It's been so frustrating - Primal used to have a pretty solid raiding PF, especially during peak hours, and then a streamer (I have no idea who it was, I just heard about it) said Aether is the place to PF, and it was like night and day, suddenly a ghost town.
That's always been the thing though. Everyone always said Aether was the best raiding DC. Plus it's where most of the big streamers play. It wasn't until around the time Omega prog was happening that Primal pf really died. The funniest thing is you have a good chance of getting mostly Primal players in a Aether pf. As a Primal player this has pretty much killed the game for me.
I hate the whole "we have to do this now cause some streamer said so" sheep mentality. I took a break before this whole thing and came back to find Primal PF empty and was so confused until my friends told about it... so now i have to DC travel just play with ppl from my home DC 🤨
eh, even up through earl EW Primal PF was popping, I did everything though PF without leaving Primal, I took a break after finishing main EW MS and in that year it's a shadow of what it was even at EW launch@@GuyN0ir
I started the game in 2019, and I always heard Aether was better back then. They're not. I can't get over that they didn't use Sharigan strat for Shiva Savage -.- I bet there'd be better strats used in NA if everyone didn't travel to Aether, but that's speculation
Primal DC here.... It's horrible really. All I see is "Go to Aether to Raid and EX!" and when I finally succumb because it's DEAD I end up with a whole party full of people from my own dang DC.
@@bleth821I moved to aether from crystal because I knew it would happen (a month before the dc travel release), also crystal savage and ultimate pf was definitely lacking on players (in savage the further you go on the tier the less players crystal had to offer and ultimates 1/4 the amount of ultimates pf you see on aether before dc travel). If I am honest I think PF should be a connected system with every DC can join from their home DC, because having to data center travel to do pf is very annoying for people that are not on the popular server.
Fellow Primal refugee here. I started noticing the decrease in Savage PFs during P5-8, server hopped over to Aether after I heard people mentioning how many parties there were in Aether, and kind of just settled after seeing it for myself. I cleared P9-12 and BiS geared purely on Aether. I'm still technically from Primal, but it's probably been a year since I logged into my home world in Primal.
I actually bit the bullet and just transferred to Light. I was very tired of constantly changing servers to even look at my retainers or sell something, I just didn't want to leave my old FC behind and endured it... In the end I just switched to Zodiark and my FC exploded and completely disappeared like 1 week after I left with a huge drama so I guess it was the perfect time kek
It's even worse on Dynamis. Since it's a newer data center, we aren't very populated, so everyone goes to the other dcs just to go in df a lot of the time, and you're lucky to find any actual pfs up even on weekends sometimes. It's crazy.
I actually find this really fascinating as we see a real world comparison as more people move from rural areas to the cities. Even with incentives, these rural areas still bleed population, so I doubt that giving out tons of stuff like gil and minions/mount tokens would work. I also want to know more about how the cloud test servers went, and what is going to come from that.
The solution is simple (i.e. consolidate PF by regions), and they did say they can do it, but they won't for the asinine reason of trying to keep a community together. This is the same reason they gave for not doing instanced housing.
They should make it so that there's cross data center recruitment. It sucks waiting for a party to fill and not being able to do much during that wait because you're not on your data center.
We did just have the cloud server test, so this might not be too far off. The team are definitely looking into new ways and technology to transfer and store information.
Not too sure about optional regional filters. I feel like having someone in your party half way across the world would just cause way too much lag to be good. It'd be essentially unavoidable, and players would be forced to ask what region someone is from before deciding to keep them in a PF, or kicking them. Keeping it to just your region would be the best solution.
the main problem with doing this would be latency. As the game stands right now, latency affects weaving during rotations rather than just positioning snapshots for avoidable attacks. Playing on EU I have 20 ping, playing on NA I have 150. The difference between the two for gameplay makes multiple jobs unplayable for me, one of which is my main, Ninja. SE has never admitted to this problem, and until they fix it, cross-region play is unworkable from a player perspective, despite the fact that from a physical/geological and corporate/financial perspective it's also currently extremely unlikely.
I'd want it optional. I remember healing a dungeon once, and the tank would just randomly use their mitigation AFTER big pulls, then you come to realization, that they are connected to some random parts of the world with really terrible internet traffic.
@@redgeoblaze3752 I almost exclusively play with someone from Europe on a NA server, the lag isn't really game breakingly bad (unless you are playing fall guys). I imagine if you could match with people or travel to other servers, there should obvious be a way to lock those regions out of your party. That seems a better solution than to take the option away from everyone just because you personally wouldn't use it.
I transferred from Aether to Dynamis when it opened because I wanted to meet new people from other data centers and have a shot at buying a medium house (which I did, in Shiro). But in addition to intrinsically lacking the population because we only have four worlds as opposed to eight, a significant chunk of the population is new players, or new characters, at least. Which means they don't have endgame content unlocked, which means we're practically obligated to use PF for any content beyond Stormblood. This has led to our "party finder culture" and I've met a lot of awesome people who are fellow lurkers like me; we just want to help players get content unlocked! Someone said that being on Dynamis is like moving to the suburbs for affordable housing, and transferring to other DCs for weeklies/raid is like commuting to work. It would be awesome if regional DF/PF were implemented. I should think it wouldn't be too difficult if the servers are in the same geographic location.
i like that dynamis kinda uses PF for alot of DF stuff it brings back a nostagic feeling from older days in a way anyways ive met awsome ppl through dynamis that on other DC's i wouldn't have due to DF ppl never talk out side of trashing on ppl makeing mistakes, where on dynamis ppl are more kind/socal
I am a static leader FULL of aether players. I make them transfer to primal to raid, when when theres only 1 or 2 primal players in the static. Its revenge for killing my dc.
As a Crystal player who is new to raiding, coming to the game right after DC travel, I feel this. I didn't even know how to travel to another DC until recently, but I still refuse to for raiding. I only travel to shop for bargains really.
I miss my reatiners, being able to chat with FC and I wish I could work on island sanctuary while away from my world. Also it feels pretty stupid to get a PF filled and see everyone is from the same outside DC.
This actually led to a massive stigma in my old FC as someone began inviting randoms from different DCs to the FC Discord for statics, which led to a culture of favoritism and toxicity along with false accusations sprinkled in to get those they disliked kicked from the FC. That FC has since died as they no longer engage with new players who join, leading to an unwelcoming atmosphere. One of the FC members I think got fed up with the situation and transferred to Brynhilder like I did. Its truly unfortunate it had to fall apart, as that FC was made in order to be more welcoming. Its why I also avoid statics now too. Its too much of a time commitment for someone like me who'd rather be enjoying life instead of raiding basically every night
The whole FC concept was a failure from the start it created wannabe elite players which is hysterical considering the game takes little to no skill and as for random FC invites I probably had 1000 when playing maybe those dopey clowns should actually ask if someone interested in joining a FC.
Where are all these FCs with drama because all the ones I ever join have literally one normal person that’s cool and then the rest are weebs, furries, flaming homosexuals, or random wannabe socialists. I join FCs just to have chats in the background while I play and I wouldn’t mind having some more entertaining conversations happening to laugh at lol
Same happened to the FC I made with my IRL friends at the time. One of us started inviting a whole bunch of people, created an in/outgroup culture with us being the out, and eventually they made their own FC, severed ties, and then later dumped that FC once they found a static of high level run-sellers to make real money off of. We're no longer friends.
It's real bad in NA. Cross DC pretty much killed partyfinder on Primal and Crystal, Dynamis never got started. If you like to do trials or are progressing in savage or ultimate, it gets to be very lonely, you could be spending hours away from their friends and DCs in practice and waiting for parties to fill. I think Rinon has the only real solution here, and it needs to be soon.
I think its important to keep in mind, its not "Just that simple". This game has 10+ years of development stacked ontop of itself, and making a change like this requires a lot of work to make sure it works as intended, and doesn't cause problems with all of the other associated systems in the game that are even mildly related to things like this, and because of how they structured things using Data centers without likely ever considering at the time how to communicate or pass information between these hubs, its likely a massive overhaul of a lot of the underlying systems the game is built on to change this. I think a really good example of this that I remember a friend mentioning, I was confused why things like Glamour chests were locked to Inn rooms and couldn't be placed in player housing, it felt like a super weird design choice, but as they explained, they tried to put them into player housing, but just because of how the game is structured, it cause a lot of problems when players started interacting with/moving them in a space those objects were never designed to deal with. Should we be able to put those things in our house? Of course. Its silly we can't, but its just a question of resources, and how big of an improvement on the overall systems of the game is it to invest into this compared to something else? And we can look at this as the same thing. Should we be able to use Party Finder on our home server and not be forced to travel somewhere else? Yeah, sure. It's probably a good thing if that was the case, but given the problems its solving, it feels like something that can be put off for the time being in favor of changes that impact a greater number of players, with a greater positive impact then the minor convince of not needing to take 2 minutes to transfer, and make sure you have all your supplies ready for what you're going over to do. I think as a final counterpoint to this, when people look at the community issues something like this brought with it, I've never understood why people feel like isolating yourself to a single bubble within a game is "community". We're all playing the same game, we all share the same hobby, and I really like the fact that when I go from Crystal over to Aether to sit in PF, I get to see a whole new section of the playerbase that I wouldn't ever get to interact with otherwise. I've met a lot of friends while sitting on servers other then my own waiting for PF to fill an just killing time chatting with people who looked interesting. Some of which just decide to join me in random PF adventures to hang out, and that's pretty cool to me. \o/ Regardless of what changes they make, I feel there's always room to critique the state of the game. The more they open things up, the more people will cry out about the lost sense of community, the less open the game is, the more people will complain about the limitations of their ability to play with other people. Its impossible to make a perfect system that everyone will be happy with, and instead I think we should just focus on making the most out of the current system that we have rather then being mad that it's not perfect, because our perfect is another players worst version of the system.
Data Center Travel in the way they implemented it is one of the worst things that has happened to the community at large. For the people willing to forgo a sense of home, community, and retainers, FCs, etc. it’s fine and they’ll just travel. For anyone who likes being in an FC, interacting with them, running PFs, or even just queuing in DF, the experience is exponentially worse in every regard. New players might not even realize this when queuing for dungeons and raids they unlock, getting significantly longer queue times, even when there are objectively enough players on their home DC to get fast queues, but people just travel by default when queuing. The implementation was made with a kind heart to allow individuals to play with their friends, but the ability to host and join PFs should have been denied. It’s too late to renege on that now, so the only solution to resolve it is a region wide PF/DF. If not implemented, the servers that are already not the “main” DC will continue to die, and if people think that Dawntrail will resolve it by simply having too long of queues during launch, they are fooling themselves, as people will continue to travel by default the moment the queues are tolerable again. And the uroborus will continue.
Yeah, the reason the "just move DCs then lol" argument doesn't work for me is bc there's no way for new players to know what DC is the "right" one when they first join. I can see it having problems when newer players start to reach endgame and think that raiding is dead or unpopular bc they didn't choose Aether 50+ hours of msq ago.
Exactly as said. If people getting into the game for the first time choose a server that isn't on the "main" DC, they will have a bad time, think the game is dead, and could very well quit without ever knowing why it's as bad as it is. People need to be encouraged to stay on their home DCs and use a cross-DC PF/DF. What absolutely should NOT happen is what some suggest by giving more reasons to travel and stay on another DC (i.e. have use of retainers, mining nodes, while traveling). The game will improve with LESS travel, not MORE.
Unfortunately this problem also exists in Materia (Not necessarily caused by DC travel but the same spiral of "If I go somewhere else I can find a group easier" so they go somewhere else and there are even less people in Materia to group with) and Regional PF wouldn't really help there.
As an American on Crystal I find this very frustrating. I don't want to go to Aether to raid. It's tedious, but more importantly, I don't want to feed into the bleed of players who are on Crystal, but leave for pf. Probably the same on Primal. Dynamis...is probably never gonna have an active pf. Sorry Dynamis. But I hope Crystal and Primal both have an upswing where people just draw a line in the sand an say "I want ro raid close to home". Either that, or we need a cross DC party finder/queueing system.
Yup. I hate what has happened to primal. I don't think allowing aether to uncheck cross dc will work though. Then the problem will still happen and people will transfer to get the full aether list.
Aether unchecking wouldn't be a huge problem, Aether isn't really that much bigger than Primal (save for the wave of people who transferred because of PF problem in this video) and a lot of the listing on Aether right now are from Primal players who went there to list their PF If all those Primal players were on Primal listing as cross DC it would be fine
"[Cross-world matching] isn't something that's needed, cross-data-centre is" \*Cries in Materia with only one data-centre that feels dead\* Things feel so dead over here... Isolated from the rest of the world and stuck in our own little bubble with a tiny population. Duty finder is all but dead, party finder is the only way to queue for certain types of content, even old content for people just going through the story, since duty support isn't available for trials and such. I've struggled to queue for some 6.X patch content! Even during the peakest time of the week that still very recent content can still take a long while to queue for. They weren't able to make moving to Materia attractive enough to pull many people from the JP servers, or even the NA servers, so there's just not enough people to keep things as lively as it should be. It's a bit of a catch-22, nobody wants to move because of the low population, but there's only a low population because nobody wants to move. Bad ping was annoying, and it's something I really like about having a DC closer to me, but I'd trade that for the option to queue with people from another region, just to be able to pug content. So from a Materia point of view, since we have no cross-data-centre, we desperately need cross-world.
When EW came out, I got tired of the 3k+ player queue on the NA servers, so I decided to temporarily play on the Material data center, mainly since the time zone difference should prevent the crazy queue. I had no idea how dead it was. For playing through the EW story, it actually was a huge plus that the DC was dead because it helped with the immersion. Being the only person on the moon and the edge of the universe was awesome. But it does suck for doing content afterwards.
Data center travel is the worst blunder on this game I have ever seen. There are only a few good aspects to it, such as being able to see friends and find better prices on the marketboard. But they should not have allowed players to join party finder and duty finder when not in their home data center. The data centers everyone is migrating to for pf are being bogged down to the point that even with very high quality ISPs you can experience lag. The influx of low skill level players has greatly increased the amount of time it often takes to do reclears. And now it is so bad that people are migrating for duty finder as well. I literally can't get a queue to fill for the Endwalker's alliance raids on my home DC anymore. I have to travel to Aether. And even then the queue times can be bad. It's like nobody wants to get their weekly free upgrade juice for 660 tome gear. And it's even at a point where people are hopping data centers for hunt trains too. I would be much happier if SE just did away with DC travel altogether. The cons heavily outweigh the pros on it.
Raid PF are dead*. But world gameplay (fates, hunts, fishing, duty roulettes) are still full. We need to be careful with how we word this, or we will be part of the problem.
Even non-raid PFs have congregated mostly around the "active" data centre just sheerly through the fact that more people are there to populate the PFs. You'll get a handful of those that don't need to fill on the other DCs but not nearly as much. Probably the only PF section that has parity are non-content PFs, like RP venues and so on
@@RinBanana I don't know if this is a data center problem but in Primal, I usually fill my Fate grind parties and Hunts are always active. Treasure, Deep Dungeons and doing DR runs also fill with no issues.
Even if it's not worldwide PF and DF, it should at least be region wide. There's no reason why Chaos can't see Light PFs when they can technically see them anyway (with a lil server traveling) So there's no cultural issues as it's already been torn down in 6.1. It would fix Dynamis being dead on NA, as they will actually have PFs and content to look for now
Worldwide PF would be best, but one potential compromise for the technical challenges might simply be to let folks *browse* other data centers party finders. You'd still need to travel, and maybe they could add a direct link in the search to let you do so, but it would allow folks to list PFs from their home worlds and still get access to everyone
Yeah I wish cross-DC travel never happened. In NA, Aether has always been the more raider-heavy DC, but I'm on Crystal and there's always been enough parties and activity to get through extremes and savages without too much trouble. Until DC-travel dropped. Now there's nothing. Like 3 parties in "High-End" during NA prime time. Go to Aether and there are 100-150. It sucks feeling forced to DC travel. It sucks not being able to use retainers or access FC house or Island Sanctuary or gather from timed nodes while waiting for your party to fill. EW will likely be the first expansion I don't finish my extreme tank mount farming before the next expansion, just because I don't want to DC travel. Obviously the solution is to have cross-DC party finder, but I'm guessing that's going to be difficult and take years to implement. I'm also worried this issue won't get any attention since all the big streamers who get to go to media events and whatnot already play on those most-popular DCs anyway, or they have a viewer community ready to fill their party for any content, so it doesn't affect them.
Thank you for making this video and raising more awareness (hopefully to SE) of this massive problem. I myself am on Chaos, where my FC is also based. For me, the issue is less about retainer access, but more about the fact that while on Light, I'm completely cut off from my entire community (Free Company). As the FC leader, it's even more important that my online time is spent socializing & communicating with my community. But since I have to travel to Light to enjoy any PF content, I may as well be "Offline" to my FC. I can't see FC chat, I can't communicate in FC chat, I can't access my FC menu or communicate with any of my friends. Everytime I play FF14 now, I have to choose: Hang out with my FC friends and do no actual raiding content OR do raiding content on Light, and basically be offline to my community. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this pain, of being forced to cut contact with my community, and for me personally is a MUCH bigger problem caused by this Light vs Chaos issue. Again, I just want to give a huge thanks to Rinon for finally bringing this to light - I desperately hope, as Rinon suggested, that Yoshi-P will find a way to introduce cross data centre party finder soon. This is really damaging my entire experience as I'm heartbroken about being ripped away from my friends, when I want to raid. I'm personally hoping that the "Cloud Based Servers" they're currently testing, will make the cross data centre PF feasible for SE, from a technical standpoint.
One of the worst aspects of it for me has been the insanely different normal strats for fights that each DC has. I learned so many fights using Primal standard strats and if I want to join a PF to help out or reprog since it's been a while, I look like a complete idiot for not knowing that the strats are totally different. I've been trying to reprog TEA there and it's been difficult for my muscle memory of what I learned to change.
I'm meanwhile someone who acknowledges that cross world shenanigans absolutely made savage and ultimate more accessible, and I will absolutely acknowledge that. But I still think it was less healthy for the game overall. Guilds may as well not even exist. Community for anything other than savage and ultimate may as well not even exist. There was also something to be said about having multiple different segregated communities in an MMO. Each of these communities having their different rules and culture was very healthy for the game, and if you didn't like the culture for your server you could just leave. Now the entirety of the community culture and rules are the same game wide, and if you don't like it, you basically have to just give up on interacting with players.
Basically we were isolated on servers until cross world was released. now that we have cross dc it FEELS like we are isolated again. Not because we can't go to another place, but because if we do we lose our social functions and access to things we do in between waiting for parties to fill.
I'm on chaos because the newb buff and that's what was recommended to me on reddit (which makes me feel bamboozled now), and I just thought this was the norm. I always chalked it up to bad timing since I usually try to PF at the end of the day or on weekends (which are different since I'm not actually from EU), and people just not wanting to play with randoms in general. I never knew this was an actual problem. I hope cross DC PF is a think because I simply can't switch for many reasons and honestly, I shouldn't have to.
My main hope for anything like this is that it'd be handed in a way where Materia isn't decimated any further by players leaving. I don't expect it to ever be busy the way big data centres are, but if being on even one of the quiet NA data centres gave you access to all party finder recruitment and duty finder match making in the region I struggle to imagine OCE surviving. If regions became the new standard for the available player pool the way data centres did when cross world was available, I'd ideally want Materia to be folded into one of the other data centres (still keeping the Sydney based physical server location since ping reduction in the entire point of having an oceania data centre). I don't know if that would be possible, but it's probably the only way materia survives cross DC pf.
One thing I can say about EU scene with everyone going to Light was mostly because Light consolidated a lot of it's resources via LPDU whereas chaos was well chaotic. Both data centres used different strats for both savages and ultimates but since Light made its resources accessible it made it the definitive way to raid especially considering in chaos if you suggested light DC strats they were frowned upon.
yeah, the reason light became the pf'ing server is because it already was even before datacenter travel, and it was thanks to lpdu, back then chaos players had no choice but to transfer if they wanted to do ultimates in pf. Then as soon as travel was implemented their fate was sealed
@@kiiturii I wouldn't say Light was the main pfing server before DC travel. Before DC travel chaos had quite a few pfs up including ultimates, I helped others in uwu pf get the kill and even got a top 10 speedkill randomly in a chaos pf back in 6.1. When the DC travel happened was when it started to drift and a huge part in that is cause of LPDU, Light has different strats to chaos and if you did suggest LPDU strats in chaos back in 6.1 or before they would kick you out of the party cause they were "different" , while chaos didn't have lpdu they did have an abundant of macros and toolboxes to give to players but the issue is you'd have to find that somewhere or ask in something like the ERC. DC travel comes around now in 6.2 and while pfs are up in chaos we start to see it die down. From the perspective of the new player if I joined a party in chaos and suggested LPDU strats I'd be kicked because the LPDU strats differ from chaos, but wait, I can now just skip on to Light, join a pf and they won't kick me because I've studied their strats. Now someone from my FC wants to raid, well I'll tell them I learnt LPDU strats so you'd have to go there as chaos won't allow it. Repeat this ad infinitum. It's funny because LPDU has been standardised nowadays so much so chaos strats don't even exist, chaos can reasonably just start pfs and put in the description LPDU strats and people won't complain this time, like both DC's could thrive now but it's too late now...
@@GoodLosertjo yes chaos pf of course existed because people didn't have a choice, but due to how chaotic it was thanks to no consistent strats people didn't want to pf there as much and instead joined statics, so when datacenter travel was implemented there was immediately a huge shift from chaos to light just for ultimate pfs and yeah people definitely could just use lpdu strats on chaos but now it's not anymore about standardized strats, it's about wait times.. It's funny because there are a lot of parties that fill up on light that are made up of only chaos players lmao..
@@GoodLosertjo That's what you call poetic justice. Funny how Chaos imploded on itself, truly poetic even in the name. Don't get me wrong, I think what happened to Chaos is a terrible thing, but is it surprising that the more accessible and more organised way keeps on? I just find it ironic.
I've been playing on chaos since mid-to-late Shadowbringers and while I did notice the PF being rather barren lately, I had no idea this was the reason! Just tried DC traveling to Light and sure enough, the PF is a lot livelier there, with multiple UWU and UCOB parties as well as progs for the current Extreme while at the same time the Chaos PF has only three parties recruiting in the High-End tab! The only exception seems to be the 'other' tab, which is equally swamped with nightclub ads on both DC's.
I'm on Primal and, if I didn't have a medium house, I'd have 100% transferred to Aether by now and I think a lot of people feel the same way about housing or other social ties. At the bare minimum, they need to enable the various social aspects, retainers, firmament, and gathering nodes (this one I'm iffy on but it probably needs to happen) for characters as long as they're within the same region as their home world. I'm tired of having to go through the process of logging out of Leviathan and hopping to Aether out of boredom because we only have 3-5 PF listings going on for most of the day/night.
Maybe I'm just the architect of my own misery, but... I'm on Crystal. I started on Crystal and I'm not leaving it. I had my first savage tier experience in the PF on Crystal, back when it usually had a decent amount of listings. Now? "lol Crystal doesn't raid, just go to Aether". If I wanted to go to Aether, my dude, I'd have just moved there and treated this like WoW where nothing matters but what you get for yourself. So I refuse. Basically have given up on raiding, even though I very much enjoyed it, but I choose to hold Crystal to better. Here's hoping a better solution is found.
I feel like the new player who has no idea what DC travel is, and not knowing what each DC is representing can be a problem. Most new players don't even check RU-vid or official websites before they hop into a game. Its not expected of them either. They usually pick a server which name resonates with them, that a friend plays on, or any servers that are open and hop right in. New players will indirectly get punished if they so happen to choose a server on dead datacenter. When they queue into a MSQ trial that requires help from others players and they are waiting 30+ minutes for the queue to proc IS in fact a barrier to entry to playing the game. Being a mentor, there is a lot of sprouts queuing for extremes and are completely unaware of the party finder even existing. They are that new, and yes.. its unhealthy for the game if they can't progress smoothly. The MSQ is the game's main selling point, and it would suck to see new players stop playing because they can't even progress through it due to being completely unaware of the game's features. DC travel can't remain the way it is right now, and it would really suck if they don't do something about it in Dawntrail. Even I felt like the game was kind of unattractive now being stuck on a DC that wasn't the chosen one for the community. Dead DCs suck, and its super bad for new players.
This issue has trickled down to casual players too. People DC hop just to do roulettes. When people make PFs to try to do the Crystal Tower raids for the first time, which is mandatory content, because the queue times in the Duty Finder were just endless, things are really bad. Unfortunately the only long term fix for this seems to be cross DC duty finder and party finder but that seems like it'd require a massive overhaul of their infrastructure. Considering the process you have to go through to DC travel, I imagine they just do not have the infrastructure setup to relay information seamlessly between DCs. Don't envy them in trying to find a solution here because the obvious one is immensely costly.
"Oh! Hello, Self fulfilling prophecy that happened when alot of players went to the official forums during the sever splits and said all the good raiders went to Aether and all them crazy role players go to Crystal! How's the wife and kids?"
This issue happened in WoW early on and NEVER recovered. Horde racial abilities were so strong in early WoW that people migrated to Horde for the racial abilities. But then everyone who raided were horde so people migrated to horde, not for the racial abilities (because only the top end cared about that) but that's where everyone was. And then years of stigma of Alliance raiding is bad, doesn't exist, and it's impossible to migrate entire guilds to Alliance. Weird how things can snowball like that and it happens before you even noticed. And it's (almost) irreversible. I bet FFXIV could do it, though.
In the modern day it is no longer incompetence in balance, but intentional. Blizzard will flip flop between which race has better PvE and PvP racials to force mass paid transfers to different faction. Guilds genuinely expect you to pay for any services required in order to raid with them, no questions it's become that normalised. People don't have loyalty to servers or factions anymore, just the chasing of top parses and being in the big guilds.
One of the biggest hurdles that would make ff14 cross world and cross server play to be better would be to do something the fighting game community did which is called numpad notation. When it comes to fighting games it's very difficult to understand and link combos and guides but when we all decided to link the numpad on your keyboard to directions it became universally easy to both share information and combos. Now you can just type 214C and no matter where in the world you are people will know what that motion is. To translate what I am trying to get across is that something similar would need to be implemented in FF14, but the biggest issue with that is that how would you make a system that would give all players equal knowledge without using words?
I remember back in shadowbringers even at like 3 am there was so many party finders going on at once, and a duty you wanted always wanted was going to have a party. Now even during prime hours there will just be a few party finders happening for extremes and savages.
As someone on crystal... this is painful. Staring at the PF list in and of itself starts to burn me out going from group to group that only last a few pulls, while *also* not being able to distract myself between with things like the market board or FC chat.
At the beginning of this year I could get parties on primal for high end duties and now a year later it's fucking dead which sucks because I don't want to sit in pf without being able to talk in my fc chat & shit.
This. I fully agree. Its a massive problem to me personally. My main character is on crystal, and i cant homeworld transfer because i have a house and an FC i would loose if i did. I find having to data center travel to play soo annoying i made an alt instead. Traveling back and forth having to constantly queue in and out inbetween is such a pain imo, it would be more barable if you could do it like world hopping from an atheryte but sadly you cant. I still play on my Crystal character, i did all crafter relics there for example in hopes i one day can actually use the character again. But for now, i raid on an alt instead of my main.
yeah it sucks. Me and my FC are on crystal and were trying to make it through the current savage (P9-P12) filling in the last 3 spots with PF and it would take hours just to have the extras die to LC1 for half the lockout. I know its a meme but raiding is dead on crystal. We spent over a month trying to get through P9 with no luck also losing a tank to burnout along the way. We transfered over to aether and cleared that week.
I transfer between Dynamis and Aether all the time. My OG server is Zalera on Crystal. It's really not as big a deal as people make, but I guess if you don't like swapping, then that's on you. I World-hop constantly for the best MB deals. It takes like 30 seconds to DC transfer and then go about my day.
@@reachinghigher4259 it depends on your specs. It does not take me just 30 seconds to DC travel. Logging in and out is taking most of the time, which being pulled out of the game, waiting for it just to log back in i personally find super unsatisfying and immersion breaking. Hopping from one world to another with the aetheryte i find less of a problem. I do that too for marketboards, to another DC i find a waste of time, normally i can make more money then i safe in the same time if i wanted to. Unrelated, it seems like you didnt really watch the video, since its entirely about that its not lust about the travel time ^^ there is plenty of reasons why traveling is a inconvinience and just shouldnt be required to play the game.
Pros: You can go do 99% of msq on these servers when each patch drop so you don’t end up in situation where the supposedly empty place like UT is filled with players.
It's not just the High End stuff EITHER. I'm on Dynamis. If I want to even do *roulettes*, I have to Travel. If I want to do ANYTHING, I have to either Travel or hope someone checks the PF because the way we get ANYTHING done is by posting it on PF and even THAT doesn't work sometimes.
A quick fix for this issue is to just not let you queue content cross DC. Then all the primal people would have to queue on primal, for example. I suppose you *could* do the regional pf, but I'm not sure they would.
DC travel sucks with how it affected PF and group stuff. I spent like maybe 40 hours in P8S prog, with maybe 1-2 hours being **in the actual instance** I am an achievement hunter so I need my island, retainers, etc. and I can’t access a lot on other DCs. Also the strats might objectively suck like JP Levinstrike. But one thing I hate. Is Hunts. I’m on primal. We are such a good hunt community and we had so many issues of people ruining trains and pulling S Ranks because we shouldn’t wait. It’s community content!! People spawn these S ranks and spend HOURS doing so for some and then someone from Aether says they pull because it’s annoying to wait when they are already there??? To be fair a lot of people from other DCs come to Primal because our Norm is 10x better than other DCs. And I know DRS and BA often have people coming to Primal as well cause we have some active communities there Just sucks that I rarely see 20+ PFs in the evening, with 70% of them being Venues. And then Aether has 250+ at the same time. I stick to Primal for my own convince and also not to perpetuate the problem
That's happened in Crystal too where people pull the monsters early and kill it before the remaining people arrive. The hunt leader had to say multiple times to wait before pulling but the guy never listened which led to many people (myself included) leaving empty-handed with some bosses
There are really only two ways to fix this. Restrict DC travel long enough for the low pop DCs to stabilize running content there and encourage character creation and transfers to low pop DCs, or cross DC party finding/duty finding.
Cross DC party/duty finder is the only way. Everyone will just leave the DCs anyways for greener pastures when the locks are released because some datacenters will always be deemed to have a "better skilled" player base than other datacenters will. Fully removing the walls between pf/df is really the only thing that will fix this issue as it will remove the perceived advantage of going to the "good" DC to run duties.
Cultural issues are a big concern. But language barriers are an even bigger one. Half a decade ago World of Warcraft combined the South and North American servers and now there are people who only speak English, Spanish, or Portuguese joining groups of the other language and cannot understand call outs or instructions. It leads to an awful experience as players fail mechanics over and over again until the raid leader has enough sense to put their instructions in Google translate. Luckily FF14 does have language options when making a group, but sometimes people ignore that and it sets everyone up for a bad time. Having a world wide party finder I think is a bit much, but a data center wide one that contains your entire server group is probably as far as they should go. Better to treat multiple servers as instances rather then completely different "things" in all aspects.
I honestly think having a data center wide party finder, and even duty finder would help breathe life into data centers that is all but dead finding content wise. Because of data center travel, Dynamis on the NA servers is a horror stories for queues as people are going to other data centers for better queues.
I've been casually working my way through the MSQ for a couple years now (playing with friends, so our progress has been slow, but enjoyable). Now that I'm getting closer to current content (almost finished with Shadowbringers), I'm a little worried to find out about this problem. Hope it gets fixed before I catch up!
Also here is the other issue. When Dawntrail comes out the player count is going to increase so just logging into your home server will take a minute now imagine everyone trying to go to 1 DC with influx of players...
I play World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and they both do the same thing but in a different way. In World of Warcraft the region wide duty finder is automatic and traveling to other 'servers' is automatic which means you can easily find players to do content with and the system is seamless for most players (i'll address the 'culture' in a bit) which means that the tech behind it does all the heavy lifting and all the player needs to do is logon and play, this is a huge benefit. However the flip side to this is that you don't get to choose what 'shard' you're on and so that can mean that you get 'phased' at inopportune moments (when you're about to harvest a node, but the boundary of the shard exceeds and as you get to the node it disappears because you swap to a different shard) which can be an intense form of frustration, and i've even seen it lately that in the middle of an event that the 'shard' changes and your progress gets reset, this sucks ass. In addition to that we also have the PING issues between the NA shards and the OCE shards (Australia) as there has been a noticeable increase in QQing from NA players that play with OCE players if they get plopped into an OCE shard / instance, and because it's automatic you don't get a choice so the frustration is high. Now the question about 'culture' is a very interesting one because we are matched with OCE / NA / Latin America and it's almost a meme at this point that there are certain servers in LA that are extremely toxic and some high population servers in NA that are also extremely toxic and you'll find that many many people will straight up refuse to play with anyone from those servers, which is the community's way to avoid the culture difference and have an enjoyable time. I don't think that Yoshi-P's concerns about culture are warranted because the community will find a way to filter out the people they don't want to play with, and for everyone else that doesn't care they'll have a ton more people to play with. Perhaps the opt-in system would alleviate this kind of problem because the people that care about it could specify "JP DC only" or "NA DC only" and then only play with people in that region. On the whole however, ping issues aside (which I don't know if it IS actually ping issues or if it's just Blizzard sucking at server management), I don't see any reason they can't enable full world-wide interaction via the DF, the PF or even via a travel system (As an OCE person, I miss playing with people on NA, the old Aether Hunts were just fun) and just make it an opt-in system that you have to select which regions you want to queue for, I would love to play with other regions. I think that the travel system they have would probably be the least problematic ping wise too because they should just 'copy' your character over temporarily so that should only have latency for the ones that are traveling over to the other DC (eg. if I queued in NA, I would get the latency because I am the one connecting to their Queue), so I think that their trepidation in implementing a system is honestly hurting the player base. In addition to that I don't know why they can't similarly implement a system that allows you to get mail or access retainers, but I don't see this as a major issue as you can just use the chocobo saddlebag (which I think still works) or prepare ahead of time, but I do see that it could be a minor inconvenience. I think the system on the whole is more of a benefit to the players than it is a hindrance (even if it does mean that you only have 1 DC out of the region to do PF with) and I think they should expand it more.
GW2 got rid of that problem with the mega server. Basically everyone is in the same shard of zone and if it overflows, another shard is made until it fills an so on an such. Then when a shard becomes underpopulated they offer to switch you with a small bonus to entice you and you end up in a more populated one. I know their engine tech might limit them, but GW2 has the best solution to having population poroblems on servers.
For some it's not just the PF. As a Dynamis player I can attest that even doing a normal raids roulette or alliance raid roulette is either a 30 minutes wait to do it at home or a 4 minute jump to aether and get it done rq. I am starting to get a lot of super-side content I never would have gotten done while waiting on these though, such as my shared fates and beast tribes. To be honest, the last time I remember having queues like this was when I was a one-trick Bard in 2.0, so in a way the queues can be kinda nostalgic, but in a primarily bad way. I play everything and no matter what I queue for, even mentor roulette as a tank or healer (or quickswapping both sometimes) it's like there's not even 3 other people on the DC trying to queue something at all. I think this is an issue that, no question, has to get fixed somehow. Whether that's from adding more incentives to stay home (home DC bonus EXP rewards on roulettes? Or bonus exp on lower pop DCs?) or updating the systems in place to let my DF queue anyone even from crystal, primal, aether, wherever. The only thing I really don't want to see is "queue popped! Now wait a minute and a half while I transfer you for this 30 second guildhest..." which I regrettably feel coming.
I miss peak crystal. I knew so many names and faces in the crafting and hunt scene. But now with how the raiding scene is non-existent after data center travel opened, my FC closed up shop and moved to Aether. Still working through it emotionally tbh.
On the Japanese language thing, if most Hispanic people didn't already speak English in the NA servers I wouldn't be surprised if there were a similar situation where PF would have Spanish and/or Portuguese only parties. Also, I really don't blame the Japanese for doing JP only parties, I'm assuming people who speak English over in JP DCs don't bother with learning Japanese, why would they bother learning English, as far as I know said language is not as widespread as it is in Europe or the Americas or I guess doesn't have the same weight. Also JP has different strats for savage and ultimate encounters last time I checked so there's that too.
Until I actually had someone to play with last year, I didn't realize how big a problem this was. I spent most of my time on Aether, and still do out of hope and habit, and I felt like I lost so much, little as it is. I can't just transfer, I have friends, memories, and FC and houses. Just feels kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't. I don't even look at Crystal's PF anymore, other than to compare how different it is-where high-end duties on Aether significantly outnumber the entirety of my DC's listings. If you love in-game nightclubs, though, you're in for a good(?) time.
I think this is only a major issue rn due to the fact that the game is in a huge lull as we hit the end of an expansion and won’t be as prevalent once dawn trail releases. I also think they need to address the issues with the Duty finder and party finder (and the fact that NA doesn’t use raid finder) first before trying to glob everyone together in one big group.
@@Bongaboi151 There's merely one million active players in Endwalker, of which only 60% own a level 90 character, and 10% of those haven't completed 6.0 MSQ yet... what makes you think it's gonna get any better with Dawntrail x'D
It was already pretty bad at the start of Abyssos raiding and only got worse with Anabaseios. If this is not fixed people will get used to traveling to other DC's and just biting the bullet leaving the ones that want to stay on their homeworld with the same situation.
I fully believe that we'll have region-wide PF at some point in Dawntrail. I don't see them ever not doing that and I've felt that way since DC travel was announced, but for now, the growing pain is here and it's not going to magically go away.
As an EU player I am now I am so glad to be in a NA DC. Goblin is great, ok my ping sucks at times, but on the whole it has been a great experience. I have a separate account on Spriggan.. Sometimes with a wait queue of two hours for a dungeon is crazy!
I remember when Leviathan was the legit place to be when 2.0 dropped. You would have to wait AGES just to get in... Now it's so cold and empty. All my friends don't want to leave Levi but they spend 90% of their time in different datacenters *COUGH AETHER COUGH*. I think they should merge some of the servers within data centers as one, but I know that wouldn't solve the overlaying issue. It would just be nice to see more people outside of HUNT TRAIN GATHERING AT LAKE WORTH
I made an alt on Sagittarius, had the road to 80 buff. Then it went away, but a couple months later it returned. Really made me realize I’m living good with my main on Excalibur.
I suppose the one solution would be to have pf allow for cross datacenter grouping for instanced content... which I suppose is no easy feat. technically, only EX, savage and ultimate really require massive player pool. roulette queue are usually short enough even on a dead data center and the rest requires to be on the right server litterally (like mapping and hunting).
I started playing back in Heavensward, and back then EU only had Chaos DC, but in Stormblood Light was added and you got a free transfer during the early days of the expansion, which I did, although my decision wasn't based on the PF, but rather that I just wanted to meet and play with others that chose to play on the (at the time) new datacenter, also the fact that the transfer was free played in to being a factor for me as well. It sucks that people are leaving Chaos, but if you actually want to play the game with people then you'll have to go where the players are, and as so happens that's Light DC for EU players, but I think that Square Enix / Yoshi-P really need to come up with a solution like for instance X-DC PF's. Something similar happened in WoW too, back in Wrath of the Lich King overnight everybody stopped playing Alliance and moved over to Horde, and suddenly it was practically impossible for Alliance players to clear content.
I'm new to the game and started on Dynamis (I had no idea what I was doing). My friend started on Aether and we both noticed SIGNIFICANTLY how shorter the queue times were on Aether duty finder, and ever since then I've just been a traveler here pretty much since I started the game. I'm not a high end raider or anything (yet ;)) but having to go back to my home world across dc's just to see my retainer's inventory is pretty annoying. Also completely missing out on the free company feature, and while leveling my gatherers I have to completely go back to my home dc just to get the timed location thing. I do hope one day at the very least duty finder is region wide, although as you say that would bring with it all sorts of technical challenges and ping issues. Maybe incentivize party finder on your home dc somehow would help the issue? Who knows. Great video!
This is the most frustrating thing about FF14 as a WoW player. WoW's group finder is leagues ahead of FF14's where I can just join a group regardless of realm.
"I play on Light because Chaos is full with french people and i hate to play with french people." yeah i hear that once why people prefer playing on Light then Chaos
This problem sucks so damn much. I'm from Crystal and I'm so damn sick of DC traveling. I wouldn't ever want it removed because it has allowed me to play with a friend in Aether and get into statics from other DCs, but man I'm so tired. I tried to prog as much of anabaiseios as it was possible in Crystal, and I always try to do my weekly unreals and EX farms there, but lately I have been progging TEA and basically living on Aether and I miss the little hard content linkshell that would teach people P4S or P9S or UWU and now I completely miss out of that because I have to stay on aether fishing for parties that can actually do LC. I would be happy for a way to just browse PF in other regional DCs, worldwide might be nice (specially for the poor people in Materia) but just a way to party up with other DCs in the reion would make me so much happier.
If I didn't have a house, I would 100% have moved to aether already and at this point I still might. I'm holding out for dawntrail and seeing what happens or if cloud server for pf/instance content comes into play maybe
I love the fact I have transfered to Dynamis. It's a nice chill place with plenty of available housing and a warm cozy feel. Boy howdy can you not even do Frontline or Crystal Tower.
I'm really lucky to be a Light native, this would definitely be something I'd consider permanently transferring for, but if you have an FC and a community you're part of on your datacenter it would massively suck to transfer one good thing about this though is that Light already had far better pf before datacenter travel was implemented especially for ultimates thanks to the lpdu community, and back then chaos players didn't have an option other than transferring if they wanted to be a part of the better pf experience. Then as soon as datacenter travel became a thing the fate was already sealed.. Region wide pf is definitely the only solution for this and I have no idea if that's even possible to implement
Ya... region wide party finder is probably the next big party finder update(followed by cross region), Because as much people like to just say "Go to Aether" i dont think thats a good idea during expansion launch period (When the population is usually at its peak) with how bad the login servers can get hammered
Cross region is a horrible, horrible idea. But cross DC duty finder / party finder in the same region really needs to happen. Cross region travel would utterly destroy this game.
DC travel was just a mistake honestly, just a short-sighted solution that caused more issues than it fixed. It's still a mystery why they even added it when looking at world travel and the effects that had clearly showed a system as such would just result in empty servers and one or two populated ones.
This entire problem could've been avoided if SE properly implemented cross-dc play in the first place. The DC-Travel system they gave us is the most half-assed stopgap measure they could've possibly came up with.
I made a twitter thread about this a while back and it showed that Aether had more High end duties over ALL other NA DCs and some people were in agreeance and others didn't even see the issue and said it was a non-issue. I really don't think the average player cares and that really speaks a ton.
Actually only learned from this video that im on a dead data center (Chaos) just never really reflected on why the partyfinder always was so empty, just thought people use duty queue instead.
Currently on crystal DC. I've been trying to pf p9s for about 3 months now, with an average of THREE savage parties a day for that server i finally switched to aether. I got a party and cleared in less than 2 hours. It's ridiculous. We have MORE venues daily than they have savage fights, and its not even a close comparison.
its really a shame how far down it went. I am on Cerberus and some of our fc members moved to Twintania on light simply for party reasons and outside discord there is almost no communication cause half the FC spends hours sitting around on Limsa waiting for a party to fill. Its just draining and am ashamed to admit that i participate in that occasionally
Even just... having some way to send /tells and see partyfinder listings from other datacenters would be better. Then you could actually see that there's a party for the thing you want to run on, e.g. Primal, so you send a tell, "hey i'm transfering to primal for this, save a spot for me" or something. Still annoying but it would be an improvement.
I've been trying to run a new FC on Ragnarok, took it really serious. And the end result when I did find some members was that I logged on to an FC with members who ARE online... they're just all on Light. Because what else is there to do if you're not new to the game, but raiding? The people I know who actively raid, have already gotten THOUSANDS of hours out of the game doing everything it has to offer. The only proper endgame content to do, is raiding. So... these players just move to Light almost permanently if they want to raid, due to the option of data center travel. And while data center travel has MANY positives, some of my friends found actual statics finally, people like us trying to rally others to do things on Chaos are left in the dust. Until Dawntrail at least. I was hoping Tokyo Fanfest would address it in some way, but I'm not hearing anything.
as someone who plays on both eu and us servers I would kill for cross-data-centre play, but i'm not holding my breath. i'll keep grinding both my characters so they match for now... cross-server party finder makes a lot of sense though, hopefully we can get that in the near future :'0
I think people look at this form the wrong way. People didnt move to other servers because of "bad influence of server travel". People moved because server travel was allowed, but the party finder was not updated. I need to use an external site to see where parties are available. I cant see it in game. If Im in aether I dont see parties of Primal... So people were like "you know what, we know aether has the most, we just go there to save the trouble"... and thus people migrate to places. Also, the fact that you cannot see or talk to your FC or linkshells on other servers or you cannot use the FC buffs is crazy... The devs should have made these possible first. People would be less inclined to change servers when they have a nice medium home on a server, and can do majority of the staff cross travel. But since they limited the cross travel things, people just be like "fuck it, too much effort". I understand the need to not allow to reach the retainers, becase it could fuck up market boards, but lets be real, people who want to mess up a server's economy, can damn right do it just about any moment.
As for the US data servers, the not one that’s truly dead is Dynamis. Crystal and Primal might not be as active as Aether, but at least you can get a party for most content (may take a little longer, say 10-15 minutes instead of 5, but it’s doable). Dynamis, however, never took off. I remember MrHappy trying to figure out where the best/worst Party Finder parties could be found for clearing certain content. Dynamis was so dead he couldn’t even get a party together for anything, let alone big raids.
After watching this I am literally DC transferring to Aether because of the lack of PF on Primal. I do my best not to DC travel if I can help it, but when you're doing content that is old enough most people don't' do it but not so old that it is easy with enough people you need that extra pool of people to draw from or your PF will never fill in a million years. Having cross-DC PF would massively alleviate many of these problems, and I'd imagine it would lighten the load on DC travel immensely by relegating it mostly to people traveling for venues or to hang out with friends in other DCs. However, Yoshi-P is right, it's a huge technical challenge. Seeing the cloud data center test though is a promising thing, as it means that DCs can be more virtualized and thus far easier to change between.
I feel like the titling of this is a bit more incendiary than the actual issue you're talking about. You should call the video "FF14 has a Partyfinder problem" It comes down to whether you care about pugging or not. When you say "dead server," I think zero players. But I'm from Louisoix and there are players all around me at all times. With a lovely comfy Static I do content with. I understand you're addicted to the ball-twisting fun of doing Savage and Ultimates... but that's more of a you being an amazing player problem lol Also when you say "dead server" that also causes an Oroboros effect because it scares people into leaving servers they are on. It's like trying to fight a fire with gasoline. 😨
The "under consideration" part of Yoshi-P's statement does make me pause a little, as there is a culture of "Never say 'no', always try and offer something" in Japan. From a technical perspective, different datacenters do live in different server racks, and it's part of why you have to log out to transfer so they don't lose data from doing other things while you wait as your character data/inventory/etc. gets moved between racks instead of just within the same rack, where shorter distances = faster transfers. It doesn't completely rule it out, but would possibly mean some lengthy transfer times onto the instance server of another datacenter as well as difficulty with party chat as you wait. I'm shocked that Chaos is so underpopulated though, being from Light! I remember some of the big raiding groups all crying "Stay on Chaos, it's the raiding DC!" back when it was due to happen (although I did wonder if this was just the run-sellers trying not to split their client base)
Primal: Home of thousands of raiders who clear the recent tier and ultimates. Also Primal: Best I can do is 1 High-End party at peak hours and 20 minute queues
