FFXIV – Cross-Region Data Center Travel Test Coming Soon



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49 thoughts on “FFXIV – Cross-Region Data Center Travel Test Coming Soon”

  1. Considering the current state of PF on multiple servers, forgive me if I'm very sceptical about this being implemented fully without some form of restriction/incentive to have people stay on their home DC.

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  2. OCE player here, and I'm super excited. Join our '11 is a long queue to log in' worlds, and fill out our exploration zones and Zurvan cities. The entire idea that OCE is the overflow DC and gets players if the others are at capacity is great, we really need the player count boost to retain players physically located in the region, and genuinely the longest log in queue I've ever seen was low 30s, it took a couple of minutes, so even if ping makes raiding here unpleasant for non locals, there's a lot to be said of OCE for people who want to get into new msq as fast as possible.
    Lots of skepticism in my FC though, some people saying nobody from other DCs will play here because of lag and just come to decimate the market board, and others worried about harassment.

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  3. As an oce dc resident it will feel really bad if people come over and force their way of playing the game on us oce players as we have built our own culture here and really dont want that to go away

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  4. I don't think cross region PF is the next step or if it is I hope cross region duty finder comes along with it. I just want a cross region duty finder so people who are only doing roulettes or stuff you can just queue into with the duty finder no longer need to DC travel.

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  5. To be fair to OCE, they have gone through their growing pains with conflicting social norms and it eventually evened out. Hopefully the same could be said of this test by opening it up to everyone who wants to try it.

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  6. People keep saying this, about the cross-DC PF, and on a conceptual level, it would be NICE.

    …the thing is, a technical level, it doesn't yet work, and I'm not sure why more people don't realize this. You have Datacenters. Your character's data resides on a Datacenter. This is why you have to go out of the game to change DC unlike world travel within a DC, which you can do from a capital city Aetherite. Your character data is transferred from one physical DC (servers with hard drives) to the destination DC (different set of servers with hard drives) like you sending a file to a friend on E-Mail or Discord or something (moving, not copying). Which is why you can't log in while transferring and have to wait for the transfer to complete before you can log into the character. You're waiting for the data to be irl uploaded from one DC to the other DC.

    Now, where are instance servers?

    On the Datacenter! (That is, there isn't one grand instance server everything connects to; it's an instance server per DC).

    This is why you can go into DF or PF, join other people on the DC, and then zone into an instance together.

    …but it's also why you can't join an instance with people from another DC. Because you aren't on that DC, your character data resides on your DC, not the target DC, and so your character cannot be zone transferred to the instance server of that DC. Not unless you transfer your character data to that DC first.

    Think of it like there are several cruise ships at sea side by side. You can hop on a rowboat to swap between cruise ships. When you're on a cruise ship, you can walk to the ballroom and dance with other people on that cruise ship. But you can't walk across the water to another cruise ship to dance in its ballroom. You have to get on your rowboat and cross the water to the other cruise ship first before you can join people on the dance floor there.

    What you're asking for is one massive ballroom that somehow is on a platform resting on the top of all the cruise ships so you can all walk up to it and dance together without having to use your rowboat to go to one of the other ships first.

    …probably not my best example ever, but maybe it gets the general point across.

    NOW, if they ever get the DCs to allow your character to dynamically transfer to Cloud DCs (if they're linked to all the DCs somehow so that your character data resides in the Cloud instead), then it might be possible to have a Cloud-wide PF. Or, outright, a Cloud-wide instance "server" (virtual, maybe…) that all characters can be zoned into from any DC. Something that somehow shares character data with the home DCs maybe. And it might be possible for characters to dynamically be zoned into it. But I'm not sure the technical issues there.

    Anyway, long story short:

    Cross-DC PF is actually far more difficult than it initially seems since character data doesn't float between DCs, it resides on only one at a time, and the instance servers are per DC and connected to specific DCs. This is a physical reality thing – the physical server racks are there together and connected to each other with high speed data transfer capable cables and such. So it's not so much they're lazy about it as it is that this is a physically and technically complicated thing to do.

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  7. We all know the concern is with JP DCs. I think they should enable all non-JP physical DCs to visit each other but not JP. For JP, I'll leave it up to SE to decide where they can go. That would fix the concern for most players.

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  8. I mean if its meant to be a stress test then directing all players to one data center to start is better then having it spread out too much no? Plus since the test will be from march 24 to 7.0 mainetenance maybe if the initial stress test goes well they'll open up the travel completely throughout the period.

    As for participating, maybe briefly some time after it starts? I didn't really do the cloud testing either other than making a character.

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  9. I wish the "less populated" rule was retroactively applied to current DC travel. (Or at least make it cost gil or something to travel to a more populated DC.) The current situation is bad for all DCs (including Mana and Aether.) Cross-DC PF would be just a band-aid on the actual issue.

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  10. It's neat, but it's not a big deal.
    Like most people already play on the same server/data center as their friends do, this feature is only for a very nisch audience.
    Personally I don't have any interest in visiting OCE, that'll just cause a massive ping issues.

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  11. I actually don't agree that it's the most extreme example, in fact, the OCE Data Centre is an amalgamation of US and JP DCs (it was rough initially having both come crashing together, but it didn't take long to get better).

    Region wide travel is long overdue, the fact that I can't play with friends in other regions without creating a new character and going through literally 300 hours of story is unacceptable especially given the cost and the lack of content they provide. I love Final Fantasy XIV, but I can't justify $20AUD a month for the service they provide 🙁

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  12. In terms of the cultural clash concern, I think that's part of why they chose us in Materia for this. Before Materia was created, OCE players were spread pretty evenly between the other DCs. We went through the clash before and are all pretty familiar with the different region cultures as a result.

    That said, I am concerned that the sheer number of people visiting might overwhelm the numbers of experienced players with that cultural understanding over here. It'll probably be chaos for a week or 2, but I'd imagine it would die down after that.

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  13. I'm in Australia. I've been playing 14 since before the OCE DC opened up. I'm also a co-manager of an FC that has maxed subs on Adamantoise. I absolutely was not interested in moving when Materia opened up.

    If this can let me play DT Materia without having to move then I'm all for it. Honestly I'd like the option to travel to there even after the release for the better ping, but I digress.

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  14. I'm tempted to try this when it comes out just to watch the absolute shitshow that's gonna happen when 4 entirely different regions all clash in one DC. It's already hilarious to watch Aether, Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis interacting with each other. Now just mix in all the EU, JP, and OCE peeps into the pot!

    This'll be good!

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  15. While this will be crucial for server congestion, I kinda hope they will have some limitations for PF so people don't all go to the same DC per region… Lag is already a factor, but maybe they could keep public PF locked to your home Region, while still keeping private parties for travelers, something like that…

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  16. The cultural difference is real. I played FF11 as a kid and early teenager back in the day. The Japanese players do not care for NA/EU players. Nothing has changed. Maybe 1 in 10 will even acknowledge western players let alone interact.

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  17. I hope this experiment turns out to be a success or at least gives out mostly favorable results between the communities. As someone who is an NA player but resides in the EU servers (I have my reasons), I'd love for this to become a full fledged thing so I can finally visit long lost NA friends that I had before I moved from NA to EU (which was about, give or take, about 5 years ago). I played on NA from 2014 to 2019 & played on EU from 2019 to present, so it would be nice to catch up with people whom I played with that are still around. That & to have good queue times for the times that I sometimes play off hours for EU, but likely prime time for NA.

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