Worldwide Data Center sounds wonderful and fun initially, but there are a few reasons why we might want some other things in order first!
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:40 How Party Finder Groups Differ Between Regions
02:03 Small Data Centers in Different Regions
03:17 Queueing for Extremes
03:51 Communication Differences Between Regions
05:03 Mutual Respect and Queueing for Hard Content
05:58 Latency Between Regions
07:06 “King” or “Hub” Data Centers
11:26 Fun Fact
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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?
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
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
I am…. honestly highly against the idea of region data center travels after seeing the effects of normal DC travels. Personally if you want to play with groups in another region you should make an alt or move the char over. EU and NA I think might be able to play nice in particular but I just can not see a world where JP and other data center with huge language AND cultural barriers would be able to not butt heads constantly. That is not to say its impossible to get over the differences but the chances I think are slim while if SE did unleash region wide travel it would also be EXTREMELY hard for them to close it again without angering many people.
As for the already existing issues, for an NA players I have sparsely visited the DC's and Aether is the raiding center but everytime I visit aether 80% of the PF's are just ultimate raiding at varying stages waiting to be filled. The rest are the other hodge podge of high end content. Primal is known as the PVP data center now as well causing anyone who wants rival wings at the moment to usually flock to primal. Dynamis is dead, I see far to many of them on other servers playing to know they are well off. Lastly Crystal is….. not really know for anything. Balmung quicksands is the closest I can think but thats just one area.
My personal want is region wide party finder but even then depending on how its implemented I am not sure it would fix it, definitely not immediately either. The best solution I can think is not only region wide party finder but also bonuses for staying on your home world for content especially for roulettes and such as opposed to hopping instead as if they don't do region wide duty finder as well then Dynamis players will still struggle to find queue's at all. Personally I wish they would remove all rou bonus, savage drops, ex drops, ect if you are from that world to be possible but I know that is a bit extreme and wouldn't happen.
It's a hard issue but good to see people still talking about it and hoping SE remedies this soon. (also the old PVP FL days were awful, there was also a "premade team" era after and slightly still to this day but SE even hopped on them to help the issue a lot.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Genuinely never thought about visiting another DC for Party Finder reasons. That feels obvious in hindsight though…
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I queue into extremes blind and win
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.
because the other regions don't really want to play with Americans, thats why
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
a region party finder would fix all my problems rn,
disagree
let people have choice. maybe some poeple want to use eu/jp strats from NA and vice versa
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.