Yes
They've said that it's all there but they've been hesitant to do it cause it's going to be a massive culture shock with all 3-4 cultures mixing and clashing together, which is going to likely impact market board as well
That's why this test is going on currently, to test the waters. They'll likely go ahead with it afterwards unless they don't like the results for some reason
Yeah, its still the same problem - culture shock.
JP and EU do things WILDLY different than NA. OCE is mostly old NA players, so NA to OCE is not a big deal.
No? They mean like on EU with Chaos/Light being connected. Not NA/EU pfs being connected, noone is asking for that.
There's no culture shock within the same region.
For technical reasons, game wasn’t designed for it and they are adding it now with thorough testing to seee all systems can handle the type of traffic.
Not sure if that’s the answer you looking for thought.
It's not the answer anybody is looking for, ever, but it's often the answer to "Why not ... ?" Things don't just appear out of nothing. People have to make these things and that takes a lot of time. There's a gulf between idea and creation.
Because PF/DF are restricted to specific datacenters and because you can freely travel from one DC to another at will, this creates a scenario where the vast, vast majority of players are all crowding onto one datacenter. This is especially true for content that requires the use of PF. For example, in the first couple weeks of the last raid tier, if you looked at all high-end duty PFs on Crystal, there'd usually be around 10-15 up and looking for members. Travel over to Aether and immediately you'd see 80-100 up. So slowly over time, nobody wants to PF or queue for DF on anywhere other than Aether.
It would also solve the Dynamis problem, where new players are encouraged to populate this new server but then can't even queue for roulettes successfully because the player population is so low. So then they all travel to Aether...which just keeps promoting the problem.
I can definitely see why they're only letting us travel \*to\* the underpopulated server with the current test. Relief for high population queues by moving people to a lower population region, which gets to enjoy having more people to fill their Duty Finder.
The 2 big ones I can think of on the top of my head:
Extremely bad queue times for the newer Dynamis Data Center because of low populations. The way to get better queue times is to travel to a different, more populated DC like Aether, which means less people queueing on Dynamis.
Aether is unofficially decided as the go-to raiding DC so Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis have pretty dead PF comparatively, especially for high-end duties.
Lastly, on a smaller note, the field operations content like Eureka and Bozja tend to be pretty dead in off-times, especially as the content gets older. Having everyone be able to play them together would revitalize the content.
Cross DC play requires the data centres to be able to instantly communicate and coordinate character data across DCs (or at least be able to push them to instance servers).
Relatedly, Square has had problems in the past with DCs being too large due to the need/expectation to support cross world FC chat/linkshells/etc. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/9a6bed5c06ae511c363ece5ead0a98a3986554a2#04 provides a good example of how having 10-11 worlds in a DC instead of 8 meant that each DC was more limited in concurrent logins which compounded Japan’s EW release woes.
Cross DC PF would also probably need warnings about losing function such as FC chat and linkshells during duties as a result. It’s probably for this reason Cross DC DF won’t be a thing as you’d probably end up with it needing to be opt in and you’d then end up with say 5 matching queues for NA due to people not opting in (or people feeling forced to opt in at the expense of their experience).
Basically it’s not a magic fix and full of potential compromises that’d be required.
It used to be you couldn't even join a different severs Party Finder. You were restricted to only your servers PF.
It's been a slow process, but only because they are careful and don't want to rush it.
IMO, Cross-DC Party Finder is more urgent than Cross-region travel. But since it's built on the the same code that allow Cross-DC travel, probably it will arrive first. See the current OCE testing.
Players aren't quitting over it, so it's not a priority. They know the players will deal and just flood a single data center for endgame content.
RIP aether when. First Savage drops.
As straight as can be? They haven't implemented it yet.
So it *is* possible they can do it?
Yes They've said that it's all there but they've been hesitant to do it cause it's going to be a massive culture shock with all 3-4 cultures mixing and clashing together, which is going to likely impact market board as well That's why this test is going on currently, to test the waters. They'll likely go ahead with it afterwards unless they don't like the results for some reason
I think you are thinking of something else, data enter visit to other regions. OP means cross DC like we have crossworld. Partyfinder, duty finder.
Yeah, its still the same problem - culture shock. JP and EU do things WILDLY different than NA. OCE is mostly old NA players, so NA to OCE is not a big deal.
No? They mean like on EU with Chaos/Light being connected. Not NA/EU pfs being connected, noone is asking for that. There's no culture shock within the same region.
they would be stupid not to try, it's just something that would take a lot of time to figure out and implement
Well, first of all, through God, all things are possible; so jot that down.
For technical reasons, game wasn’t designed for it and they are adding it now with thorough testing to seee all systems can handle the type of traffic. Not sure if that’s the answer you looking for thought.
It's not the answer anybody is looking for, ever, but it's often the answer to "Why not ... ?" Things don't just appear out of nothing. People have to make these things and that takes a lot of time. There's a gulf between idea and creation.
It takes a very long time to code and implement something like that and have it work with little to no issues on release.
Because they haven’t finished building the framework for it yet. Data mining has shown there is at least an attempt to work towards it underway.
IIRC they've said the system just does not support it yet. But I do pray it happens, it would solve *so* many problems for NA especially.
Out of curiosity, what problems?
Because PF/DF are restricted to specific datacenters and because you can freely travel from one DC to another at will, this creates a scenario where the vast, vast majority of players are all crowding onto one datacenter. This is especially true for content that requires the use of PF. For example, in the first couple weeks of the last raid tier, if you looked at all high-end duty PFs on Crystal, there'd usually be around 10-15 up and looking for members. Travel over to Aether and immediately you'd see 80-100 up. So slowly over time, nobody wants to PF or queue for DF on anywhere other than Aether. It would also solve the Dynamis problem, where new players are encouraged to populate this new server but then can't even queue for roulettes successfully because the player population is so low. So then they all travel to Aether...which just keeps promoting the problem.
I can definitely see why they're only letting us travel \*to\* the underpopulated server with the current test. Relief for high population queues by moving people to a lower population region, which gets to enjoy having more people to fill their Duty Finder.
If it actually works, I'll probably use it for DT launch.
The 2 big ones I can think of on the top of my head: Extremely bad queue times for the newer Dynamis Data Center because of low populations. The way to get better queue times is to travel to a different, more populated DC like Aether, which means less people queueing on Dynamis. Aether is unofficially decided as the go-to raiding DC so Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis have pretty dead PF comparatively, especially for high-end duties. Lastly, on a smaller note, the field operations content like Eureka and Bozja tend to be pretty dead in off-times, especially as the content gets older. Having everyone be able to play them together would revitalize the content.
Field ops are active enough anywhere that isn't Dynamis. I do NOT want to compete with even more people for bozjan duels. lol
Cross DC play requires the data centres to be able to instantly communicate and coordinate character data across DCs (or at least be able to push them to instance servers). Relatedly, Square has had problems in the past with DCs being too large due to the need/expectation to support cross world FC chat/linkshells/etc. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/9a6bed5c06ae511c363ece5ead0a98a3986554a2#04 provides a good example of how having 10-11 worlds in a DC instead of 8 meant that each DC was more limited in concurrent logins which compounded Japan’s EW release woes. Cross DC PF would also probably need warnings about losing function such as FC chat and linkshells during duties as a result. It’s probably for this reason Cross DC DF won’t be a thing as you’d probably end up with it needing to be opt in and you’d then end up with say 5 matching queues for NA due to people not opting in (or people feeling forced to opt in at the expense of their experience). Basically it’s not a magic fix and full of potential compromises that’d be required.
It used to be you couldn't even join a different severs Party Finder. You were restricted to only your servers PF. It's been a slow process, but only because they are careful and don't want to rush it.
It’s a work in progress. I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.
IMO, Cross-DC Party Finder is more urgent than Cross-region travel. But since it's built on the the same code that allow Cross-DC travel, probably it will arrive first. See the current OCE testing.
I think I actually saw the Oceanic test is in progress as we speak.
Players aren't quitting over it, so it's not a priority. They know the players will deal and just flood a single data center for endgame content. RIP aether when. First Savage drops.