prime (generally 7-10pm AEDT) it isn't so much of an issue. The REAL PROBLEM is being able to actually do content in those 3 hours. Trying to go from the organised Frontline queue's from 5-7pm to trying to get your roulette done ESPECIACLLY ALLIANCE RAID because if you dont do AR in that window you aint doing it period. But then also trying to do other activities such as Ex farming, eureka/bozja and raids you have to choose to do 1 thing and ignore the others simply because of thats when people are actually playing.
I would love to see Materia and Materia alone be connected to NA, World of Warcraft forsore the inability for OCE to reach that critical mass a decade ago with the release of Warlords of Draenor and it REALLY HELPED keep the game playable during off-hours by being connected to NA.
Even if the argument of it creating an even more heavy 'HUB' datacenter on Aether, the Ping alone for OCE players will be enough to warrant raiding here while also allowing us to be able to actually do basic content such as previously mentioned Alliance raid roulette during off hours with the ability to DC travel.
I love Materia and the community it has fostered but seeing the luchy blancho report for 6.55 and seeing that the entirety of the players who have finished the MSQ is barely 10% that of every other Region hurts a lot and you can feel it when playing the game.
The effect of DC travel has been awful for the game and we're still suffering from it. What we need right now is regional party finder, not Worldwide DC travel. If Square ever wants to do Worldwide DC travel? I hope they lock the party finder for it.
I'd much rather have region-wide friend list or Party Finder sintead of DC hopping to find a good party finder, or losing my friend list access if i do that
I've had so many PF groups on Light that ended up all 8/8 Travellers from Chaos. And it's such a wasteland at this point that boycotting travel is almost out of the question now.
Did you hear about elemental dc not allowed in high end raiding on other jp dc party finder?
Some troublemakers I guess.
Non Japanese speaking weebs usually go in elemental.
Taiwanese all in Typhon.
I only do ex, unreal and stopped doing savage, doesn't matter to me. Not sure if it's still a thing.
I only go to the other dc, recently to check on Baldesion Arsenal and Mentor roulette, because bored.
Jp people are scared when they see your client with _E. hehe.
Personally I only join if I know what I'm doing.
When Yoshida said about cultural gap, it's definitely about JP dc's.
On Materia, yes, it's better to make PF if you want to go in something. but queuing works too. but sometimes it will take a while. Alliance lv60+ might not even pop. Frontline is on a set usual time everyday. Usually 3pm GMT+9. Sometimes on sunday it doesn't pop at all lol. people doing normie stuff.
On JP. You can even queue unreal and current EX. I'm not sure about savage. But there's a lot of PF as well. LV50, 60 ex will occasionally pop and usually with 4 mentors. Lv70 and 80 never pops, only rathalos. Older lv90 ex, no. I've taken a look at the queues. Only the current purple one will pop. Source, my 1500 mentor roulette. Almost there.
World travel probably not going to happen because the JP population takes priority, sorry everyone else is an after thought. But please. Materia. dead dc. However, since the yen is weakening the execs should devise a plan to secure more international players that pay in USD, EUR, GBP that's like free money.
If anyone dead serious to travel, they'll make an alt anyway. My Materia is an alt because I know it's going to be dead. Although the population seems to be increasing.
Indeed, I heard about the elemental situation in JP, which ultimately, would probably be the same deal if people were to go in pf over in the JP region I suppose! 😅
I think the cultural differences are a cover for actual technical difficulties they've been having. Party finder will eventually coalesce on a single set of Pastebin strats anyways, and I mourn the loss of UPR but the strategies will come naturally. Even if we have to go through some Happy Brambles every now and then.
What I think should be always done though is that PF should ALWAYS go as far as you're able to travel. No matter if they do Worldwide Travel or not, it should IMMEDIATELT be accompanied by PF and DF matching your traveling capabilities. Having a "Hub" DC is infuriating for people that aren't from it and everyone should have as small a queue time from their own Home Worlds.
I don't really think Worldwide Travel would be that handy though, if only for language barriers, latency issues, timezones and other minor technical difficulties like marketboard surfing. I say let the regions be locked, but let the PF and DF be regional. Let Dynamis queue, damn it.
Yeah indeed! I think a lot of dynamis' problems could be alleviated if they could queue without leaving the DC 😅
I can see why jp doesn't wanna do something like that, just look at Logan's example in their country and many other that go there just to make a clow of themselves
Region-wide party finder is a feature I think is needed. I play at Chaos DC, and while Chaos is good enough to play casual content, it saddens me to see its PF to be half-dead. Personally, I don't see that much sense for Chaos players to flock to Light for high-end duty content. I've been doing that too, and most of the time when I have, I have ended up in parties in Light that are mostly, if not entirely, made up from Chaos players. This always raises me the question: why bother traveling to Light at all? When I asked this, the answer I got was that high-end duty raiding scene has migrated there. A lame reason imo. I think that every data center can have a healthy party finder if players would just take an effort to keep them that way, and I can give an example. One time, when I was in Light with my alt doing savage, I attempted to return to Chaos in order to play with my static. But just then data center travel broke, and I got stuck in transit for over 2 hours. By the time I got back to Chaos I checked the PF there to find 45 high-end duty parties looking for players. In comparison, Light had around 50 when I was leaving. To me it showed that Chaos and Light both can have a healthy party finder. But of course things returned to normal when the issue was fixed. And since data center travel isn't going anywhere, region-wide party finder may be the only way to see a healthy party finder in Chaos and other DCs with the same issue.
2:40 That's actually kinda an advantage in ranked pvp. You can get top 100 reward at gold rank in dynamis, LOL
Please let JP/NA players visit Materia
You don't have to let Materia players leave just let people visit us please please please please please please
The main reason Materia is so empty is because half of the OCE players never transferred to Materia in the first place, preferring to stay on Tonberry/NA with their FC and statics
The other half transferred back to Tonberry/NA when they realised they couldn't raid savage or play pvp whenever they wanted
Yes, half of the Aus/NZ/SEA player base raids savage on JP despite the higher latency simply because its actually possible to form groups there
If you allowed this one way travel I guarantee you, you would at the very least have full groups of OCE based JP players visiting Materia on their raid nights for the lower latency. Please.
I think regional data center travel is a good thing for the game and the community, but you mentioning king data centers is the one thing that i absolutely hate about it.
I used to be on crystal before DC travel and thats when i started raiding. High end parties used to number in like the 80s to 100 during peak times. Now there's nothing.
Could you subtitle this video in French/German/Japanese? I feel like this is a discussion we should be having as a whole player community.
I unfortunately cannot, on account of not speaking any of those languages myself! 😢 Hopefully the auto translate is effective enough 😕
Why not a single gigantic server for each region + layering?
I am guessing that the server infrastructure the game has simply isn't designed to do this 😅
Also I have heard lots of stories about how annoying layering can be in wow, so even if it is a good idea, it doesn't come without drawbacks 😅
As an NA player we do not need a culture of tanks single pulling in level 90 dungeons and a YPYT attitude (that I've heard is present in JP datacenters). No thanks. When I play healer if the tank is single pulling and isn't new I try to pull ahead and if the tank is toxic about it I have heals and can survive.
I don't think Data Centers are surviving just being able to jump between ones in your own region. I'm of the opinion that we probably be better off just sticking with our own.
They should do a SA SERVER!
This is not a technical issue but a cultural one and sadly will never happen. The Japanese players do not want it. At most we would probably get EU/NA cross travel. But not to JP.
Yeah I get that. Language barrier among other things would also cause problems. 😅
because the other regions don't really want to play with Americans, thats why
People who think Dynamis is a 'dead' data center should visit Materia...
Materia is not dead 😑😑
@@Lily_Catt- Compared to Dynamis, we are dead. We have multiple empty wards, hour long que times during peak...
That's why we are the target destination for the new world data center travel. They get to come to us, because we are so empty.
i think a way to fix the King DC problem is if you arent in your home DC, ALL EXP, tomes, currency, rewards etc are severely cut or just flat out not given to you.
S rank hunts would get progress towards their achievements, but you would get much less tomes/seals etc
if you clear an ultimate on a different data center, sure you get the achievement but you wouldnt get the shiny weapon.
i think this would incentivise people to play on their own DC
The marker dance and pastebin stuff that NA does for raids is so interesting in a bad way, its such a waste of time and annoying it seems
Im sure NA people can read macro just fine, its just the culture is marker dancing and everyone just rolls with it, has any of you in NA here ever tried dropping a macro instead? How'd that go?
Actually, I had someone in my discord (Cole) tell me that they had someone recently post a "huge" macro for P9S in a pf group in NA, and the group simply laughed, said "I'm not reading all that". He sent me the macro, and it was genuinely pretty normal sized to me. That's not to say that anything bad came of it, but just to say that I had exactly one story to answer your question! 😅
In regards to the culture thing, I have heard NA players said that the marker dance makes it easier to recognize your position. I also heard that in NA it is more common to use macros in the middle of a fight to remind what the strat is. (like one liners and such)
Personally I have not seen that in EU, but I can imagine that would be quite handy as well 😅
It also depends on the fight a bit. I don't do a ton of high-end content that requires knowing dedicated positions, but in what I've done it is most common to assign clock spots and light party groups using markers, which is (usually) fast. Once people start fucking up mechanics, then you might see markers for a specific mechanic get dropped.
Obviously, notoriously wipe-y mechanics might get placed at the start to try to make sure everyone is clear on it, but the PF description usually indicates which strats people need to follow for key mechanics.
My opinion on worldwide DC ? Don't implement it.
Regional DC ? Make doing a PF be DC-locked, meaning only a Light DC originating character can open a PF and / or DF in Light, and if he goes to Chaos he needs to be invited in a Chaos player's party in order to join the fun. Because the Chaos player launched PF / DF.
Also lock out any access to marketboard when in another DC.
Yea. NA drops marker, people grab clock positions around the marker and its done, Drop two markers for light parties and its done.. They dont use macros, you supose to do your homework. Not join party and then ask....
But simply said, its ping what prevents worldwide travel. I got 170-210 on US servers, even in other games its around 130, for some reason....probably depends on what coast servers are. On Japan server, my ping swipe over 300, which makes things extremely difficult.
I did little bit of Savage on NA, it is harder but manageable with good prepositioning, but i can clearly forget it on JP servers, because how unpredictable it gets. You get snapped very easilly by big AoEs even if you run asap. Actually it happens very often to weave switfcast before spell only to find out you are hardcasting with Swiftcast active... thats how bad it can get.
Thats probably why we'll never get worldwide datacenter travel.
PS: More accurate ping meassurement is windows resource monitor than direct ping, since FFXIV network architecture is bit complicated.
PSS: Even if you add worldwide PF, problem is instance hosting...one server has to be chosen to host instance. Even if it is posible to do, simply chose server that isnt overloaded, problem with ping remains. Its easier on Datacenter scale(its one physical server after all), but much more complicated on worldwide, or even region scale.
For me personally, Cross-Region DC travel is something that needs to be an option. I am Australian, and i flat out don't play in Australian Servers because the majority of my friends who play FFXIV are spread out between Aether, Primal and Crystal, I also have a few that are on the EU Data Centers that i wish i could play with, without having to create a new character. Cross-region travel would allow me to play with all my friends on one character.
I also don't think that Cross-Region DC travel would cause anywhere near the 'hive-mind' King servers like regular DC travel has caused. You're not suddenly going to have all the US players suddenly flock to EU or vice versa, because the ping would be a nightmare. As an Aussie playing on NA, even the 150ms ping is enough that its almost impossible to double weave comfortably with 2.5s gcd, forget about it with any class that reduces their gcd.
Seriously, I dont care about region travel right now because they need to fix issue with the DC travel first. 1- Hunts. It's already a mess, it already congest areas and make it impossible to even tp in the zone, so world wide DC? No. If it were just for me, Id make hunt server exclusive. Sorry not sorry for the achievement hunters. 2- DC wide PF before any expansion to DC travel. Having to travel to aether to raid because PF is dead on the other 3 DC is annoying. Cant check retainers between pulls or break or if you do, you have an annoying amount of loading to do. So... fix those issues first. Until thats fixed, Idc about other regions because we all know the vast majority of people are all gonna come to NA. So do you wanna kill EU because everyone is gonna come and raid on Aether? And I find it funny people think JP is gonna carry them. If they see you're there for a carry here's what they'll do: Kick you out without a word.
EU /s chat Is extremely dead, I have no idea what you're talking about.. and the macro is not very common since most people follow guides from discords.
disagree
let people have choice. maybe some poeple want to use eu/jp strats from NA and vice versa
Let's be honest with ourselves. The other reason is that they want to keep the toxic weebs out of JP🤔