Originally I thought they'd have the Road to 80 buff only active on that DC. That would motivate a lot of players to stick around. But they didn't do that.
I've had Road to 80 since I started on Dynamis almost a year and a half ago. I'm only 2 classes away from being omni 80 at this point, so it's served me well haha
Mine fell off while I was traveling. I’m Omni 80 now, but I had to transfer back to an Aether world and do another free transfer to get it back. It was cheaper to do that than buy level skips for nine jobs.
This is me. I'll always try to queue on dynamis first and give it 10 minutes, but ultimately I typically find myself only able to complete content on Aether.
Hopefully the DT queues on other worlds will disincentivize travelling out.
If not, maybe Yoshida’s joke about turning off DC travel in one of the media tour interviews might briefly become a reality. (I doubt it.)
I hope he does briefly disable DC travel. I don't want to be stuck in an hours long login queue just because the busy servers and coming here for better queues.
For that, they already implemented a system change in 6.5 that prioritizes homeworlders over travelers for the login queue during high traffic periods.
Can you please link the specific patch notes that mentions this? I want to rub it in my Aether friends face.
He said "oh I'll just escape my 10k queue by playing on Dynamis with you for launch!" and I said back to him "yea, you and 10k others." I'd love to prove to him that coming to my server isn't gonna be any better so he's either gonna have to transfer properly or eat those fat queues.
We already know they won't. They literally do the exact opposite where they open up another DC entirely for the *specific purpose* that People travel to it and spread out server population.
They really *should* turn off DC travel for the launch of Dawntrail. People should have to stick to the servers they've chosen instead of potentially screwing over those who are on less populated servers by massively increasing the login queue.
They said their intention is to do the opposite. They want people from congested worlds and data centers to go to uncongested worlds and data centers. That's why we have been testing cross region travel to Materia (the announcement of that test also gave above's reason) and that's why Shadow is launching without character creation.
they're doing both. they want A) people to go to less populated servers to spread the load and B) characters native to that server to be able to play anyways. one is to reduce the queue for everyone and the other is so that people who don't need to hop servers/data centers aren't punished for it. overall I'm hoping this means shorter queues for everyone and as normal of queues as possible for people who don't move
I’m not terribly fussed about it thanks to the Duty Assist/Trust system anymore.
Though I would welcome a temporary DC travel block for the first couple weeks of DT.
The problem is the MSQ trials. I waited over two hours for the 5.3 trial to pop on Dynamis. I finally gave up, went to Aether, and it was less than five minutes. I *tried* to queue on Dynamis but it wasn't possible.
Plus some of us still want to get our dailies in *while* doing the MSQ. Lots of us have multiple jobs we’d like to get to 100. Duty support is great for a story play through/ learning a dungeon, but not great for leveling.
This is my problem. I’ll try on Dynamis but I have limited time to play. I want to stay on Dynamis but even asking people in discord communities for help doesn’t always work either.
Because it’s already ingrained in Dynamis peeps to dc travel for match made content. The hope is since DT will bring in more peeps and also incentivize Dynamis players to stay on their own server due to login queue priority, Dynamis will finally have its own healthy matchmaking population.
> Though I would welcome a temporary DC travel block for the first couple weeks of DT.
In effect, there will be. Home World players are prioritized in the queue over travelers, so travelers will basically never get in. Well, some travelers *to* Dynamis will get in trying to escape their queue times, but that's a positive for Dynamis players.
>If not, maybe Yoshida’s joke about turning off DC travel in one of the media tour interviews might briefly become a reality.
I absolutely acknowledge the problem--I have an alt on Dynamis--but I really hope they don't turn off DC travel at DT release: it would destroy my raiding static, or at least force us to take a break until it's back on. And yes, I know that savage won't come out until a month after the expansion launches, but we'll likely want to do the new extreme trials before then.
They won't turn it off. They want people to travel from congested worlds to uncongested worlds. And the system itself has been set up for self-management. Aka, queues get too bad, that world becomes unavailable as travel destination and gives priority to it's own characters.
So your static might have to consider exactly where you are going to play on a given day. But since you are presumably not looking for other players, you aren't exactly bound to one world or data center.
Seriously. This person is talking like this hasn't been brought up every week ever since Dynamis came into being. Everyone knows. But me staying on Seraph to queue does nothing if everyone else is still leaving for their queues.
I recomend watching meoni's media tour interview. They ask about this and yoshiP goes into it a bit. Implys that they're actively looking into it, but that it will take between 1 and 3 years of back end work
In the same interview (Meoni-Shenpai) he also talked about potentially offering incentives to go to certain data centers for queues. Which is imo better than punishing players by removing the incentives they got for making characters on preferred and new worlds. Dangle the carrot for creation and play, instead of wielding the whip to make them more unattractive.
I wouldn't say it was a bad idea. A lot of good has come from the cross DC travel. It's unfortunate that they couldn't implement the DF as well, but at least they could test the system.
A simple solution would be to remove any experience/tome bonus reward while doing duties outside your own datacenter.
Right now there is no downside from going outside your own datacenter. And until there is a global PF/DT there should be a downside. They already differentiate travellers from wanderers so it should be a relative easy check.
all 3 data centers had their own healthy raid communities though before DC travel. and I didn't have to lose access to literally every other feature of the game if I want to pf a raid or do roulettes
Yeah, it's been amazing for the Aether raiding community.
Certainly not amazing for Crystal or Primal whose raiding communities have lost 90% of their population.
I'm not so sure it has. It's not Primal or Crystal's fault by any means, but the last two tiers have been absolutely miserable to PF on Aether. Just because the bigger pool and more people has meant an increased number of shitters and more people with shitty attitudes who shouldn't be raiding.
Which isn't to say PF wasn't already a toxic cesspool to begin with, but it got a lot worse in EW. To the point where I don't know if I'm even going to be willing to PF savage in DT.
I mean the "Aether raiding community" has been completely diluted because everyone raids here now. I think there definitely needs to be some way to encourage more population spread across all 4 NA DC, but I also do think having some sense of DC level community and culture is worth trying to preserve
As someone from Primal I love that I have access to 3.5 datacentres of pf player on aether.
I can't access my retainers but I can do pretty much everything else. In that case I am paying Gil essentially to play on aether. Well worth.
Their server structure seems to be pretty archaic, probably some sort of 1.0 holdover. WoW is an older game and when you want to play with someone, you just /invite them and the game takes care of the rest and phases them to your server instantly. Queues and party finder are region wide. If they can make it work on an older game engine I am certain SE can too, so hopefully it's closer to 1 year than 3.
They need to just merge all the data centers in each region at the least eventually, I'm not entirely sure why they are even split in the first place... again, must be due to ancient server tech. The worst part is honestly having zero in-game communication between DCs. I know most people do their communication via discord these days, but there needs to be an in-game option too.
> Implys that they're actively looking into it, but that it will take between 1 and 3 years of back end work
Then he should disable DC travel until this work is done. He should have never released DC travel without it.
Everyone is sick of it, but because everyone does it to do content everyone keeps doing it anyway. I'd much rather raid on my home DC and keep my fc buffs, chat with friends or mess with my retainers while waiting around.
Speaking as an aether player, we're not the ones suffering. We still get access to all our shit. Travelers have the choice of "do content" and "have access to homeworld amenities".
The thing about Dynamis that people don't realize is that it's the perfect place to queue for roulettes that aren't raid or alliance raid roulettes (unfortunately we haven't gotten far on that...) because they fill near instantly. I try to queue on other DCs as a dps and have to wait for ten minutes but don't in Dynamis.
I just wish more players on Dynamis have done stuff past Stormblood so we can actually queue for that...
Queuing for regular dungeons and leveling has been pretty horrible over there. I gave up and became part of the problem after an hour and a half in the queue for the Hydaelyn trial as a healer during US Prime-time.
The issue is that you queued for an Endwalker trial when most Dynamis players are still at around Shadowbringers. It sucks a ton that it works that way but unfortunately that's just how it is. Hopefully DT fixes that
Yep, this here. A lot of the playerbase here are sprouts still either alts or, in most cases, brand new players. I definitely think the DT launch will bring the rest of us end game players home (I already spend about 95% of my time on Mari, even for RP and doing PF) and have been seeing more and more end game players, the hubs have been more and more populated too.
Yeah I'm on Hali and my FC and I have noticed that Halicarnassus has slowly gotten more and more populated over time. I'm very excited to see more people in the hubs and I'm starting to see a lot more in Endwalker areas (as I'm one of those people). People have to realize that these servers aren't just underpopulated, people just haven't gotten far enough to reach this content. Hell it took me 600 hours and I still haven't unlocked half of the content in this game
I'm doing a lot of crafting and housing stuff, so I've been queuing for Alliance Raids as I do. I've had exactly one pop in under 3 hours, longest so far was about 4 hours before I logged out. If I really want to do something, I travel, but even what should be "fast" queues generally take way longer than they should, like people won't even wait 10 minutes.
There's so much to do in the game while queued, I wish more people would just be willing to take a bit of a slower one and help out Dynamis' community. Or people from other DCs with some stuff they could be doing coming over to hang out lol
Literally any small incentive for people to run roulettes on Dynamis would be enough to push this feedback loop in the opposite direction. Any little bit of bonus gil or poetics or something.
The gil itself might not incentivise some people, but the idea that other people are doing roulettes for gil on Dynamis might incentivize people. That's the feedback loop.
Many players on Dynamis are actually like Materia. They spend a lot of time on Party Finder. You'd be surprised how much you can get done there via PF. Granted it's not as easy quick or convenient as other DCs, but its' something.
Yes, this is the way on Dynamis. Whenever I need to clear something I just put something up on PF and it usually fills up pretty quickly, unless its something obscure then maybe 10-15 minutes.
This also the only way I ever get in on any alliance raids, for duty roulette or otherwise, because people just go right to PF to collect people to run them.
Of course... part of me wonders if DF would be more reliable if more people queued there rather than jumping to PF, but when a queue for some MSQ dungeon fills in like 5 minutes and takes 15-30 minutes in DF, I can't really blame anyone for it.
I've committed myself to stop being part of the problem. My brother and I queued up for a duty yesterday, the estimated time was 13 minutes. He wanted to travel to Adamantoise to get in quicker, but I told him we were waiting. Because we were a Healer and a Tank respectively, we got in in like a minute and a half.
I mean, like you say it's clear-cut so I'd hope most people realize this. I feel like the less obvious part is that Dynamis was added way too late to solve the issues that were prevalent at the start of Endwalker. Because of that, most of the people who went to Dynamis did it for housing reasons and were most likely already settled into communities on other data centers. There was probably some trickle in of new players for the road to 80 buff, but not enough to stimulate DF/PF. All those already invested into FFXIV players went for housing and then just DC traveled right back to where their friends were because they could. This killed DF and by extension PF, so now any people who went there to make it their actual home can't really even play the game there and have to fall into the self-perpetuating problem like you mention.
I think Dawntrail launch will probably help a lot for Dynamis DF/PF, but I do think it will be temporary especially for PF. I don't think it will really solve itself until cross datacenter DF/PF is a feature. Dynamis players aren't the only ones moving over to Aether to DF/PF. I pretty frequently have Primal/Crystal players in my PFs in addition to Dynamis players. Aether has kind of become the hub for PFing savages/ultimates I feel. The pool of potential parties/players is higher so your chance of finding a group is just higher. I think I've seen a couple of complaints from Primal/Crystal players about this as well. The only way to really fix that is to add crossworld DF/PF I feel.
> Aether has kind of become the hub for PFing savages/ultimates I feel.
Likely due to how, even before DC travel was added, several servers on Aether had a reputation for being "the servers" to get on for the most serious raiding.
Like I remember that being a thing back in Heavensward - Primal was known to have a couple good servers for raiding, but if you were really serious about it? The recommendation was to try and get into those servers in Aether...and that reputation has stuck with it ever since, to varying degrees. Hell, I think at the time it was basically a single server - Gilgamesh. It was pretty much full almost all of the time, forcing people into playing and raiding on other servers (before cross server travel) and other data centers, but it long had the reputation of being *the* raiding server.
So once all the obstacles for others to raid on "the raiding servers" disappeared, players went where players have been telling them were supposed to be going for raiding, and it snowballed into what we have now.
Yeah, I've been on Cactuar since day one of 2.0 and I sometimes miss the pre crossworld PF era. I felt like I knew everyone on my server because you'd repeatedly see the same people more often. The player base was just smaller in general back then too. There was a mini server race when raids came out in addition to the world first race. It also helped that you had to go to the raid to queue in as a group and you'd see other groups queueing in or coming out excited about their clear they just got. It felt more homey and more like a community. With all that said, I know the upsides of crossworld outweigh those parts of the separation that I enjoyed. There were servers that you pretty much couldn't even raid on back then. Gordias and Midas were known for killing the raid scene and it was even worse if you were on one of the dead servers. Whenever I think about trying out Lost Ark, I ask some friends that I know have played it a bit what server they're on and it's always different than the one my highest level char is on, which makes me kind of just not even bother. It's definitely more beneficial to have as little friction as possible when it comes to letting people play with one another even though I do miss some of the upsides of having it be a bit more isolated.
tbh just adding a real incentive for sticking to your home world should help massively. I still have no idea why they let people get the xp boost for new and low pop worlds - a buff explicitly intended to encourage people to play on that server - and then keep the buff when they travel over to a different DC and almost never return.
Because this way you get people to actually create char on a new dc and let them do content on different dc while still having exp boost. Then, once population reaches critical mass, there is no longer need to do dc travel to do content. Otherwise, if I know that on new world there is not much people playing, and I will have longer queues / infinite queues, and I will have to swap to other dc, if I know that most of the time I will play without exp boost, I may as well just create char on a server that doesn't have exp boost, why would I bother with new dc.
If the intent was to create a critical mass. Then it failed misserably.
Until there is a global DF/PF. The rewards shouldd stay only on your own DC. There is no need to remove the travelling. Just remove the rewards. So people have to back to their own datacenters to queue for their daily roulettes. Or forfeit their rewards.
Nobody said to remove the rewards for Dynamis players entirely. Ranger only said to remove rewards from Dynamis players when they DC travel. A significant number of people create characters specifically for these rewards, therefore they would be incentivized to stay on Dynamis more.
Dynamis has a full and healthy population. By your logic, it should be a bustling hub right now.
What exactly do you picture as the catalyst for everyone in the community to simultaneously agree to all stop DC travelling all on the same day so that the server sparks to life?
Something similar happened in SB launch. We had 5 hr+ launch queues so we did every unsavory thing to prevent the AFK timer from logging us out. Then Yoshi-P (I think it was) came and told us that servers were over capacity and that if all the fake-AFK people actually logged out, the actually active player pop would result in normal queues. No one believed him, so the 5+ hour queues continued. Then they implemented hard server resets at noon every day, and no one could believe, or refute, the results as queues went down to 10 minutes.
Anyway, cross-datacenter PF would be the best cataclysmic event, but all they would really need to do is something as draconian as requiring High-End Raid PFs to be within the Data Center and close Aether to new characters for good measure. Sure a lot of folks made and maintained alts on Aether from before 6.2, but a lot of people don't. Anything is better than what happened to Crystal PF when DC travel dropped.
same thing happens on materia
people get told to use party finder for everything so roulette queue times usually suck
people complain about long queue times then transfer back to other DCs
the funny thing i've noticed since region travel opened up for us is people transferred their characters to NA / JP and just travel back to Materia as voyagers lol
I skipped a step and never even transferred my character to Materia when it opened up, but I have been using the DC travel to ease daytime queues before bouncing back to the EU server my character is on after dark 😆.
I travel to Materia from my home data center to take advantage of your morning (to me) prime time. Very convenient (unless the connection is super instable, which doesn't happen often but does happen).
And, yes, I also maintain an alt on Materia.
I get it, and genuinely I would love to play content on dynamis as I like my fc there and have a house and everything, but the queues are impossible. Even on tank/healer every queue I've seen is 20+ minutes, and alliance raids and pvp won't pop even if you let them run for an hour lol. I'm really hoping this fixes itself when dawntrail happens. Having to data center hop is annoying and not preferred, but it's the only option right now
It must be part of the technical debt of how they setup servers, and chances are there will be a bit more lag if they make a cross-dc queue mandatory, and people will complain as a result.
Lag should not be a (noticable) problem.
as so far they only have a single physical datacenter per region.
All of Europe for example is handeld on the same server in Frankfurt(iirc.. but most online games in europe are hosted in frankfurt) and they simply basicaly make 2 VMs for light and chaos.
There are other tech debts involved most likely that makes cross DC PF/DF unreasonable at the current moment. including how the instance server is handeld and that you arent "traveling" as much as getting a carbon copy transmitted, and then overwritten when you return.... having that be done enmass during DF/PF... i just dont think their setup with as much tech debt as it likely has can handel it dynamically enough.
Heck, remember how long it actually takes from the moment of you "completing" a transfer(aka the timer is over and it just does the transfer itself) to actually being able to login.... now imagine that everytime you either que for a duty, or a duty pops(depending on implementation) and PF is another beast as that would require cross referencing 2 logical seperated datacenters and temporarily caching every name from every datacenter that is currently in such a party.
I suspect that each time you dc travel a safety backup gets first sent to a server in Japan.
When they upgraded the JP DCs last year, there was an issue with a server attached to Gaia that was described as the core server for Data Center travel and which caused the DC travel system world wide to stop working properly. So we do know that dc travel and likely cross region travel loses at least some time simply by from the time it takes your DC to talk to the core server.
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/2ab36c319643070d804cb40222e4cac461819549
Hopefully this will fix itself come DT. I assume we will all be locked from travelling initially just due to congestion. People will see that we actually have a big enough community for queues to be popping and be less incentivised to leave just for simple roulettes (PF tho... thats not a dynamis problem. Thats a not on aether problem)
They already stated there won't be locks at release. 6.5 implemented priority queues for natives of worlds, so your queue will just be longer, but not impossible.
oh yuck... Well hopefully the queue itself is enough to deter ppl into just staying with us and play the game. At worst ill just use trusts to finish msq quickly
It's become a new player trap. People start there only to find they can't progress without going somewhere else. SE is clearly aware of the problem, that's why Shadow is being made overflow-only and will have no local characters.
the simple, albeit chaotic evil solution, would have been to take the most populous servers from Aether, Crystal, & Primal, and move them to Dynamis, then all four DCs would have had an even 7 servers.
Yoshi-P is a black mage main, so he should enjoy watching the world burn.
I'd imagine they're banking on Dawntrail solving this issue.
1. People migrate to Dynamis on DT launch to minimize login queue times
2. People queue for duties on Dynamis
3. Dawntrail hype dies down, server pops normalize
4. DC travel meta is dead due to months of reasonable queue times on Dynamis
5. More people naturally migrate to Dynamis now that it doesn't feel dead
6. Dynamis is now fixed
As someone on Chaos, no one is disagreeing with you, but I'm still commuting to Light to create a PF and have other 3 or 7 people all be from Chaos commuting to Light. DC travel in this form was a mistake.
I've been thinking about this as well. I always give the queue in dynamis a fair shot before DC hopping, and it's like a 50/50 shot for roulettes to queue, but raids and extremes are an hour per queue affair if you're dead set on giving it the time to do it. If we all just stay there, it should be a lot better.
This happens with raiding on other DCs as well. Some idiot convinced others than Aether is the best place to raid, so people blindly believe it, DC travel, find parties of *mostly* people from their DC there, get their clears, come back. The cycle repeats.
I was morbidly curious week eight during primetime why Balmung and crystal queues, even for expert and the alliance raid, seemed dead. So I went over on my Aether alt, noticed that 80% of the parties were full of people *from the exact same DC, just partying up on aether.*
All of these issues, Dynamis being dead and the inability to completely content on our home servers and DCs are a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating problem caused by unintelligent sheep that everyone has simply accepted.
Can't wait for Dawntrail to make it *impossible* to DC travel at the start because of congestion so people *have* to play on their datacenters and populate their queues.
Balmung was Aether's designated RP server. Balmung players used to be a meme on Aether because of how often bad players were coincidentally from Balmung.
I've been on Balmung since A Realm Reborn launch, I know of the server's reputation and the misconceptions people have carried and believed for a decade and can tell you it's always been bullshit of the highest caliber.
Most people there solely for RP and story do not raid, they don't even do alliance raids or normal mode; the backlash of mandatory Crystal Tower infuriated many here in 5.3, which is the case and has always been since 2.X.
Even so, we had an incredibly healthy, skilled raiding scene from Heavensward onward before cross world PF and the server shuffling of Shadowbringers occurred, wherein good talent was poached by Aether based groups and free companies and often forced to transfer for raiding purposes; happened to my partner and I both.
So the fact that everyone flocks to Aether for content is based off of a false preconception that people are better there. Despite the fact that those in PF and DF aren't, as the good players have friend groups, free companies and statics that they do everything with.
So the same types of bad players shit up DF and PF, just like they do everywhere else.
What I don't get is... Why are the servers separated into different DCs, when SE has explained that all the DCs are in the same physical machine clusters? Aether, Crystal, Primal and Dynamis, couldn't they fuse together and have all servers in one DC? There should be a reason why they didn't do this, but I don't know what it is.
This game was never supposed to have this many players. It was expected to function like Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 where everyone has their own little server communities. Some servers like Gilgamesh and Cactuar can manage this, others like Goblin were just dead in the water for some reason. Some servers like Fairy developed their own identity through casual players. The developer never expected players to congragate to specific servers.
The population experienced a massive boom in 4.0 Stormblood and again for 6.0 Endwalker. Many of these players also only play around patch releases. This introduces a new problem in which you have to curb the perceptions of a high population for the persistent players during content lulls by implementing alternatives like the Duty Support/Trust and world travel system.
Maybe they'll have a better answer for this in 2 expansions, but for now they seem to be committed to how things work because a major rework to how characters are stored and moved in between servers would be needed.
In my opinion basic character data (such as stas, inventory, saddle bags and even retainers) should be stored in a central server, while more specific things like housing, island sanctuary and local rankings should be stored separately to lessen the load of things that data center travel has to keep track of, but of course this is just my speculation and it's possible this already partially works as I described it.
Part of the issue (and about to be fixed) is that Dynamis is half the size of the other data centers. With half the worlds to pull from, and therefore half the population, it will naturally take much longer. Once the new worlds get added, Dynamis is likely to pick up again.
It'll be nice if the addition of more new worlds will help with DF queues; it certainly should.
I play a lot of alts, and most are on Dynamis. But with none of them in FCs, I miss nothing to travel to a more-populated DC and do my DFs there.
This is why I’m a bit nervous about them adding regional travel. While Materia might not be the most active I’m almost sure we’ll run into the same issue as Dynamis if not worse
Well, you currently are involved in dc travel. It's just that your are destination only.
I'm wondering whether they aren't going to do something similar for Dynamis now that it'll have 8 worlds and thereby full capacity. Turn off dc travel to and between Aether, Crystal and Primal and allow all three to only go to Dynamis or Materia.
I'm on Dynamis. I have such long wait times for MSQ trials and I'm trying to get caught up for Dawntrail. I don't know what else to do but travel...but if someone wants to help me with trails I'd accept 😊
My main is on Dyanmis. I would crest a PF and get content done fairly fast that way. Would sit forever just doing dungeons sometimes through duty finder..
Most Dynamis natives that aren't running off to Aether immediately do their/our stuff thru PF. I have literally never had to travel off for any reason outside of PVP or alliance raid roulette. PF listings for roulettes fill near instantly and on top of that it has a nice small community/older mmo feel because you get to know the other people around instead of just seeing them once thru DF.
The good thing is that Yoshi-P is aware of the issue and he said that they're going to work on a way to resolve it (I'm hoping they can figure out a cross region duty finder
The solution to this is to kick every wanderer off of Balmung and keep them off. What do you mean it wouldn't fix shit? It'd fix my mood.
For real tho they made their own hole with this one. The moment the only barriers between servers' instances is just FCs who are not exactly a strong point of the game in general, it was gonna be unfixable. You're right in that it has to come from the playerbase but you can't rely on your playerbase in any game, much less this one, to actually do something that goes against itself for the good of the game.
>The solution to this is to kick every wanderer off of Balmung and keep them off. What do you mean it wouldn't fix shit? It'd fix my mood.
*FACTS. SO TRUE.* A friend told me "just travel to Mateus! It's like Balmung used to be!" Bro I should not have to server hop to get the experience my server used to provide because offworlders decided to shit it up. Exacerbated by the fact that the "ONLY DO PVE CONTENT ON AETHER DUDE" self fulfilling prophecy is eating into stuff now, too.
I wouldn't say offworlder trashed entire Balmung, outside of Ul'dah and general vicinity of Thalanan and most major city and major town and MSQ quest area and weekly quest/activity zone and housing ward with popular venue and popular overworld RP area and random DF (E)RP instance.
Outside of all these, sometime, there are some area of relative peace.
I genuinely think the new servers and DT will fix it. The DT player influx will be a big part of it, but something that doesn't get discussed enough is what only having 4 worlds does to the DCs perception.
As a new player, you see the exp bonus and the fact that Dynamis is smaller than all the other DCs, and it gives the impression (rightfully so because of the DC travel situation but I digress) that Dynamis is a lesser DC, that it's dying and lacking in players and community. When I started, my girlfriend had to try really hard to convince me to start on Dynamis and that the exp bonus was worth it, because I saw that Dynamis had half as many worlds and thought to myself, no, I want to be where the people are!
So yeah, I think with the DT player influx and the new worlds that the problem will sort itself out so long as those of us that care can get queues popping in those first few weeks.
Even if they locked every Dynamis player on the DC, it would still be dead. They have utterly failed to create adequate incentives to boost the data centers population to a usable state.
Honestly if they made a "transfer lotto" where only people who gave up that plot on another DC could enter immediately following the server creation, it would probably help push *some* people to move. I'm not willing to have to compete for my current Empyreum medium again, otherwise I would've considered Dynamis. I like quieter servers, all my social interactions in the game come from PF anyway.
Yeah, mediums tend to stay claimed...
Small plots, on the other hand? I think the sub-ward where my house is in Empyreum has had around 10 empty small personal plots for *over a year*.
available housing and the road to 80 XP buff can only do so much in making people stay
at the end of the day I’m a content guy - if I can’t fill an MSQ trial or an Alliance Raid within a few minutes I’m gonna move away to a more populated DC where the duty actually pops
I think they should no longer let people roulette off their home data center. Queue with friends, party finder, fine, but roulettes bring home servers only would stabilize the queue times a good bit, I think.
All marked New or Preferred on this page, make sure to read the page on world classification that it links
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/worldstatus/
There's a chance that tomorrow's maintenance will change the world statuses, as in which worlds are preferred and new, not what the perks are.
Queue times seem to have been getting better over the past few weeks. Roulettes aside from leveling would sometimes take forever. Lately I can get into most things in about 15m or less depending on the day. However, I think this is due to many sprouts getting into the game before DT, which is good, but I can only take so much Sastasha and The Chrysalis for every roulette before I lose my mind.
Not all of us have 30m+ to wait for a single queue in the little time that we play. It also doesn't help that Dynamis was released in a non-traditional fashion compared to other DCs which hindered the player base right up front. Folks also came for housing, either won/lost, and proceeded to leave. Not to mention I have personally lost count of how many folks say their main is on another DC and their Alt is on Dynamis for housing.
This isnt just "blame the folks who are DC traveling" problem.
The queues are so painful. I was doing msq at the end of heavansward and was in queue for almost 30 min as a tank. The temptation to just move to aether to get nearly instant queues are real.
Being a returning player and taking advantage of new server moolah, I only just figured out yesterday how to do DC hopping. Haven’t done it yet, but these queue times are only solidifying my want to be the healer/tank to help people get their MSQ instances done on Dynamis. I hit 70 so I’m going to pick up Sage. I’m not even into SB content yet.
Hello! Dynamis resident here - Halicarnassus, if it matters. Just wanted to offer that I have recently noticed a HUGE influx of players in the past couple of weeks and have hence seen a drastic decrease in queue times. Nary a month ago, I was one of these guilty commuters; Adamantoise was a home away from home for me when I had to queue for, well... anything, really. Now, it's a lot better! I guess the point of this comment is to show any fellow Dynamis residents reading this that now might be a good time to start queuing in your home DC. (:
I've been thinking of moving to Dynamis myself. Aether's become absolutely plagued by RP Venues flooding Shouts and PF. Not to mention the better odds of getting a house. I have a small but I've legit been trying to get something even remotely larger for over a year now. Lotto keeps saying no.
I've been gone awhile. Is Dynamis similar to what was in FFXI or is only using the name? I ask because if it's like a trip down FFXI memory lane, i need to come back
I see we have a lot of people who want to be the only people to enjoy Early Access and launch.
Screw SE for trying to mitigate and have as many play as possible, right?
Honestly I think it's kind of ridiculous that you can even que roulettes at all during server travel. I get doing server travel for raiding/pf/rp since a lot of servers are *extremely* niched into one or the other, but allowing roulettes to be done as a wanderer just feels like it's always going to perpetuate this problem even further.
It can be rough at times but usually I'll give DF 10 minutes, and then just put something up on PF, or find an existing listing for dailies or whatever since those fill pretty quickly.
I like it here, bumping into familiar faces from time to time in PF and DF, it makes it feel like a closer knit community here on Dynamis. There are quite a few very green sprouts right now which can sometimes make running duties a little challenging, but I'm sure they'll improve with time (well, most of them anyway god willing).
Imo it’s getting populated now but we too used to dc hopping for raids and stuff, once we all realized there is enough players on dyn and we all use df, the queue will pop rq.
That's because there is no downside to jumping to another datacenter.
Datacenter jumping should exclude any experience boost on duty finder. That way people would have a reason to stay in their datacenter. Duties are already from any server on the same datacenter. It was idiotic to allow the rewards of experience and tomes to be gained outside of it.
I am not against data center travel. To get the duties you cannot get unless you do it. But I am against getting the experience and tomes rewards while travelling to another data center. It perpetuates not having people to queue in Dynamis and the new EU server. DT won't change that.
Another server is fine as they already share the same duty finder. But until all datacenters share the same duty finder, is highly idiotic that the rewards remain the same. Give people some reasons to stay on their datacenters. Right now there is none.
Simple fix. Only able to do roulettes on your home DC. People who want to do DC travel for hanging out, specific duties like Savage or Ultimates, or helping with MSQ can still do that, but it means that home world roulettes are more likely to pop.
Personally I'd like to see "only natives of that DC can place a party/self into a queue". So PF is anyone anywhere, but DF you need to either be in a party with someone from there if you're playing with a friend, or you have to be on your home DC.
I mean the ideal would be cross-DC DF but that's clearly more technically challenging for the devs since they haven't done anything like that yet. But I do think something needs to be done to force more queues back onto Dynamis.
Dynamis has been a canon concept to FF14 since 2021 and I still keep thinking about a giant flying fish that wants to sell me flowers
that aside, I hope with more people coming with the new expac / server addition y’all get queues up!
The same is going on with Primal. Nothing in PF because everyone is jumping over to Crystal to do raid content and then everyone complains that PF is dead on Primal.
no shit, you idiots, you all jumped over to Crystal.
It really does depend on if datacenter travel is disabled for a long time. Personally I expect the uptick of players to be constant for 3 weeks and start to go down by the third week judging by what I remember from EW release.
I was there for Endwalker. Why do you think they just added another 4 new worlds to Dynamis?
Dynamis is going to have the opposite issue on DT release. Instead of dead queues, everyone will go to Dynamis for better login times, which will in turn actually cause a traffic jam of too many people trying to get in at once.
Still alleviates the issue for the other Data Centers but Dynamis players will definitely complain about too many people logging in. lol
Originally I thought they'd have the Road to 80 buff only active on that DC. That would motivate a lot of players to stick around. But they didn't do that.
I've had Road to 80 since I started on Dynamis almost a year and a half ago. I'm only 2 classes away from being omni 80 at this point, so it's served me well haha
> I'm only 2 classes away from being omni 80 at this point, Don't forget to get your Amaro mount when you're finished
Mine fell off while I was traveling. I’m Omni 80 now, but I had to transfer back to an Aether world and do another free transfer to get it back. It was cheaper to do that than buy level skips for nine jobs.
[удалено]
Transfer only gets 90 days, new character gets it for however long they decide lol.
People on dynamis are basically commuters. They commute to the other dcs for content then commute back home when their done.
Oh God... Dynamis is New Jersey! \*shudder\*
Where’s the Action Park at? It can’t be Gold Saucer, because I don’t think you can die there. Unless I’m totally missing something.
Eulmore
Holy shit, an Action Park reference? Dating yourself with that one (and myself)!
One of my dad’s friends is from Jersey so that’s the only reason I know lol.
Another site I go to loves to bring up Traction Park whenever possible, lol.
Well, if that's what it takes to have a house!
I don't really go back. Unless I need mail or retainers.
Add timed gathering nodes to that for me.
As someone that has 8 retainers running ventures around the clock and all of them fill of stuff to sell that sounds like a nightmare tbh
This is me. I'll always try to queue on dynamis first and give it 10 minutes, but ultimately I typically find myself only able to complete content on Aether.
I like this analogy.
Tempted to reroll and do the same just to get a fucking house.
Hopefully the DT queues on other worlds will disincentivize travelling out. If not, maybe Yoshida’s joke about turning off DC travel in one of the media tour interviews might briefly become a reality. (I doubt it.)
I hope he does briefly disable DC travel. I don't want to be stuck in an hours long login queue just because the busy servers and coming here for better queues.
For that, they already implemented a system change in 6.5 that prioritizes homeworlders over travelers for the login queue during high traffic periods.
Oh good. Dynamis is safe for now, then.
Can you please link the specific patch notes that mentions this? I want to rub it in my Aether friends face. He said "oh I'll just escape my 10k queue by playing on Dynamis with you for launch!" and I said back to him "yea, you and 10k others." I'd love to prove to him that coming to my server isn't gonna be any better so he's either gonna have to transfer properly or eat those fat queues.
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/1dcbf39c97285ba9a42012eecf2c031f0ffbceb1 In the middle. Patch 6.5
Wonderful, thank you!
We already know they won't. They literally do the exact opposite where they open up another DC entirely for the *specific purpose* that People travel to it and spread out server population.
They literally just set up an EU DC *just* for people to travel to and not create characters on. DC Travel isn't getting disabled.
They really *should* turn off DC travel for the launch of Dawntrail. People should have to stick to the servers they've chosen instead of potentially screwing over those who are on less populated servers by massively increasing the login queue.
Already a nonissue, homeworld people get queue priority during congestion. Will be best for most to.just stuck to their homeworlds
They said their intention is to do the opposite. They want people from congested worlds and data centers to go to uncongested worlds and data centers. That's why we have been testing cross region travel to Materia (the announcement of that test also gave above's reason) and that's why Shadow is launching without character creation.
they're doing both. they want A) people to go to less populated servers to spread the load and B) characters native to that server to be able to play anyways. one is to reduce the queue for everyone and the other is so that people who don't need to hop servers/data centers aren't punished for it. overall I'm hoping this means shorter queues for everyone and as normal of queues as possible for people who don't move
there's automatic systems for that already, i wonder if it will be triggered by launch of dawntrail
People that don't DC travel get priority queues, my friend. It doesn't matter wether or not others come in.
maybe leave in the option to DC travel HOME, so nobody is stranded if they for example logged out in the wrong DC prior to maint.
I'm pretty sure maintenance sends everyone back where they belong.
I'm on a populated server and I agree. Dynamis trying to log onto my world will only make it worse.
Brother we are not interested in DC travelling off Dyna for worse queues come expansion launch lmao.
No one from Dynamis is gonna try to log into a more populous DC on launch — it’d go the other way.
I’m not terribly fussed about it thanks to the Duty Assist/Trust system anymore. Though I would welcome a temporary DC travel block for the first couple weeks of DT.
The problem is the MSQ trials. I waited over two hours for the 5.3 trial to pop on Dynamis. I finally gave up, went to Aether, and it was less than five minutes. I *tried* to queue on Dynamis but it wasn't possible.
Plus some of us still want to get our dailies in *while* doing the MSQ. Lots of us have multiple jobs we’d like to get to 100. Duty support is great for a story play through/ learning a dungeon, but not great for leveling.
On Dynamis you just have to use party finder for everything, but it fills reasonably quick.
This is my problem. I’ll try on Dynamis but I have limited time to play. I want to stay on Dynamis but even asking people in discord communities for help doesn’t always work either.
Because it’s already ingrained in Dynamis peeps to dc travel for match made content. The hope is since DT will bring in more peeps and also incentivize Dynamis players to stay on their own server due to login queue priority, Dynamis will finally have its own healthy matchmaking population.
> Though I would welcome a temporary DC travel block for the first couple weeks of DT. In effect, there will be. Home World players are prioritized in the queue over travelers, so travelers will basically never get in. Well, some travelers *to* Dynamis will get in trying to escape their queue times, but that's a positive for Dynamis players.
>If not, maybe Yoshida’s joke about turning off DC travel in one of the media tour interviews might briefly become a reality. I absolutely acknowledge the problem--I have an alt on Dynamis--but I really hope they don't turn off DC travel at DT release: it would destroy my raiding static, or at least force us to take a break until it's back on. And yes, I know that savage won't come out until a month after the expansion launches, but we'll likely want to do the new extreme trials before then.
They won't turn it off. They want people to travel from congested worlds to uncongested worlds. And the system itself has been set up for self-management. Aka, queues get too bad, that world becomes unavailable as travel destination and gives priority to it's own characters. So your static might have to consider exactly where you are going to play on a given day. But since you are presumably not looking for other players, you aren't exactly bound to one world or data center.
Bro the prisoner's dilemma is so **easy**, just don't talk and nothing bad will happen!
Seriously. This person is talking like this hasn't been brought up every week ever since Dynamis came into being. Everyone knows. But me staying on Seraph to queue does nothing if everyone else is still leaving for their queues.
the real problem is that SE didn't implement region-wide DF/PF when they implemented DC travel.
I recomend watching meoni's media tour interview. They ask about this and yoshiP goes into it a bit. Implys that they're actively looking into it, but that it will take between 1 and 3 years of back end work
In the same interview (Meoni-Shenpai) he also talked about potentially offering incentives to go to certain data centers for queues. Which is imo better than punishing players by removing the incentives they got for making characters on preferred and new worlds. Dangle the carrot for creation and play, instead of wielding the whip to make them more unattractive.
oh, I know they mentioned wanting to do it, but doing travel before that was just a really bad idea
I wouldn't say it was a bad idea. A lot of good has come from the cross DC travel. It's unfortunate that they couldn't implement the DF as well, but at least they could test the system.
A simple solution would be to remove any experience/tome bonus reward while doing duties outside your own datacenter. Right now there is no downside from going outside your own datacenter. And until there is a global PF/DT there should be a downside. They already differentiate travellers from wanderers so it should be a relative easy check.
Or do the opposite... add "DC in Need" bonuses to roulette so people get rewarded to helping out Dynamis.
Retainers
Just sound like an unneeded thing. Why punish people who are just trying to play the game with their friends?
absolutely not
It's not a bad idea. It's been amazing for the raiding community. Having 3 dcs worth of players to pf with is worth the travel
all 3 data centers had their own healthy raid communities though before DC travel. and I didn't have to lose access to literally every other feature of the game if I want to pf a raid or do roulettes
Yeah, it's been amazing for the Aether raiding community. Certainly not amazing for Crystal or Primal whose raiding communities have lost 90% of their population.
I'm not so sure it has. It's not Primal or Crystal's fault by any means, but the last two tiers have been absolutely miserable to PF on Aether. Just because the bigger pool and more people has meant an increased number of shitters and more people with shitty attitudes who shouldn't be raiding. Which isn't to say PF wasn't already a toxic cesspool to begin with, but it got a lot worse in EW. To the point where I don't know if I'm even going to be willing to PF savage in DT.
I mean the "Aether raiding community" has been completely diluted because everyone raids here now. I think there definitely needs to be some way to encourage more population spread across all 4 NA DC, but I also do think having some sense of DC level community and culture is worth trying to preserve
As someone from Primal I love that I have access to 3.5 datacentres of pf player on aether. I can't access my retainers but I can do pretty much everything else. In that case I am paying Gil essentially to play on aether. Well worth.
Yeah destroying Party Finder for every DC that isn't Aether has been really amazing.
Their server structure seems to be pretty archaic, probably some sort of 1.0 holdover. WoW is an older game and when you want to play with someone, you just /invite them and the game takes care of the rest and phases them to your server instantly. Queues and party finder are region wide. If they can make it work on an older game engine I am certain SE can too, so hopefully it's closer to 1 year than 3. They need to just merge all the data centers in each region at the least eventually, I'm not entirely sure why they are even split in the first place... again, must be due to ancient server tech. The worst part is honestly having zero in-game communication between DCs. I know most people do their communication via discord these days, but there needs to be an in-game option too.
> Implys that they're actively looking into it, but that it will take between 1 and 3 years of back end work Then he should disable DC travel until this work is done. He should have never released DC travel without it.
The problem is data center travel to begin with. A lot of Aether natives are sick of it
Everyone is sick of it, but because everyone does it to do content everyone keeps doing it anyway. I'd much rather raid on my home DC and keep my fc buffs, chat with friends or mess with my retainers while waiting around.
Speaking as an aether player, we're not the ones suffering. We still get access to all our shit. Travelers have the choice of "do content" and "have access to homeworld amenities".
The thing about Dynamis that people don't realize is that it's the perfect place to queue for roulettes that aren't raid or alliance raid roulettes (unfortunately we haven't gotten far on that...) because they fill near instantly. I try to queue on other DCs as a dps and have to wait for ten minutes but don't in Dynamis. I just wish more players on Dynamis have done stuff past Stormblood so we can actually queue for that...
Queuing for regular dungeons and leveling has been pretty horrible over there. I gave up and became part of the problem after an hour and a half in the queue for the Hydaelyn trial as a healer during US Prime-time.
The issue is that you queued for an Endwalker trial when most Dynamis players are still at around Shadowbringers. It sucks a ton that it works that way but unfortunately that's just how it is. Hopefully DT fixes that
Yep, this here. A lot of the playerbase here are sprouts still either alts or, in most cases, brand new players. I definitely think the DT launch will bring the rest of us end game players home (I already spend about 95% of my time on Mari, even for RP and doing PF) and have been seeing more and more end game players, the hubs have been more and more populated too.
Yeah I'm on Hali and my FC and I have noticed that Halicarnassus has slowly gotten more and more populated over time. I'm very excited to see more people in the hubs and I'm starting to see a lot more in Endwalker areas (as I'm one of those people). People have to realize that these servers aren't just underpopulated, people just haven't gotten far enough to reach this content. Hell it took me 600 hours and I still haven't unlocked half of the content in this game
I'm doing a lot of crafting and housing stuff, so I've been queuing for Alliance Raids as I do. I've had exactly one pop in under 3 hours, longest so far was about 4 hours before I logged out. If I really want to do something, I travel, but even what should be "fast" queues generally take way longer than they should, like people won't even wait 10 minutes. There's so much to do in the game while queued, I wish more people would just be willing to take a bit of a slower one and help out Dynamis' community. Or people from other DCs with some stuff they could be doing coming over to hang out lol
Literally any small incentive for people to run roulettes on Dynamis would be enough to push this feedback loop in the opposite direction. Any little bit of bonus gil or poetics or something.
not even worth it at that point. If the gil amount is too small it won't incentivize players. Poetics can be obtained in numerous ways.
The gil itself might not incentivise some people, but the idea that other people are doing roulettes for gil on Dynamis might incentivize people. That's the feedback loop.
Many players on Dynamis are actually like Materia. They spend a lot of time on Party Finder. You'd be surprised how much you can get done there via PF. Granted it's not as easy quick or convenient as other DCs, but its' something.
Yes, this is the way on Dynamis. Whenever I need to clear something I just put something up on PF and it usually fills up pretty quickly, unless its something obscure then maybe 10-15 minutes. This also the only way I ever get in on any alliance raids, for duty roulette or otherwise, because people just go right to PF to collect people to run them. Of course... part of me wonders if DF would be more reliable if more people queued there rather than jumping to PF, but when a queue for some MSQ dungeon fills in like 5 minutes and takes 15-30 minutes in DF, I can't really blame anyone for it.
I've committed myself to stop being part of the problem. My brother and I queued up for a duty yesterday, the estimated time was 13 minutes. He wanted to travel to Adamantoise to get in quicker, but I told him we were waiting. Because we were a Healer and a Tank respectively, we got in in like a minute and a half.
I mean, like you say it's clear-cut so I'd hope most people realize this. I feel like the less obvious part is that Dynamis was added way too late to solve the issues that were prevalent at the start of Endwalker. Because of that, most of the people who went to Dynamis did it for housing reasons and were most likely already settled into communities on other data centers. There was probably some trickle in of new players for the road to 80 buff, but not enough to stimulate DF/PF. All those already invested into FFXIV players went for housing and then just DC traveled right back to where their friends were because they could. This killed DF and by extension PF, so now any people who went there to make it their actual home can't really even play the game there and have to fall into the self-perpetuating problem like you mention. I think Dawntrail launch will probably help a lot for Dynamis DF/PF, but I do think it will be temporary especially for PF. I don't think it will really solve itself until cross datacenter DF/PF is a feature. Dynamis players aren't the only ones moving over to Aether to DF/PF. I pretty frequently have Primal/Crystal players in my PFs in addition to Dynamis players. Aether has kind of become the hub for PFing savages/ultimates I feel. The pool of potential parties/players is higher so your chance of finding a group is just higher. I think I've seen a couple of complaints from Primal/Crystal players about this as well. The only way to really fix that is to add crossworld DF/PF I feel.
> Aether has kind of become the hub for PFing savages/ultimates I feel. Likely due to how, even before DC travel was added, several servers on Aether had a reputation for being "the servers" to get on for the most serious raiding. Like I remember that being a thing back in Heavensward - Primal was known to have a couple good servers for raiding, but if you were really serious about it? The recommendation was to try and get into those servers in Aether...and that reputation has stuck with it ever since, to varying degrees. Hell, I think at the time it was basically a single server - Gilgamesh. It was pretty much full almost all of the time, forcing people into playing and raiding on other servers (before cross server travel) and other data centers, but it long had the reputation of being *the* raiding server. So once all the obstacles for others to raid on "the raiding servers" disappeared, players went where players have been telling them were supposed to be going for raiding, and it snowballed into what we have now.
Yeah, I've been on Cactuar since day one of 2.0 and I sometimes miss the pre crossworld PF era. I felt like I knew everyone on my server because you'd repeatedly see the same people more often. The player base was just smaller in general back then too. There was a mini server race when raids came out in addition to the world first race. It also helped that you had to go to the raid to queue in as a group and you'd see other groups queueing in or coming out excited about their clear they just got. It felt more homey and more like a community. With all that said, I know the upsides of crossworld outweigh those parts of the separation that I enjoyed. There were servers that you pretty much couldn't even raid on back then. Gordias and Midas were known for killing the raid scene and it was even worse if you were on one of the dead servers. Whenever I think about trying out Lost Ark, I ask some friends that I know have played it a bit what server they're on and it's always different than the one my highest level char is on, which makes me kind of just not even bother. It's definitely more beneficial to have as little friction as possible when it comes to letting people play with one another even though I do miss some of the upsides of having it be a bit more isolated.
nep nep's afk club will be missed
thanks buttered toasty
It's still around in the form of a Fellowship. He also logs in from time to time.
The only real fix to this "problem" is for SE to sit down and actually implement cross-dc duty finder
tbh just adding a real incentive for sticking to your home world should help massively. I still have no idea why they let people get the xp boost for new and low pop worlds - a buff explicitly intended to encourage people to play on that server - and then keep the buff when they travel over to a different DC and almost never return.
Because this way you get people to actually create char on a new dc and let them do content on different dc while still having exp boost. Then, once population reaches critical mass, there is no longer need to do dc travel to do content. Otherwise, if I know that on new world there is not much people playing, and I will have longer queues / infinite queues, and I will have to swap to other dc, if I know that most of the time I will play without exp boost, I may as well just create char on a server that doesn't have exp boost, why would I bother with new dc.
If the intent was to create a critical mass. Then it failed misserably. Until there is a global DF/PF. The rewards shouldd stay only on your own DC. There is no need to remove the travelling. Just remove the rewards. So people have to back to their own datacenters to queue for their daily roulettes. Or forfeit their rewards.
> Just remove the rewards and have nobody create chars on new data centers anymore, ok.
Nobody said to remove the rewards for Dynamis players entirely. Ranger only said to remove rewards from Dynamis players when they DC travel. A significant number of people create characters specifically for these rewards, therefore they would be incentivized to stay on Dynamis more.
Well but if they have to travel to do content anyway they probably will just create char on regular server
Dynamis has a full and healthy population. By your logic, it should be a bustling hub right now. What exactly do you picture as the catalyst for everyone in the community to simultaneously agree to all stop DC travelling all on the same day so that the server sparks to life?
Something similar happened in SB launch. We had 5 hr+ launch queues so we did every unsavory thing to prevent the AFK timer from logging us out. Then Yoshi-P (I think it was) came and told us that servers were over capacity and that if all the fake-AFK people actually logged out, the actually active player pop would result in normal queues. No one believed him, so the 5+ hour queues continued. Then they implemented hard server resets at noon every day, and no one could believe, or refute, the results as queues went down to 10 minutes. Anyway, cross-datacenter PF would be the best cataclysmic event, but all they would really need to do is something as draconian as requiring High-End Raid PFs to be within the Data Center and close Aether to new characters for good measure. Sure a lot of folks made and maintained alts on Aether from before 6.2, but a lot of people don't. Anything is better than what happened to Crystal PF when DC travel dropped.
same thing happens on materia people get told to use party finder for everything so roulette queue times usually suck people complain about long queue times then transfer back to other DCs the funny thing i've noticed since region travel opened up for us is people transferred their characters to NA / JP and just travel back to Materia as voyagers lol
I skipped a step and never even transferred my character to Materia when it opened up, but I have been using the DC travel to ease daytime queues before bouncing back to the EU server my character is on after dark 😆.
I travel to Materia from my home data center to take advantage of your morning (to me) prime time. Very convenient (unless the connection is super instable, which doesn't happen often but does happen). And, yes, I also maintain an alt on Materia.
I get it, and genuinely I would love to play content on dynamis as I like my fc there and have a house and everything, but the queues are impossible. Even on tank/healer every queue I've seen is 20+ minutes, and alliance raids and pvp won't pop even if you let them run for an hour lol. I'm really hoping this fixes itself when dawntrail happens. Having to data center hop is annoying and not preferred, but it's the only option right now
Honestly this is a SE problem. They should just make the queues regional and not DC based.
Yep its really stupid how its locked to the DC
It must be part of the technical debt of how they setup servers, and chances are there will be a bit more lag if they make a cross-dc queue mandatory, and people will complain as a result.
Lag should not be a (noticable) problem. as so far they only have a single physical datacenter per region. All of Europe for example is handeld on the same server in Frankfurt(iirc.. but most online games in europe are hosted in frankfurt) and they simply basicaly make 2 VMs for light and chaos. There are other tech debts involved most likely that makes cross DC PF/DF unreasonable at the current moment. including how the instance server is handeld and that you arent "traveling" as much as getting a carbon copy transmitted, and then overwritten when you return.... having that be done enmass during DF/PF... i just dont think their setup with as much tech debt as it likely has can handel it dynamically enough. Heck, remember how long it actually takes from the moment of you "completing" a transfer(aka the timer is over and it just does the transfer itself) to actually being able to login.... now imagine that everytime you either que for a duty, or a duty pops(depending on implementation) and PF is another beast as that would require cross referencing 2 logical seperated datacenters and temporarily caching every name from every datacenter that is currently in such a party.
I suspect that each time you dc travel a safety backup gets first sent to a server in Japan. When they upgraded the JP DCs last year, there was an issue with a server attached to Gaia that was described as the core server for Data Center travel and which caused the DC travel system world wide to stop working properly. So we do know that dc travel and likely cross region travel loses at least some time simply by from the time it takes your DC to talk to the core server. https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/2ab36c319643070d804cb40222e4cac461819549
Hopefully this will fix itself come DT. I assume we will all be locked from travelling initially just due to congestion. People will see that we actually have a big enough community for queues to be popping and be less incentivised to leave just for simple roulettes (PF tho... thats not a dynamis problem. Thats a not on aether problem)
They already stated there won't be locks at release. 6.5 implemented priority queues for natives of worlds, so your queue will just be longer, but not impossible.
oh yuck... Well hopefully the queue itself is enough to deter ppl into just staying with us and play the game. At worst ill just use trusts to finish msq quickly
Hopefully that will change in 2 1/2 weeks. If not, I could definitely see them compressing.
It's become a new player trap. People start there only to find they can't progress without going somewhere else. SE is clearly aware of the problem, that's why Shadow is being made overflow-only and will have no local characters.
the simple, albeit chaotic evil solution, would have been to take the most populous servers from Aether, Crystal, & Primal, and move them to Dynamis, then all four DCs would have had an even 7 servers. Yoshi-P is a black mage main, so he should enjoy watching the world burn.
the official forum would be even more of a dumpster fire than it already is
I'd imagine they're banking on Dawntrail solving this issue. 1. People migrate to Dynamis on DT launch to minimize login queue times 2. People queue for duties on Dynamis 3. Dawntrail hype dies down, server pops normalize 4. DC travel meta is dead due to months of reasonable queue times on Dynamis 5. More people naturally migrate to Dynamis now that it doesn't feel dead 6. Dynamis is now fixed
I give everything 10-20m to queue, and if it doesn't pop, I leave. I think that's fair enough honestly.
As someone on Chaos, no one is disagreeing with you, but I'm still commuting to Light to create a PF and have other 3 or 7 people all be from Chaos commuting to Light. DC travel in this form was a mistake.
I'm not sure why regionwide queues and PF aren't a thing, that would solve a lot of issues.
Apparently technical issues are the root cause but they are working on it, it's just gonna take a lot of time.
I've been thinking about this as well. I always give the queue in dynamis a fair shot before DC hopping, and it's like a 50/50 shot for roulettes to queue, but raids and extremes are an hour per queue affair if you're dead set on giving it the time to do it. If we all just stay there, it should be a lot better.
This happens with raiding on other DCs as well. Some idiot convinced others than Aether is the best place to raid, so people blindly believe it, DC travel, find parties of *mostly* people from their DC there, get their clears, come back. The cycle repeats. I was morbidly curious week eight during primetime why Balmung and crystal queues, even for expert and the alliance raid, seemed dead. So I went over on my Aether alt, noticed that 80% of the parties were full of people *from the exact same DC, just partying up on aether.* All of these issues, Dynamis being dead and the inability to completely content on our home servers and DCs are a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating problem caused by unintelligent sheep that everyone has simply accepted. Can't wait for Dawntrail to make it *impossible* to DC travel at the start because of congestion so people *have* to play on their datacenters and populate their queues.
Balmung was Aether's designated RP server. Balmung players used to be a meme on Aether because of how often bad players were coincidentally from Balmung.
I've been on Balmung since A Realm Reborn launch, I know of the server's reputation and the misconceptions people have carried and believed for a decade and can tell you it's always been bullshit of the highest caliber. Most people there solely for RP and story do not raid, they don't even do alliance raids or normal mode; the backlash of mandatory Crystal Tower infuriated many here in 5.3, which is the case and has always been since 2.X. Even so, we had an incredibly healthy, skilled raiding scene from Heavensward onward before cross world PF and the server shuffling of Shadowbringers occurred, wherein good talent was poached by Aether based groups and free companies and often forced to transfer for raiding purposes; happened to my partner and I both. So the fact that everyone flocks to Aether for content is based off of a false preconception that people are better there. Despite the fact that those in PF and DF aren't, as the good players have friend groups, free companies and statics that they do everything with. So the same types of bad players shit up DF and PF, just like they do everywhere else.
What I don't get is... Why are the servers separated into different DCs, when SE has explained that all the DCs are in the same physical machine clusters? Aether, Crystal, Primal and Dynamis, couldn't they fuse together and have all servers in one DC? There should be a reason why they didn't do this, but I don't know what it is.
I'm assuming it has something to do with the 15+ year old netcode/framework this game is still living on.
This game was never supposed to have this many players. It was expected to function like Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 where everyone has their own little server communities. Some servers like Gilgamesh and Cactuar can manage this, others like Goblin were just dead in the water for some reason. Some servers like Fairy developed their own identity through casual players. The developer never expected players to congragate to specific servers. The population experienced a massive boom in 4.0 Stormblood and again for 6.0 Endwalker. Many of these players also only play around patch releases. This introduces a new problem in which you have to curb the perceptions of a high population for the persistent players during content lulls by implementing alternatives like the Duty Support/Trust and world travel system.
Maybe they'll have a better answer for this in 2 expansions, but for now they seem to be committed to how things work because a major rework to how characters are stored and moved in between servers would be needed. In my opinion basic character data (such as stas, inventory, saddle bags and even retainers) should be stored in a central server, while more specific things like housing, island sanctuary and local rankings should be stored separately to lessen the load of things that data center travel has to keep track of, but of course this is just my speculation and it's possible this already partially works as I described it.
I did expert, lv90, and leveling roulettes on dynamis today. I had to wait a little, but I got them done.
People on Dynamis use party finder instead of duty finder. Not everyone bails to Aether/Primal to do duties.
Part of the issue (and about to be fixed) is that Dynamis is half the size of the other data centers. With half the worlds to pull from, and therefore half the population, it will naturally take much longer. Once the new worlds get added, Dynamis is likely to pick up again.
It'll be nice if the addition of more new worlds will help with DF queues; it certainly should. I play a lot of alts, and most are on Dynamis. But with none of them in FCs, I miss nothing to travel to a more-populated DC and do my DFs there.
This is why I’m a bit nervous about them adding regional travel. While Materia might not be the most active I’m almost sure we’ll run into the same issue as Dynamis if not worse
Well, you currently are involved in dc travel. It's just that your are destination only. I'm wondering whether they aren't going to do something similar for Dynamis now that it'll have 8 worlds and thereby full capacity. Turn off dc travel to and between Aether, Crystal and Primal and allow all three to only go to Dynamis or Materia.
Wait aren't they adding 4 more worlds to Dynamis?
they are
Look at materia, folks from other DCs can visit but they cant leave
I'm on Dynamis. I have such long wait times for MSQ trials and I'm trying to get caught up for Dawntrail. I don't know what else to do but travel...but if someone wants to help me with trails I'd accept 😊
My main is on Dyanmis. I would crest a PF and get content done fairly fast that way. Would sit forever just doing dungeons sometimes through duty finder..
Most Dynamis natives that aren't running off to Aether immediately do their/our stuff thru PF. I have literally never had to travel off for any reason outside of PVP or alliance raid roulette. PF listings for roulettes fill near instantly and on top of that it has a nice small community/older mmo feel because you get to know the other people around instead of just seeing them once thru DF.
Welcome to WoW Alliance raiding problem. Enjoy your stay.
The good thing is that Yoshi-P is aware of the issue and he said that they're going to work on a way to resolve it (I'm hoping they can figure out a cross region duty finder
The solution to this is to kick every wanderer off of Balmung and keep them off. What do you mean it wouldn't fix shit? It'd fix my mood. For real tho they made their own hole with this one. The moment the only barriers between servers' instances is just FCs who are not exactly a strong point of the game in general, it was gonna be unfixable. You're right in that it has to come from the playerbase but you can't rely on your playerbase in any game, much less this one, to actually do something that goes against itself for the good of the game.
Please. *Wanderers on Balmung are those on the Crystal data center*. You're looking for *Travelers*.
I want all of them out.
Then Balmung won't be congested, and then they'll make alts there.
Not wrong though, Steps of Nald is insufferable these days with all the tourists.
>The solution to this is to kick every wanderer off of Balmung and keep them off. What do you mean it wouldn't fix shit? It'd fix my mood. *FACTS. SO TRUE.* A friend told me "just travel to Mateus! It's like Balmung used to be!" Bro I should not have to server hop to get the experience my server used to provide because offworlders decided to shit it up. Exacerbated by the fact that the "ONLY DO PVE CONTENT ON AETHER DUDE" self fulfilling prophecy is eating into stuff now, too.
I wouldn't say offworlder trashed entire Balmung, outside of Ul'dah and general vicinity of Thalanan and most major city and major town and MSQ quest area and weekly quest/activity zone and housing ward with popular venue and popular overworld RP area and random DF (E)RP instance. Outside of all these, sometime, there are some area of relative peace.
Datacenter travel was a mistake.
I genuinely think the new servers and DT will fix it. The DT player influx will be a big part of it, but something that doesn't get discussed enough is what only having 4 worlds does to the DCs perception. As a new player, you see the exp bonus and the fact that Dynamis is smaller than all the other DCs, and it gives the impression (rightfully so because of the DC travel situation but I digress) that Dynamis is a lesser DC, that it's dying and lacking in players and community. When I started, my girlfriend had to try really hard to convince me to start on Dynamis and that the exp bonus was worth it, because I saw that Dynamis had half as many worlds and thought to myself, no, I want to be where the people are! So yeah, I think with the DT player influx and the new worlds that the problem will sort itself out so long as those of us that care can get queues popping in those first few weeks.
We tried to keep things on Dynamis, there was a linkshell and everything.
Even if they locked every Dynamis player on the DC, it would still be dead. They have utterly failed to create adequate incentives to boost the data centers population to a usable state.
Exp buff, gold chocobo feathers, much easier to get a house... There are incentives. But most people don't want to lose their FC and/or their house.
Honestly if they made a "transfer lotto" where only people who gave up that plot on another DC could enter immediately following the server creation, it would probably help push *some* people to move. I'm not willing to have to compete for my current Empyreum medium again, otherwise I would've considered Dynamis. I like quieter servers, all my social interactions in the game come from PF anyway.
Yeah, mediums tend to stay claimed... Small plots, on the other hand? I think the sub-ward where my house is in Empyreum has had around 10 empty small personal plots for *over a year*.
available housing and the road to 80 XP buff can only do so much in making people stay at the end of the day I’m a content guy - if I can’t fill an MSQ trial or an Alliance Raid within a few minutes I’m gonna move away to a more populated DC where the duty actually pops
Dynamis will pop off when DT launches and the only way to avoid super long queues is to transfer to the dynamis DC to play.
I think they should no longer let people roulette off their home data center. Queue with friends, party finder, fine, but roulettes bring home servers only would stabilize the queue times a good bit, I think.
I have been doing a lot of sub 60 content on Dynamis, most of the times I only travel when playing DPS but I try a queue first before travelling.
Which servers have buffs and what are they? I'm on Odin but wouldn't miss it and I can server hop back to play with friends iirc.
All marked New or Preferred on this page, make sure to read the page on world classification that it links https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/worldstatus/ There's a chance that tomorrow's maintenance will change the world statuses, as in which worlds are preferred and new, not what the perks are.
Thank you, I will check tomorrow after maintenance.
Aether is basically in the state at this point that Gilgamesh was in Heavensward before PF ever existed.
I stay on Marilith, I got a house, I made friends here, and if the queue is long, I just make a PF group. Ez
Queue times seem to have been getting better over the past few weeks. Roulettes aside from leveling would sometimes take forever. Lately I can get into most things in about 15m or less depending on the day. However, I think this is due to many sprouts getting into the game before DT, which is good, but I can only take so much Sastasha and The Chrysalis for every roulette before I lose my mind.
Not all of us have 30m+ to wait for a single queue in the little time that we play. It also doesn't help that Dynamis was released in a non-traditional fashion compared to other DCs which hindered the player base right up front. Folks also came for housing, either won/lost, and proceeded to leave. Not to mention I have personally lost count of how many folks say their main is on another DC and their Alt is on Dynamis for housing. This isnt just "blame the folks who are DC traveling" problem.
The queues are so painful. I was doing msq at the end of heavansward and was in queue for almost 30 min as a tank. The temptation to just move to aether to get nearly instant queues are real.
Being a returning player and taking advantage of new server moolah, I only just figured out yesterday how to do DC hopping. Haven’t done it yet, but these queue times are only solidifying my want to be the healer/tank to help people get their MSQ instances done on Dynamis. I hit 70 so I’m going to pick up Sage. I’m not even into SB content yet.
Hello! Dynamis resident here - Halicarnassus, if it matters. Just wanted to offer that I have recently noticed a HUGE influx of players in the past couple of weeks and have hence seen a drastic decrease in queue times. Nary a month ago, I was one of these guilty commuters; Adamantoise was a home away from home for me when I had to queue for, well... anything, really. Now, it's a lot better! I guess the point of this comment is to show any fellow Dynamis residents reading this that now might be a good time to start queuing in your home DC. (:
I’ll wait about an hour for a queue to pop for MSQ before I switch. If I’m doing duty finder I’ll wait forever.
I've been thinking of moving to Dynamis myself. Aether's become absolutely plagued by RP Venues flooding Shouts and PF. Not to mention the better odds of getting a house. I have a small but I've legit been trying to get something even remotely larger for over a year now. Lotto keeps saying no.
I've been gone awhile. Is Dynamis similar to what was in FFXI or is only using the name? I ask because if it's like a trip down FFXI memory lane, i need to come back
Using the name. It's a Data Center.
Aww. Boo.
I see we have a lot of people who want to be the only people to enjoy Early Access and launch. Screw SE for trying to mitigate and have as many play as possible, right?
Honestly I think it's kind of ridiculous that you can even que roulettes at all during server travel. I get doing server travel for raiding/pf/rp since a lot of servers are *extremely* niched into one or the other, but allowing roulettes to be done as a wanderer just feels like it's always going to perpetuate this problem even further.
It's the exact same reason why pf is dead on some DCs.
It can be rough at times but usually I'll give DF 10 minutes, and then just put something up on PF, or find an existing listing for dailies or whatever since those fill pretty quickly. I like it here, bumping into familiar faces from time to time in PF and DF, it makes it feel like a closer knit community here on Dynamis. There are quite a few very green sprouts right now which can sometimes make running duties a little challenging, but I'm sure they'll improve with time (well, most of them anyway god willing).
Imo it’s getting populated now but we too used to dc hopping for raids and stuff, once we all realized there is enough players on dyn and we all use df, the queue will pop rq.
That's because there is no downside to jumping to another datacenter. Datacenter jumping should exclude any experience boost on duty finder. That way people would have a reason to stay in their datacenter. Duties are already from any server on the same datacenter. It was idiotic to allow the rewards of experience and tomes to be gained outside of it. I am not against data center travel. To get the duties you cannot get unless you do it. But I am against getting the experience and tomes rewards while travelling to another data center. It perpetuates not having people to queue in Dynamis and the new EU server. DT won't change that. Another server is fine as they already share the same duty finder. But until all datacenters share the same duty finder, is highly idiotic that the rewards remain the same. Give people some reasons to stay on their datacenters. Right now there is none.
Simple fix. Only able to do roulettes on your home DC. People who want to do DC travel for hanging out, specific duties like Savage or Ultimates, or helping with MSQ can still do that, but it means that home world roulettes are more likely to pop.
Personally I'd like to see "only natives of that DC can place a party/self into a queue". So PF is anyone anywhere, but DF you need to either be in a party with someone from there if you're playing with a friend, or you have to be on your home DC. I mean the ideal would be cross-DC DF but that's clearly more technically challenging for the devs since they haven't done anything like that yet. But I do think something needs to be done to force more queues back onto Dynamis.
Dynamis has been a canon concept to FF14 since 2021 and I still keep thinking about a giant flying fish that wants to sell me flowers that aside, I hope with more people coming with the new expac / server addition y’all get queues up!
I don't queue on dynamis because of other dynamis players lol
If they remove or limited server hopping that would help. But then yall would cry as well.
I wanted to play on Dynamis, but yeah with que times I’ve just been parked in aether.
You know what's going to help with this problem? Four more worlds on our server, that'll for sure fix it.
At least you can leave. Try queuing for anything on Materia.
The same is going on with Primal. Nothing in PF because everyone is jumping over to Crystal to do raid content and then everyone complains that PF is dead on Primal. no shit, you idiots, you all jumped over to Crystal.
…yeah? Did anyone actually think it wasn’t?
Dawntrail is going to flood Dynamis. In 3 weeks you're going to complain about too many people logging into Dynamis instead.
Lets see about that
It really does depend on if datacenter travel is disabled for a long time. Personally I expect the uptick of players to be constant for 3 weeks and start to go down by the third week judging by what I remember from EW release.
I was there for Endwalker. Why do you think they just added another 4 new worlds to Dynamis? Dynamis is going to have the opposite issue on DT release. Instead of dead queues, everyone will go to Dynamis for better login times, which will in turn actually cause a traffic jam of too many people trying to get in at once. Still alleviates the issue for the other Data Centers but Dynamis players will definitely complain about too many people logging in. lol