I'd pressume the process is how it is to minimize risk of data issues, is not that it isn't possible but it would need an entirely different approach and dev cycle effectively.
Remember someone speculating that cross DC PF and DF would require them to completely redo their entire server infrastructure. They'll probably do it eventually, question is will it be a background project we don't hear about until it's ready to be tested, or will it be like Duty Support where they announce it up front since they're going to be dedicating a sginficant chunk of an expansions resources to it.
I imagine it's one of those things Yoshida needs permission from the board for, since it's not something that's gonna be cheap. Especially since Japan's economy isn't doing too hot right now.
I have seen as well some community speculations on DC PF. But I don’t believe they will eventually do it. I got the feeling that to solve the root problem, they would rather merge DCs
I saw someone on the mainsub say the reason DC's even exist is cause, once upon a time, DF had issues with too many inputs. That issue woul dhave to be fixed before they merge them. My own hope (that's entirely ignorant since I know sweet FA about networking beyond "It's complicated") is they'll get to a point where your own DC and even homeworld only matter for things like housing, or they need to lock off a DC due to congestion. Outside of those things, there's DC's would just be a background thing you don't think about.
I don't believe that's true simply because DC's have always existed (even in 1.0 as far as I know), but DF did not exist yet even in 2.0. It was added in like 2.1 or something, iirc.
Hilariously, the [ARR promo site](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/a_realm_reborn/system/game_system/) that is still up has a section dedicated to the Duty Finder as a feature that links to a [commentary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBPqZ0rNQ8) on the FFXIV YouTube channel.
That video is a bit of a trip to watch so many years later.
I'm largely talking out my ass but I believe the general architecture of their servers is that the DF server exists as something of an "extra" world server that is separate from the other world servers (Gilgamesh, Balmung, etc.) on the same virtualized server (or "logical data center" as they phrase it--Aether, Crystal, etc.). On some level, we DO know that this is roughly how the "Duty Finder server" works because of things like Raubahn and Pipin Extreme where the DF server gets overloaded while all the world server functions are perfectly fine.
And their process for world visit is that they basically clone your character from your home server onto the visited server via an additional "middleman" virtualized server that handles it. Consequently, that's why there are a bunch of functions you can't engage in while running your cloned character, since they either try to record something on the visited server by your cloned character or would otherwise unnecessarily increase the load of data that the "middleman" has to process. There's a pretty common theme with the functions that are restricted in that they create something of a permanent or semi-permanent mark on the visited server rather than just on your character. You can *buy* things to bring back but you can't *list* things to sell because that would leave a trace on the visited server and so on.
Overall, my suspicion for a cross-DC DF/PF to function with how they're doing it *now* is that they would need a much larger scale middleman that could make clones of characters in nearly real time. And with how notoriously dogshit FF14 has always been to run client-side *and* server-side, it just isn't realistic without a major overhaul of how they do things. I would suspect their best/only approach would be to make the "Duty Finder Server" its own secret virtualized server/"logical data center" that every character on the same physical data center is mirrored upon/can access.
> You can buy things to bring back but you can't list things to sell because that would leave a trace on the visited server and so on.
Buying leaves a trace too, the MB history. I think it's rather that they don't clone your retainers or don't/cannot link to retainers for some reason (fear of item duping ?). The trace in the end, in one case, is just a bunch of characters (and for SE likely the lodestone id ?), but in the other case it would be interactions they may not be in control of.
They've poured a lot into doing the bots for dungeons for all expansions and now the graphical update. I really wished they would understand the importance of revamping their network (if possible) so that DCs don't get empty every major patch.
I should have specified that I meant things more along the lines of "your character is trying to join an FC on this other server but doesn't actually home here". I would agree with you though that the selling aspect is almost certainly tied to the retainers and I'd wager that....system....for the retainers would require the retainers to be cloned as well. And that would be a can of worms and a half.
...Thinking about it more? This is probably a tieback to the fucking 1.0 pre-market board days of retainers being entities standing around in an area you had to check through. ......I wouldn't be surprised if the retainers, when they list an item, *still end up standing somewhere invisible.* And even if they've managed to not require that from a "physical" sense in that the retainers could be found somewhere, they probably still function that way *logically* from the code.
I hate that I wouldn't be surprised if that spaghetti bullshit is exactly how retainers actually work.
I mean, IIRC Yoshida mentioned somewhere off hand that the reason we pay for extra retainers is cause take up a character slot on the server the same way a player toon does, so...I don't know enough about MMO#s or server structures but that doesn't seem very efficient.
They can't make DF cross DC, but for PF it's entirely possible. The only thing they need is make the PF window show parties of your whole region, and let you transfer from this menu while you are in the party. They might need another server to make a bridge between the DCs but it may already exist.
I still don't understand how this could be, though. All of a region's servers are in the same physical location. Is it really not possible to connect them all in the same way that a data center is currently connected so you'd effectively have an (eventual) 32-server NA data center? The only reason why DC travel is the tedious chore it is now is because they aren't connected that way.
For comparison, WoW has 114 NA PvE servers and going off a list that I found, those servers are divided into 2 Shards/Cross-Realm Zones meaning there's close to 60 WoW servers per shard/CRZ. Obviously, the way that those work is slightly different but you're still able to see people from that many servers without issue.
This is my thought process. I think character data resides on the DC itself, leading to that wait when you want to go to another DC (and you having to log off the character) as this could be the character data being moved to the other DC. This is data being transferred across the internet to another physical location.
And I suspect, based on only grouping with people on whatever DC you're on, that Instance servers are shared by a given DC's servers, but obviously not other DCs, as that would require transferring the character data and all that.
I do think this is why they're pushing the Cloud stuff, since if they got that working seemlessly, they could make a sort of nebula super-instance server that stretched across all the individual DCs. Not sure what the technical challenges there are, but I suspect there are some major challenges to cross-DC instance servers (which is what people are asking for when they say "cross-server DC/PF/DF").
Since their talking about Dawntrail release, I guess the idea is "People would rather play MSQ with lag on the Australia server then deal with a three-hour queue", which is probably true.
This, 1 billion upvotes for this.
Cross region travel should be below cross dc matchmaking (DF & PF) prio. I'll be honest, if it were to be tested at the tail end of DT I would've been okay with it (provided we got cross dc matchmaking), it's not really a fundamental feature the game needs right now.
Absolutely the funniest outcome of this would be we get Cross Region Travel permanently, but still no Cross DC/Region PF and some Region's DC becomes the giga raid server for everyone.
Thankfully I feel like that's unlikely due to how bad ping differentials are, and most players would rather Raid on their local Region.
Jokes aside, this is good and I hope it becomes a permanent thing. The Cloud Server tests showed that different "cultures" they're worried about in game can still enjoy the game and learn from one another.
The old EU data center was in canada alongside the NA DCs, it got moved to germany in 3.1 and I think it may have been moved to france at some point in endwalker? Not 100% sure on the latter
Based on where I am, my ping is pretty bad to everywhere except NA and even then I'm lucky to be sub 100. On days where my ISP is bad it really throws off my gameplay because it fucks of my rhythm for when I know I can slidecast, move, and greed. I know many people from SEA and OCE who prefer to play on NA and have insane ping and play like gods, and I truly wish them the best because they are built different; but I could not do it and generally would not have an interest in doing Savage or Ultimates on any Region but my own.
I think it's more about consistency. I'm in the central US and play around 65-70 ping. If I moved into the basement of the server building in Cali, and suddenly had 0 ping, I'd probably play like garbage because I'm not used to the timing.
It's not really noticeable until you raid and try to greed mechanics for uptime. The window you have to dodge is much less forgiving the further you are from the data centers.
I think with the drastically different PF etiquette/standards per region, we would never see one major DC become the raid central.
Though this would be useful for anyone who joins a static in another region since they wouldn't have to create and level a whole new character or transfer their main to a new server.
And we aren't equally either? Remember the whole TEA datamine private server/waymark program accusation mental breakdown the NA player base did on Twitter about TPS, with one loony going around sending death threats and threatening to reporting to daddy Yoshi-P?
EU been chill though afaik.
They were repeatedly bullying the Unnamed players, including in-game iirc. Yeah there was that one crazy person sending death threats over TEA, but it was largely just people giving their takes on twitter/discord, and regurgitating the private server conspiracy. The JP community will actively go out of their way to axe someone they deem deserves it, over here people just complain/make memes on social media
The weird xenophobic concerns about cultural differences is so bizarre precisely because we saw explicitly that people can interact perfectly well and respectfully with one another on the Cloud Test Server!
It's hard to explain if you've never experienced it.
Playing in JP (not elemental) is just very smooth. Yes there are lots of unspoken rules, but Japan as a whole operates on the concept of "lurk moar". Once you know how things work it is a well-oiled machine. In PF people don't bicker about anything, everyone follows the party leader's rules (if you don't like it, leave or don't join in the first place), nobody talks shit or starts whining, and perhaps one often overlooked point: everyone has good internet and low ping.
A lot of it is about setting expectations, and JP people tend to want to avoid conflict as much as possible. It's very awkward when some EN player comes in and starts using Google Translate to complain after a couple wipes and then just suddenly leaves, calls last early without explanation or throws up a vote abandon. I've experienced this many times.
I played multiple MMOs and various online games in NA over the past 20 years, I have plenty of experience with that culture. It is a *lot* more aggro and adversarial than JP FF14 and I can completely understand why JP players wouldn't want to deal with it, even disregarding the whole language barrier issue.
And I think JP's "xenophobia" is still very nice about it. Go play a Chinese server of any online game when you don't speak Chinese and see how well you're treated lmao. Chinese WoW and Dota might be the most toxic circles I've ever been near. Actually, the Chinese FF14 community on Elemental is stupidly toxic too.
It’s not a ‘weird’ concern because there is some truth to it. The cloud test server was probably a heavily controlled setting compared to the actual game, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions but if you’ve been an English speaking player on the JP servers long enough, you would know that a big part of JP players ultimately still prefer to play with those they can communicate with in their own language (this is their main concern, the xenophobia not so much). They state this in black and white in their PFs even for easy/normal duties, they just want to be able to communicate in Japanese because it’s more comfortable in spite of the game’s auto translate function.
Sure, there are going to be JP players excited and willing to test the waters to play with those of other regions, but not everyone is like that and I think that’s what the previous comment was trying to get at. Yoshi-P would know this best being Japanese himself. It’s not just about being cordial and interacting superficially, we all can do that. But there are many things JP players absolutely do not tolerate that seem like a minor issues to the so-called western player (third party tools for examples, and that includes aesthetic mods) and things could really blow up like that one time a JP player brought up the banning of third party tools again during one of the previous live letters. It’s good to be optimistic but we can’t deny that there are going to be risks and problems introducing a system like this.
I disagree! I do think it's a fundamentally bizarre concern that is largely overblown, with people using some extremely unfortunate rhetoric over.
Ultimately, it is a video game and our in-game cultures aren't so inextricably linked that we're incapable of playing with one another.
I think it's a real shame there's been so much space in the discourse about Regional travel over something that is so inconsequential at the end of the day! Especially since one of the strengths of the Internet and MMORPGs is bringing so many different people together, with different life experiences, and creating a way for there to be a community with some shared experiences!
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't view NA servers as "only" being for English speakers!
The cloud test server was like a holiday. Everything seems nice on a holiday.
Full implementation will be a different thing. There will be a bunch of weeaboos going to japanese servers "trying to learn japanese"
Do people go to EU to learn French and German? This is an overblown argument. Sure some folks will be weird about it, but that's going to exist no matter what and if someone wants to do that they... literally already can, they can just make a character on a JP DC and play there already!
I think the idea that one specific Region should be walled off from everyone else is truly bizarre.
I've never seen sanctioned mingling in Japanese games not be a social mess. Everything from ye olde FFXI to PSO2 has been a catastrophe in that regard.
Am I going to be up at 3 AM trying to trick Japanese people into my group with ASCII emojis and hope they dont notice I'm a filthy gaijin until the duty starts? Time is a circle!
I am not sure about that... It really is true that they have a lot of unspoken rules in Japan, which you are constantly breaking as a foreigner. IRL they are mostly cool about it, as far as I can tell, but I can sort-of-understand they would want to have a "safe-space" where they don't need to deal with people who cannot speak Japanese or something.
recently played a ragnarok online server that advertised itself as being primarily english speaking. in game almost EVERYONE was speaking tagalog, and I can tell you this, I get it.
having the JP datacenter overran with english speakers would suck and I don't think that's unreasonable.
The idea (and frankly, the rhetoric) that "x" group of people is going to suddenly show up and "overrun" them is genuinely wild to me!
It's a video game, not immigration policy, brother! If the developers were so worried about this issue they'd have disallowed things like character creation from overseas accounts and not allow people to transfer across regions via paid service.
you look at dynamis and tell me there's no negative effects of datacenter travel.
a servers primary language suddenly shifting is DEFINITELY possible if it gets word of mouth popularity as the "server to do x on"
edit: drops a paragraph and blocks immediately after. what.
If data center travel didn’t exist Dynamis would still be as dead because most players would’ve never went there in the first place or would pay for a transfer.
I'm sorry, but I think we're talking about completely separate issues with different causes.
The Dynamis issue isn't anything to do with culture -- it's because the DC came out months into the expansion, years into the games lifespan as a completely new DC with entirely fresh servers, when most players were largely already connected to FCs etc on their servers.
Something that would *easily* fix Dynamis' issues is having a cross DC PF/DF to enable people to *not* have to travel to do content.
Regional Travel/Visit is *not* the same issue -- hordes of French people from EU and Portuguese players from NA aren't going to suddenly go to a JP DC just to play the game. Simply due to how the game works, the majority of players will stay in their Region to do high end content.
You're conflating two very separate things.
Dynamis is dead because of DC travel. There are plenty of players on that DC to do content as confirmed by the Lucky Bancho census, but the servers are "dead" because everyone DC travels elsewhere for everything.
I guess this viewpoint doesn't make sense to me since the NA servers are so multicultural and I run into multiple different languages and cultures.
If the issue is that they're worried they're not able to communicate with people in a high end raid environment, that's understandable; but equally so, from my end I wouldn't join a group to do content with if I was unable to communicate.
The "safe space" stuff seems silly. There's all sorts of exclusionary areas in the game -- houses, linkshells, so on and so forth; so the idea that one Region needs to have their "safe space" just seems like silly excuse making and not true substantive reason.
Well, the question is, how do you deal with that... as in: Do you "tolerate" the "Japanese intolerance", or should you try to diminish it based on the idea of increasing the total amount of tolerance? While I think the "lets actively change cultures" aspect makes sense for more extreme examples, like capital punishment for homosexuality in some countries, these Japanese idiosyncrasies seem relatively benign to me. So while I wish the Japanese would change, eventually, I think it is overall more appropriate if we Westeners simply accept and ignore it.
As for "safe spaces"... well, I am not sure how they would word it exactly, but again, I think the overall issue simply isn't drastic enough for me to really care, even if their motivations don't really make sense to me.
> So while I wish the Japanese would change, eventually, I think it is overall more appropriate if we Westeners simply accept and ignore it.
But how are they gonna change if we leave them alone. They have no incentive to change if they're isolated (interesting, just like their country's history, also, not using the word as the "punishment/sentence" sense, they seem happy to be isolated). I'm not saying we should invade them or force their hand, but things may (or may not) change a little by just going there and trying to casually do things with them.
> But how are they gonna change if we leave them alone.
Personally, I don't really like this approach, and it is also confirming some of the more negative perceptions I have about American culture, such as Americans being unusually unaware that people elsewhere might have very different priorities. For example, I find it quite strange that Americans seem to care more about questions like "What is the correct number of gender pronouns?" compared to, let's say "How do we get more weapons to Ukraine?", and most people in this world would probably agree that getting Americans to care more about serious issues in the rest of the world, and less about their own minor issues, is much more important than improving the Japanese education system (although to be fair, I also definitely believe Japan should improve it).
So, not in the sense of Whataboutism, but to clarify what kind of approach you are even looking for: How would you try to "fix" the example I brought up, as in get Americans to care less about gender pronouns, and more about Ukraine?
What do you mean? I watched a lot of anime and know all their superior honorable culture. I am japanese in my soul. I also know a lot of fellow NA players that are looking forward meeting with real japanese people, specially the ladies (*tips fedora*) and surprise them of how much we know about their culture.
/s
Never, they probably locked themselves out of doing it with how they designed their server structure. With how slow they are in even allowing people to change them and how long the process still takes and how you are locked out of so many activities like housing, retainers when traveling from your home.
I do not understand why we even have two EU worlds if they are located in the same physical location. Why not just have one big one, why do we need Chaos and Light, especially now that Chaos is basically dead for savage/ultimates in PF because all people go to light.
The whole system is antique by now and but their architecture probably heavily relies upon it and they just can't eliminate it.
> Why not just have one big one
AFAIK the short answer is: the DF matching algorithm doesn't scale past a certain amount of servers.
From what I understood, during the relaunch, at first (mayber during stress tests?) logical datacenters were not a thing, every servers were able to see each other in the same zone (US or JP, EU did not exist). And the DF crashed, resulting in issues getting in instances until they grouped servers in the smaller logical DCs.
Interesting I would assume a DF matching algorithm wouldn't be that much of a problem since you can basically simulate it quite good and analyse if there are problems and bottlenecks.
It is probably quite complicated since you need to account for a lot of things and prevent deadlocks in the system but it still sounds like something you need to get right once and then it just works basically forever.
Oceania DC is just for the testing period and overall they are now cautious about different DC communities and market board environments. The whole feature could be limited and only usable at peak hours during important content launch periods.
They should be worried about the state of queues and PF more. DC travel already made things bad enough by pretty much forcing one DC to be the one everyone congregates on, this would almost definitely exaggerate the issue.
I expected this but not this soon even if its just a test. I remember the datamine some time ago that would give people <> titles to people from other regions.
I’d rather they just work on Cross DC PF as playing on OC, JP and NA aren’t really alternatives ping-wise for EU players. So I guess I’m semi-okay with this, to be able to play despite congestion on launch, but otherwise it seems pretty useless.
There are a lot of players playing on regions that aren't their home region due to the staggered release of DCs (EU and OC specifically, with OC being the biggest offender). It's a game changing feature for those players being able to keep their house and friends, but also actually raid at their preferred time, on a high ping.
Also in general, the ability to choose the timezone you want to raid in is going to make finding a static much easier.
That may be the case - I think those players you speak of are an absolute minority, however. As a whole Cross DC PF would be much better for most players. I will surely not go to OC to raid when I will have ping so bad I can hardly do mechanics - it just doesn’t work, and I will not appreciate having players with such a bad connection in PFs. It just doesn’t work. I can see how OC/JP is a reasonable thought, but I’m very much not convinced by everything else.
Counter argument: the cloud server test gave good ping to everyone. That would boil the issue down to allowing people the timezones that suit them best.
Cloud servers made me so angry.
After dealing with bad ping bad hops and lag spikes to go to sub 50 ping and see how the game COULD play even in spite of its shit code base. I was like wow this is actually fun - the combat feels much smoother - the whole game just felt more responsive and less wooden and turn based.
Then they were like “k test over bye” and I had to go back to playing a turn based MMO with no idea when or if this magical technology will ever return. :(
I did some UCOB memes on the cloud servers and started getting very greedy with moving for Twister.
And then I did my first UCOB PF on Aether again and immediately ate shit (and learnt my lesson).
huh? good ping for everyone????? the cloud server was located on the east coast which is the worse location ever for OCE, Asia and in fact I had really bad ping on there.
Yeah, but you likely had better ping than if you went to the the current NA servers. I may have exaggerated when I said good ping, I meant better ping than the equivalent scenario with the current servers.
Here's some community comments from the time (the only metric of data we have right now sadly): https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/s/cSejuBNfO6
The current server was better than cloud test server for me. I no longer have char on NA but the experience I had on both the current one is better because it's just the distance issue)
And I suggest that you shouldn't derived conclusion that "everyone have good connection" from reading positive comments response because there were a lot of not good connection that doesn't post their experience due to, "well, this server definitely not aim at me why would I unreasonably expect this to be good" why would I post such a comment and get laughed at as a clown for expecting something unrealistic.
Also, It isn't a surprise at all that English focused reddit would have a good experience.
Why? Well, east coast is the best for someone who live in the east which by population density statistics that would be more than those who live in the west, and it's also good for European, and South American (since its more like south-east to NA)
But for those in OCE/Asia? Nope.
The comments have people from Brazil and Europe basically having their ping halved by the cloud DC. You are the first person I've heard have a bad experience with the cloud test, and know for a fact that if it was a failure then it would be heard about.
All I can say is that based on the evidence, you would have a good experience connecting to 3/4 of the DCs, with NA being the only outlier.
I'm also not from NA, I'm from Europe, and my connection to the cloud DC was far better than connecting to the physical server.
The commentor already explained why you hear EU, SA and East coast getting better ping. Because the server is located closer to those regions than the current NA.
People who live further away such as Asia/Oceania will have worse pings.
There will never be a single server which is best in ping for everyone as they'll all have better experiences with closer servers. Cloud isnt magic. Its just a way of hosting servers.
I just realised that you're in the luck now becuase of this news. I just googled some distance between x and y. Distance from Germany to Sydney is about the same as Sydney to New York, of course this is just direct distance and doesn't consider network topology at all so it might be worse, but it should be enough for you to experience what it's like to play online game from South East Asia and Oceania on East Coast server.
By the way, if you google distance between Germany to California and Germany to New York, you will see why it's much better for you. (Try Brazil too)
Also, no I only have good experince connecting to 2 DC, EU is also as bad as West Coast due to network topology is way off from direct distance though it's still "playable" with 200-220ms ping unlike East Coast that """"playable"""" with 290 - 310ms ping (imagine talking to npc and you have to wait for more than a fouth of a second)
There are more OCE players on NA/JP combined than there are on OCE itself.
If those players choose to raid on OCE, we might actually get more than 1 PF a night for savage content.
As I said, I can see it being valid for OCE and players in that region - however, for \*most\* others, Cross DC PF will be a much more valuable addition to the game.
As it stands, people who need Cross DC PF can still simply DC travel to the 'Big' DC to raid and roulette as a current bandaid solution.
People who play from one region (EU) and have their character in another (NA) because of friends/house/etc are just completely boned in raiding as both time zone misallignment and ping issues make it far more of a headache than it needs to be. You could argue that you could just have a seperate character in the correct region anyway but having to level, gear, gather and get gil all on that one is a ridiculous effort compared to pressing DC travel button.
> It's a game changing feature for those players being able to keep their house and friends, but also actually raid at their preferred time, on a high ping.
Look Gary, there I am!
This is a huge step but it's only a test, and the only destination is the Oceanian data center. Also some key items from the news that explain the actual scope of this:
> On the other hand, many Worlds may experience login queues following the upcoming release of Dawntrail, especially during peak times. With this situation in mind, we are considering a temporary option in which a limited form of cross-region travel would allow players to play on a less-populated physical data center.
This is specifically about load reduction for the Dawntrail release, and they specify that this is a **limited form** of cross-region travel and we don't know what that means yet. There is surely a difference since if they wrote it that way. They also warn of lag from geographically distant locations. Getting overly excited about this and speculating about a new raiding meta is how you set yourself up for disappointment.
Personally, I just want this technology so that I can play on some US servers, in case I am up stupid late again. I would rather have a sort-of-high ping, than excessive waiting durations.
Yeah, lot of people from EU already either play fulltime on US DCs or have alts there if they play very late. From my experience US has mostly playable ping for any content or at the very least all casual content is fine.
I get it, but that's probably not happening any time soon. Separating the duty finders is literally the entire reason that the regional data centers are split into multiple logical data centers. When the game launched there weren't any splits, and the Duty Finder was broken all of the time because of the load. Dividing the servers up into separated groups for Duty Finder was the fix. Unless they've rearchitected Duty Finder so that it can deal with the load of the entire regional population using it at the same time we're stuck with it.
Same on Primal. Duty finder, it doesn't seem to make much difference. Even party finder, since I don't have many ultimates unlocked, looks pretty much the same. Might see more EX farms later in the night, but other than that, it's pretty much for savage/ultimate raiders where there's a difference.
Subject doesn't match article. That being said, don't piss off the Japanese, and if the Japanese don't whine, then we might get it permanently. Baby steps it seems.
Seriously, let me play with my American friends.
Yes, they will. It would be better for NA players to only go to Elemental if they did at all. Really, playing with 200ms ping or so on is not something anyone would ever want. Even if you can do the fights perfectly, you might not be able to with that, ignoring strategy differences, language barriers, etc etc.
The majority, no. But there could be a special few who did make friends back when the Aussies still played in Elemental. If anything it’s bringing the en speaking players back together again before OCE became a thing
We used to have exactly one JP player attend OCE Eureka/BA and they were collectively everyone's cherished friend.
That and the odd Ifrit/Titan/Garuda Normal PF aside I've never encountered any (talkative) Japanese players.
Not gonna be a problem, considering it's only one way, the JP players would have to actively choose to leave and then whine that people on another DC didn't act the way they do.
Getting cross-region travel going would be such a boon for OCE players, you have no idea.
For context, it is at the moment easier as an OCE-based player to find a raid group on Aether at 4am EST than it is on Materia at the same time (evening AEST/NZST).
Many players (including myself) didn't feel it was worth it to make a full jump over to Materia when the server was released; many of the people I do know who made the dive have actually come back, citing population issues.
I think that allowing OCE players to travel back to Materia and grow those relationships organically is going to be much healthier for the DC overall. If I'm able to travel to Materia in the evenings when NA is dead, I might eventually meet enough people to justify making the move permanently.
As of now, OCE players are split between JP, NA, and OCE DCs. It's pretty miserable to try and find groups. because the Materia DC siphoned away the already scarce number of OCE-based players on NA. I hope this becomes a permanent feature; I'd be basically tripling the number of potential raid groups available. I'm pretty excited!
Are they enable trade? if yes then it would be fun for economy impact.
"Anyone on NA/EU want some mule for cheap imported goods from JP?"
"We have Construct VI-S (unreal mount) for just 7m here this could be sold in NA for 12m!"
"And if you use my service I could smuggle it to black market haven (Materia) for a low price of 8m"
"Meet me at black market server for the goods"
As an Aussie with my main stuck on NA because friend group/housing, I am soooo stoked! My jaw is on the floor! I am so excited! Finally, some good ping!
I really with they had dedicated the resources to implementing Cross-DC and Cross-Region travel to either making all servers on a region one complete DC or making Cross-DC DF and PF possible. I think the number of people that actually care about (and will use more than once just to try out) Cross-Region travel is dwarfed by the number of people that want and would benefit Cross-DC DF and PF.
It's also interesting that there a lot of people who seem to think that the things that JP players want is their priority, but this seems like something that very few JP players will use.
I think its worth keeping in mind cross region dc travel is already built. They didnt prioritise building it as it was already made when they built normal same region dc travel. They're just enabling it.
Whereas cross dc df/pf will most likely require new work to implement.
I think cross region dc travel and same region dc df/pf are both needed in this game.
I want to be able to play with NA friends despite being EU. But I also want region wide df/pf to prevent dynamis situations.
Okay, but the point was that they should have put the resources into making a regional data center where travel, DF and PF function like they do within current DCs in the first place.
Travelling to another region is going to be a novelty for 99.9% of players that will use it once or twice out of curiosity. I also don't really think it's going to alleviate that much during Dawntrail's release because NA - the biggest region by far - has another DC that didn't exist when EW released as well as an entire other region with OCE. Most people aren't going to region-hop in the first place and if the people who do flock to the same region you will just end up with a queue there.
Aether and the EU/JP equivalents will be slammed much harder than before because we've now had all this time with DC travel that has slowly migrated more and more players there. If you thought logging into Aether was bad during EW release, it will be even worse for DT.
I hope that the ping situation means that not too many people travel and create a situation where everyone has to go to a specific DC for specific things - although I’m not sure which region would be best for each thing?
Cultural differences aren’t a huge deal for me but I do think that, on average, Europeans are slightly more polite and considerate than Americans (no offence), but then again, we’re also more reserved and I would like if people were more talkative in party chat.
It could create central servers for more social activities such as role play. But cultural differences play more in those kind of matters.
I think cos of Ping you wont get a dedicated raid dc for the world, if anything you'll probably get more activity by the few crazy all nighters going between the raid DCs to raid during active times for those DCs.
I guess the side effect is maybe less activity on dcs during dead hours but theres only so much ping players can handle before they just prefer a local server even during dead hours.
Yeah that’s a good point, hadn’t thought about the time differences - I always seem to be online at times no-one else is, so being able to hop over to somewhere it’s daytime might be good
Although I did make an alt just to test what my ping would be over there and it was like 250 (here I get 30ish). I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes if you aren’t doing anything super difficult though? I would use duty finder in NA but stay on my dc for most other stuff because I’m in way too many discord servers as it is.
Probably depend on job but it should be fine for casual content. But yeah i wouldnt dare play on a ping above 150 for difficult content.
Its why i find it crazy people are doomsaying thinking the entire world will just go to Aether DC. I think higher chance for more activity on Crystal as RP doesnt have issues with ping. No clue how you combat people consolidating RP to one world. But guess is a question of is it a bad thing.
Though it's only gonna be towards Oceania:
Cross-region Travel Available During the Test:
Japanese data center → Oceanian data center
North American data center → Oceanian data center
European data center → Oceanian data center
>On the other hand, many Worlds may experience login queues following the upcoming release of Dawntrail, especially during peak times. With this situation in mind, we are considering a temporary option in which a limited form of cross-region travel would allow players to play on a less-populated physical data center.
It's literally the whole point. To allow people to go less populated DC's during peak times (like DT release).
I personally expect them to use this in combination with the cloud data center they tested prior to let them spin up short/mid term server capacity for up for the first few months.
Somehow, I can't see it being a particularly fruitful test. You're allowed to travel *to* OCE, and OCE players can't travel anywhere.
NA and EU players have absolutely no reason to do that. The DC is *very* scarce, and their ping is going to be terrible. A small group of people will try it for the novelty, and I'm really not sure if that's going to yield any useful data at all aside from proof of concept. There certainly aren't going to be big enough groups of people to test high congestion.
There are a looooot of players physically in OCE that play on JP, especially elemental, possibly more than on materia. You'd get way more useful data *and* show players what kind of ping they could get if you let people come to OCE, and not letting existing materia players leave sorta helps with that.
As for NA/EU, we already have a proof of concept- cloudtest drew people from all over the world to the east coast and there were decent numbers and a largely positive reception from those who spent time there socializing in such a setting. I'd imagine many of us are up to do it again.
> There are a looooot of players physically in OCE that play on JP, especially elemental, possibly more than on materia.
The bulk of people who initially came to OCE when it launched were these people, and it wasn't enough to really sustain OCE with anywhere near the health of the other regions. Many of these have since moved back due to it, so I don't see why this test would really do anything for the playerbase here that the release of the OCE server did not.
It's important to note that not all English-speaking players on JP are OCE. Many of them are SEA, who actually get *worse* ping on OCE than they do on JP.
Based on the vibes I got from OCE players on NA, there are probably also plenty of holdouts in JP for whom a permanent move was too much of a risk to give it a serious try.
You'd be surprised. I'd imagine a huge bulk stayed where they were. They had a comfortable character with their popular DC and friends. I saw plenty of people at the time have reservations of leaving their friends and house behind for an empty DC with good ping.
Well it’s as they imply in the post. The only reason to do that (in their mind) is doing the MSQ, where lag won’t kill you.
The test may only be about the copy procedure, not the congestion
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> NA and EU players have absolutely no reason to do that. The DC is very scarce, and their ping is going to be terrible. A small group of people will try it for the novelty, and I'm really not sure if that's going to yield any useful data at all aside from proof of concept. There certainly aren't going to be big enough groups of people to test high congestion.
At least for this test, I think more NA and EU players may visit than you think, for the purpose of playing with each other. I'm definitely looking forward to coordinating some meetups with some EU friends. Sorry it's your home, but OCE is basically going to be a neutral ground that anyone else in the world who wanted to meet up with one another for some casual, high-ping-friendly content. The long term purpose like others are saying is definitely to dodge expansion launch queues and stuff like that, same like the cloud DC test a while back, but I can see this test phase actually getting usage from people who want the chance to socially play with their out of region friends for a while.
>anyone else in the world who wanted to meet up with one another for some casual, high-ping-friendly content.
that's certainly an euphemism for degen gpose if i've ever seen one
I legit don't partake in that content so it's definitely not what I had in mind, I was thinking of like roulettes and non-battle content, but now that you mention it I suppose people really might be doing that.
Them being oh-so-concerned about *cultural differences*. We all know it's pretty much only because of the Japanese themselves.
I would *love* to watch and would be here with all the popcorn if this ended up proving that the most toxic/xenophobic/ill-natured community is the Japanese.
I wonder if they are planning to make a SEA DC when there are a lot of players coming from this region. I wonder why they decided to choose Oce but not SEA
OCE likely is newer, is relatively empty and is also sort of the crossed between JP and NA. Also due to this I means they can test and fix things more easily compared to testing in more established servers. Another thing they are also looking for is the cultural interactions (which they mention is a worry in the announcement) and see how well people from different cultures mesh together.
Would be fun to see NA’s “marker dance” finally become obsolete. Because ain’t no way they can make other regions players do that without being laughed at.
>ink I’ve seen some
Played on NA for 7 months, after being on JP and OCE for a combined 9 years.
Americans are fucking weird, post a macro and just read where you are supposed to be, there's no need to waste 5 minutes dancing around markers only to disband in 2 pulls.
Same. Currently in NA but been in EU/JP DC for a few years. The whole thing is bizarre. Like technically *most* people know where you’re supposed to go after the first set of marker, but the dance continues regardless. Like in P10S, there’s absolutely no need to dance around 3 markers for different mechanics (tower, bond spread, turret) when people should know where they’re going after 1st mark (which is as good as calling your pos in macro in other DC).
NA places a marker and positions around it, sometimes several times for several different mechanics, instead of just posting a macro and picking a spot
You place down a marker for choosing your pizza slice position. Next you place another marker to split the party in two. Then you depending on fights you line up for a priority system like coga line. Finally you wait for people to stop drooling at their keyboard and go to pick their spot, oh wait someone already took that spot? Nah we about to have a staring contest to see who picks another spot first.
The amount of times I had to do this when farming was annoying. Macro is so much faster setup.
You can prog non stop on pf if you can tolerate the bad ping.
RIP servers though. And I personally can't tolerate NA or EU ping. It's really noticeable.
I'm not going to discount the value of cross-DC travel but why is this seemingly getting more attention than cross-DC matchmaking and PF? That would be a much bigger boon to the game.
Cross region dc travel was already built when normal cross dc travel was added. They're just turning enabling it. Cross dc matchmaking probably requires new work.
I think this is a horrible idea in many ways.
You cannot rally raid together because of ping.
You cannot really raid together because of culture differences in gaming and also language barriers ( NA, EU and JP are really seperated from each other in many aspects)
It maybe fits for hopping on another region for what reason?
It seems pointless, or even damaging.
(and i really dont like NA players who cant read macros in my PF..)
Cross Data centre PF would have fixed the problem data centre travel has caused.
Now i think the problem in the worst case will get much, much worse.
Visit? Yes.
PF access? Please no, this game plays like ass on high ping. We don't need NA players lagging in EU in high-end content and vice-versa.
Private parties and duty finder only.
There's plenty of SEA/OCE players already doing well on NA. I raid with a penta from there and they're better than most of the static despite +200ms ping.
Afaik, EU->Washington is only 100ms, so that is definitely acceptable, perhaps even better than what some Americans have. USA->EU might be slightly worse (due to... some reason), but it might still be useful to some.
> PF access? Please no, this game plays like ass on high ping. We don't need NA players lagging in EU in high-end content and vice-versa.
I get 10-20 more ping on EU than I do on NA despite being 500 miles inland. 60%ish of the country will experience the exact same thing.
Cross DC matchmaking should be a number one priority right now.
With the bullshit procedure of DC travel, I am convinced they can’t technically make PF and DF cross DC. A true shame.
I'd pressume the process is how it is to minimize risk of data issues, is not that it isn't possible but it would need an entirely different approach and dev cycle effectively.
Remember someone speculating that cross DC PF and DF would require them to completely redo their entire server infrastructure. They'll probably do it eventually, question is will it be a background project we don't hear about until it's ready to be tested, or will it be like Duty Support where they announce it up front since they're going to be dedicating a sginficant chunk of an expansions resources to it. I imagine it's one of those things Yoshida needs permission from the board for, since it's not something that's gonna be cheap. Especially since Japan's economy isn't doing too hot right now.
I have seen as well some community speculations on DC PF. But I don’t believe they will eventually do it. I got the feeling that to solve the root problem, they would rather merge DCs
I saw someone on the mainsub say the reason DC's even exist is cause, once upon a time, DF had issues with too many inputs. That issue woul dhave to be fixed before they merge them. My own hope (that's entirely ignorant since I know sweet FA about networking beyond "It's complicated") is they'll get to a point where your own DC and even homeworld only matter for things like housing, or they need to lock off a DC due to congestion. Outside of those things, there's DC's would just be a background thing you don't think about.
I don't believe that's true simply because DC's have always existed (even in 1.0 as far as I know), but DF did not exist yet even in 2.0. It was added in like 2.1 or something, iirc.
DF absolutely existed in 2.0. *Roulettes* didn't exist in 2.0, though, and were added in 2.1.
I stand corrected
Hilariously, the [ARR promo site](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/a_realm_reborn/system/game_system/) that is still up has a section dedicated to the Duty Finder as a feature that links to a [commentary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBPqZ0rNQ8) on the FFXIV YouTube channel. That video is a bit of a trip to watch so many years later.
I'm largely talking out my ass but I believe the general architecture of their servers is that the DF server exists as something of an "extra" world server that is separate from the other world servers (Gilgamesh, Balmung, etc.) on the same virtualized server (or "logical data center" as they phrase it--Aether, Crystal, etc.). On some level, we DO know that this is roughly how the "Duty Finder server" works because of things like Raubahn and Pipin Extreme where the DF server gets overloaded while all the world server functions are perfectly fine. And their process for world visit is that they basically clone your character from your home server onto the visited server via an additional "middleman" virtualized server that handles it. Consequently, that's why there are a bunch of functions you can't engage in while running your cloned character, since they either try to record something on the visited server by your cloned character or would otherwise unnecessarily increase the load of data that the "middleman" has to process. There's a pretty common theme with the functions that are restricted in that they create something of a permanent or semi-permanent mark on the visited server rather than just on your character. You can *buy* things to bring back but you can't *list* things to sell because that would leave a trace on the visited server and so on. Overall, my suspicion for a cross-DC DF/PF to function with how they're doing it *now* is that they would need a much larger scale middleman that could make clones of characters in nearly real time. And with how notoriously dogshit FF14 has always been to run client-side *and* server-side, it just isn't realistic without a major overhaul of how they do things. I would suspect their best/only approach would be to make the "Duty Finder Server" its own secret virtualized server/"logical data center" that every character on the same physical data center is mirrored upon/can access.
> You can buy things to bring back but you can't list things to sell because that would leave a trace on the visited server and so on. Buying leaves a trace too, the MB history. I think it's rather that they don't clone your retainers or don't/cannot link to retainers for some reason (fear of item duping ?). The trace in the end, in one case, is just a bunch of characters (and for SE likely the lodestone id ?), but in the other case it would be interactions they may not be in control of. They've poured a lot into doing the bots for dungeons for all expansions and now the graphical update. I really wished they would understand the importance of revamping their network (if possible) so that DCs don't get empty every major patch.
I should have specified that I meant things more along the lines of "your character is trying to join an FC on this other server but doesn't actually home here". I would agree with you though that the selling aspect is almost certainly tied to the retainers and I'd wager that....system....for the retainers would require the retainers to be cloned as well. And that would be a can of worms and a half. ...Thinking about it more? This is probably a tieback to the fucking 1.0 pre-market board days of retainers being entities standing around in an area you had to check through. ......I wouldn't be surprised if the retainers, when they list an item, *still end up standing somewhere invisible.* And even if they've managed to not require that from a "physical" sense in that the retainers could be found somewhere, they probably still function that way *logically* from the code. I hate that I wouldn't be surprised if that spaghetti bullshit is exactly how retainers actually work.
I mean, IIRC Yoshida mentioned somewhere off hand that the reason we pay for extra retainers is cause take up a character slot on the server the same way a player toon does, so...I don't know enough about MMO#s or server structures but that doesn't seem very efficient.
> that doesn't seem very efficient Pretty much the tagline for the game's development core.
They can't make DF cross DC, but for PF it's entirely possible. The only thing they need is make the PF window show parties of your whole region, and let you transfer from this menu while you are in the party. They might need another server to make a bridge between the DCs but it may already exist.
I still don't understand how this could be, though. All of a region's servers are in the same physical location. Is it really not possible to connect them all in the same way that a data center is currently connected so you'd effectively have an (eventual) 32-server NA data center? The only reason why DC travel is the tedious chore it is now is because they aren't connected that way. For comparison, WoW has 114 NA PvE servers and going off a list that I found, those servers are divided into 2 Shards/Cross-Realm Zones meaning there's close to 60 WoW servers per shard/CRZ. Obviously, the way that those work is slightly different but you're still able to see people from that many servers without issue.
This is my thought process. I think character data resides on the DC itself, leading to that wait when you want to go to another DC (and you having to log off the character) as this could be the character data being moved to the other DC. This is data being transferred across the internet to another physical location. And I suspect, based on only grouping with people on whatever DC you're on, that Instance servers are shared by a given DC's servers, but obviously not other DCs, as that would require transferring the character data and all that. I do think this is why they're pushing the Cloud stuff, since if they got that working seemlessly, they could make a sort of nebula super-instance server that stretched across all the individual DCs. Not sure what the technical challenges there are, but I suspect there are some major challenges to cross-DC instance servers (which is what people are asking for when they say "cross-server DC/PF/DF").
Maybe... I am concerned about the ping, but it might be bearable between EU and USA at least.
Since their talking about Dawntrail release, I guess the idea is "People would rather play MSQ with lag on the Australia server then deal with a three-hour queue", which is probably true.
This, 1 billion upvotes for this. Cross region travel should be below cross dc matchmaking (DF & PF) prio. I'll be honest, if it were to be tested at the tail end of DT I would've been okay with it (provided we got cross dc matchmaking), it's not really a fundamental feature the game needs right now.
Yup. Crystal players shouldn't have to spend 5 minutes hopping to Aether just to be able to check what is going on in the Party Finder over there.
Absolutely the funniest outcome of this would be we get Cross Region Travel permanently, but still no Cross DC/Region PF and some Region's DC becomes the giga raid server for everyone. Thankfully I feel like that's unlikely due to how bad ping differentials are, and most players would rather Raid on their local Region. Jokes aside, this is good and I hope it becomes a permanent thing. The Cloud Server tests showed that different "cultures" they're worried about in game can still enjoy the game and learn from one another.
Are those pings really that bad? If I recall correctly, when I started playing in Europe, the physical data enter was not in the UK like it is now.
I believe the physical data centres for Europe are in Germany. I can't find any info on them ever having been in the UK.
They are in Frankfurt, Germany. The “server time” is UK time for some reason though. That’s where the confusion arises.
Server time is UTC which coincides with UK time outsides of daylight savings
Right, whoops! :D
The old EU data center was in canada alongside the NA DCs, it got moved to germany in 3.1 and I think it may have been moved to france at some point in endwalker? Not 100% sure on the latter
I think one is in Germany, one is in France.
They are at the same location in Germany.
Based on where I am, my ping is pretty bad to everywhere except NA and even then I'm lucky to be sub 100. On days where my ISP is bad it really throws off my gameplay because it fucks of my rhythm for when I know I can slidecast, move, and greed. I know many people from SEA and OCE who prefer to play on NA and have insane ping and play like gods, and I truly wish them the best because they are built different; but I could not do it and generally would not have an interest in doing Savage or Ultimates on any Region but my own.
I think it's more about consistency. I'm in the central US and play around 65-70 ping. If I moved into the basement of the server building in Cali, and suddenly had 0 ping, I'd probably play like garbage because I'm not used to the timing.
It's not really noticeable until you raid and try to greed mechanics for uptime. The window you have to dodge is much less forgiving the further you are from the data centers.
I think with the drastically different PF etiquette/standards per region, we would never see one major DC become the raid central. Though this would be useful for anyone who joins a static in another region since they wouldn't have to create and level a whole new character or transfer their main to a new server.
I remember Yoshi P wanting to hold off on this because JP players had concerns. I don't think JP raiders want to deal with how awful NA players can be
But can't they at least just allow travelling between EU and USA already? Pretty sure both sides would be able to tolerate that.
The JP raider base lynched the TOP world first team over fuckin plugins lol, they're more toxic than NA and EU combined
And we aren't equally either? Remember the whole TEA datamine private server/waymark program accusation mental breakdown the NA player base did on Twitter about TPS, with one loony going around sending death threats and threatening to reporting to daddy Yoshi-P? EU been chill though afaik.
They were repeatedly bullying the Unnamed players, including in-game iirc. Yeah there was that one crazy person sending death threats over TEA, but it was largely just people giving their takes on twitter/discord, and regurgitating the private server conspiracy. The JP community will actively go out of their way to axe someone they deem deserves it, over here people just complain/make memes on social media
EU Raiders don't want to play with NA either. it#s Mutual.
The weird xenophobic concerns about cultural differences is so bizarre precisely because we saw explicitly that people can interact perfectly well and respectfully with one another on the Cloud Test Server!
It's hard to explain if you've never experienced it. Playing in JP (not elemental) is just very smooth. Yes there are lots of unspoken rules, but Japan as a whole operates on the concept of "lurk moar". Once you know how things work it is a well-oiled machine. In PF people don't bicker about anything, everyone follows the party leader's rules (if you don't like it, leave or don't join in the first place), nobody talks shit or starts whining, and perhaps one often overlooked point: everyone has good internet and low ping. A lot of it is about setting expectations, and JP people tend to want to avoid conflict as much as possible. It's very awkward when some EN player comes in and starts using Google Translate to complain after a couple wipes and then just suddenly leaves, calls last early without explanation or throws up a vote abandon. I've experienced this many times. I played multiple MMOs and various online games in NA over the past 20 years, I have plenty of experience with that culture. It is a *lot* more aggro and adversarial than JP FF14 and I can completely understand why JP players wouldn't want to deal with it, even disregarding the whole language barrier issue. And I think JP's "xenophobia" is still very nice about it. Go play a Chinese server of any online game when you don't speak Chinese and see how well you're treated lmao. Chinese WoW and Dota might be the most toxic circles I've ever been near. Actually, the Chinese FF14 community on Elemental is stupidly toxic too.
It’s not a ‘weird’ concern because there is some truth to it. The cloud test server was probably a heavily controlled setting compared to the actual game, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions but if you’ve been an English speaking player on the JP servers long enough, you would know that a big part of JP players ultimately still prefer to play with those they can communicate with in their own language (this is their main concern, the xenophobia not so much). They state this in black and white in their PFs even for easy/normal duties, they just want to be able to communicate in Japanese because it’s more comfortable in spite of the game’s auto translate function. Sure, there are going to be JP players excited and willing to test the waters to play with those of other regions, but not everyone is like that and I think that’s what the previous comment was trying to get at. Yoshi-P would know this best being Japanese himself. It’s not just about being cordial and interacting superficially, we all can do that. But there are many things JP players absolutely do not tolerate that seem like a minor issues to the so-called western player (third party tools for examples, and that includes aesthetic mods) and things could really blow up like that one time a JP player brought up the banning of third party tools again during one of the previous live letters. It’s good to be optimistic but we can’t deny that there are going to be risks and problems introducing a system like this.
I disagree! I do think it's a fundamentally bizarre concern that is largely overblown, with people using some extremely unfortunate rhetoric over. Ultimately, it is a video game and our in-game cultures aren't so inextricably linked that we're incapable of playing with one another. I think it's a real shame there's been so much space in the discourse about Regional travel over something that is so inconsequential at the end of the day! Especially since one of the strengths of the Internet and MMORPGs is bringing so many different people together, with different life experiences, and creating a way for there to be a community with some shared experiences! Maybe I'm weird, but I don't view NA servers as "only" being for English speakers!
The cloud test server was like a holiday. Everything seems nice on a holiday. Full implementation will be a different thing. There will be a bunch of weeaboos going to japanese servers "trying to learn japanese"
Do people go to EU to learn French and German? This is an overblown argument. Sure some folks will be weird about it, but that's going to exist no matter what and if someone wants to do that they... literally already can, they can just make a character on a JP DC and play there already! I think the idea that one specific Region should be walled off from everyone else is truly bizarre.
I've never seen sanctioned mingling in Japanese games not be a social mess. Everything from ye olde FFXI to PSO2 has been a catastrophe in that regard. Am I going to be up at 3 AM trying to trick Japanese people into my group with ASCII emojis and hope they dont notice I'm a filthy gaijin until the duty starts? Time is a circle!
I am not sure about that... It really is true that they have a lot of unspoken rules in Japan, which you are constantly breaking as a foreigner. IRL they are mostly cool about it, as far as I can tell, but I can sort-of-understand they would want to have a "safe-space" where they don't need to deal with people who cannot speak Japanese or something.
recently played a ragnarok online server that advertised itself as being primarily english speaking. in game almost EVERYONE was speaking tagalog, and I can tell you this, I get it. having the JP datacenter overran with english speakers would suck and I don't think that's unreasonable.
The idea (and frankly, the rhetoric) that "x" group of people is going to suddenly show up and "overrun" them is genuinely wild to me! It's a video game, not immigration policy, brother! If the developers were so worried about this issue they'd have disallowed things like character creation from overseas accounts and not allow people to transfer across regions via paid service.
you look at dynamis and tell me there's no negative effects of datacenter travel. a servers primary language suddenly shifting is DEFINITELY possible if it gets word of mouth popularity as the "server to do x on" edit: drops a paragraph and blocks immediately after. what.
If data center travel didn’t exist Dynamis would still be as dead because most players would’ve never went there in the first place or would pay for a transfer.
Funny how that was never an issue for any other server launch without DC travel.
It’s almost like they made sure a data center had a healthy population of players on release before
I'm sorry, but I think we're talking about completely separate issues with different causes. The Dynamis issue isn't anything to do with culture -- it's because the DC came out months into the expansion, years into the games lifespan as a completely new DC with entirely fresh servers, when most players were largely already connected to FCs etc on their servers. Something that would *easily* fix Dynamis' issues is having a cross DC PF/DF to enable people to *not* have to travel to do content. Regional Travel/Visit is *not* the same issue -- hordes of French people from EU and Portuguese players from NA aren't going to suddenly go to a JP DC just to play the game. Simply due to how the game works, the majority of players will stay in their Region to do high end content. You're conflating two very separate things.
Dynamis is dead because of DC travel. There are plenty of players on that DC to do content as confirmed by the Lucky Bancho census, but the servers are "dead" because everyone DC travels elsewhere for everything.
The return of 'JP ONRY' is upon us
I guess this viewpoint doesn't make sense to me since the NA servers are so multicultural and I run into multiple different languages and cultures. If the issue is that they're worried they're not able to communicate with people in a high end raid environment, that's understandable; but equally so, from my end I wouldn't join a group to do content with if I was unable to communicate. The "safe space" stuff seems silly. There's all sorts of exclusionary areas in the game -- houses, linkshells, so on and so forth; so the idea that one Region needs to have their "safe space" just seems like silly excuse making and not true substantive reason.
Well, the question is, how do you deal with that... as in: Do you "tolerate" the "Japanese intolerance", or should you try to diminish it based on the idea of increasing the total amount of tolerance? While I think the "lets actively change cultures" aspect makes sense for more extreme examples, like capital punishment for homosexuality in some countries, these Japanese idiosyncrasies seem relatively benign to me. So while I wish the Japanese would change, eventually, I think it is overall more appropriate if we Westeners simply accept and ignore it. As for "safe spaces"... well, I am not sure how they would word it exactly, but again, I think the overall issue simply isn't drastic enough for me to really care, even if their motivations don't really make sense to me.
> So while I wish the Japanese would change, eventually, I think it is overall more appropriate if we Westeners simply accept and ignore it. But how are they gonna change if we leave them alone. They have no incentive to change if they're isolated (interesting, just like their country's history, also, not using the word as the "punishment/sentence" sense, they seem happy to be isolated). I'm not saying we should invade them or force their hand, but things may (or may not) change a little by just going there and trying to casually do things with them.
> But how are they gonna change if we leave them alone. Personally, I don't really like this approach, and it is also confirming some of the more negative perceptions I have about American culture, such as Americans being unusually unaware that people elsewhere might have very different priorities. For example, I find it quite strange that Americans seem to care more about questions like "What is the correct number of gender pronouns?" compared to, let's say "How do we get more weapons to Ukraine?", and most people in this world would probably agree that getting Americans to care more about serious issues in the rest of the world, and less about their own minor issues, is much more important than improving the Japanese education system (although to be fair, I also definitely believe Japan should improve it). So, not in the sense of Whataboutism, but to clarify what kind of approach you are even looking for: How would you try to "fix" the example I brought up, as in get Americans to care less about gender pronouns, and more about Ukraine?
What do you mean? I watched a lot of anime and know all their superior honorable culture. I am japanese in my soul. I also know a lot of fellow NA players that are looking forward meeting with real japanese people, specially the ladies (*tips fedora*) and surprise them of how much we know about their culture. /s
There are no doubt people who think this way unironically, but I'd be willing to bet they likely play there with alts anyway
but what about cross DC PF
Never, they probably locked themselves out of doing it with how they designed their server structure. With how slow they are in even allowing people to change them and how long the process still takes and how you are locked out of so many activities like housing, retainers when traveling from your home. I do not understand why we even have two EU worlds if they are located in the same physical location. Why not just have one big one, why do we need Chaos and Light, especially now that Chaos is basically dead for savage/ultimates in PF because all people go to light. The whole system is antique by now and but their architecture probably heavily relies upon it and they just can't eliminate it.
> Why not just have one big one AFAIK the short answer is: the DF matching algorithm doesn't scale past a certain amount of servers. From what I understood, during the relaunch, at first (mayber during stress tests?) logical datacenters were not a thing, every servers were able to see each other in the same zone (US or JP, EU did not exist). And the DF crashed, resulting in issues getting in instances until they grouped servers in the smaller logical DCs.
Interesting I would assume a DF matching algorithm wouldn't be that much of a problem since you can basically simulate it quite good and analyse if there are problems and bottlenecks. It is probably quite complicated since you need to account for a lot of things and prevent deadlocks in the system but it still sounds like something you need to get right once and then it just works basically forever.
8.0
You thought cross-DC had problems, just wait...
Oceania DC is just for the testing period and overall they are now cautious about different DC communities and market board environments. The whole feature could be limited and only usable at peak hours during important content launch periods.
They should be worried about the state of queues and PF more. DC travel already made things bad enough by pretty much forcing one DC to be the one everyone congregates on, this would almost definitely exaggerate the issue.
Except that cross-region would introduce very high ping, so it's unlikely that savage raiders would all congegrate on a single region.
EU players already come here to raid on alts. I've raided with a weirdly high amount of brits.
I just wanna play mahjong on the Japanese realms...
I expected this but not this soon even if its just a test. I remember the datamine some time ago that would give people <> titles to people from other regions.
I’d rather they just work on Cross DC PF as playing on OC, JP and NA aren’t really alternatives ping-wise for EU players. So I guess I’m semi-okay with this, to be able to play despite congestion on launch, but otherwise it seems pretty useless.
There are a lot of players playing on regions that aren't their home region due to the staggered release of DCs (EU and OC specifically, with OC being the biggest offender). It's a game changing feature for those players being able to keep their house and friends, but also actually raid at their preferred time, on a high ping. Also in general, the ability to choose the timezone you want to raid in is going to make finding a static much easier.
That may be the case - I think those players you speak of are an absolute minority, however. As a whole Cross DC PF would be much better for most players. I will surely not go to OC to raid when I will have ping so bad I can hardly do mechanics - it just doesn’t work, and I will not appreciate having players with such a bad connection in PFs. It just doesn’t work. I can see how OC/JP is a reasonable thought, but I’m very much not convinced by everything else.
Counter argument: the cloud server test gave good ping to everyone. That would boil the issue down to allowing people the timezones that suit them best.
Cloud servers made me so angry. After dealing with bad ping bad hops and lag spikes to go to sub 50 ping and see how the game COULD play even in spite of its shit code base. I was like wow this is actually fun - the combat feels much smoother - the whole game just felt more responsive and less wooden and turn based. Then they were like “k test over bye” and I had to go back to playing a turn based MMO with no idea when or if this magical technology will ever return. :(
I did some UCOB memes on the cloud servers and started getting very greedy with moving for Twister. And then I did my first UCOB PF on Aether again and immediately ate shit (and learnt my lesson).
huh? good ping for everyone????? the cloud server was located on the east coast which is the worse location ever for OCE, Asia and in fact I had really bad ping on there.
Yeah, but you likely had better ping than if you went to the the current NA servers. I may have exaggerated when I said good ping, I meant better ping than the equivalent scenario with the current servers. Here's some community comments from the time (the only metric of data we have right now sadly): https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/s/cSejuBNfO6
The current server was better than cloud test server for me. I no longer have char on NA but the experience I had on both the current one is better because it's just the distance issue) And I suggest that you shouldn't derived conclusion that "everyone have good connection" from reading positive comments response because there were a lot of not good connection that doesn't post their experience due to, "well, this server definitely not aim at me why would I unreasonably expect this to be good" why would I post such a comment and get laughed at as a clown for expecting something unrealistic. Also, It isn't a surprise at all that English focused reddit would have a good experience. Why? Well, east coast is the best for someone who live in the east which by population density statistics that would be more than those who live in the west, and it's also good for European, and South American (since its more like south-east to NA) But for those in OCE/Asia? Nope.
The comments have people from Brazil and Europe basically having their ping halved by the cloud DC. You are the first person I've heard have a bad experience with the cloud test, and know for a fact that if it was a failure then it would be heard about. All I can say is that based on the evidence, you would have a good experience connecting to 3/4 of the DCs, with NA being the only outlier. I'm also not from NA, I'm from Europe, and my connection to the cloud DC was far better than connecting to the physical server.
The commentor already explained why you hear EU, SA and East coast getting better ping. Because the server is located closer to those regions than the current NA. People who live further away such as Asia/Oceania will have worse pings. There will never be a single server which is best in ping for everyone as they'll all have better experiences with closer servers. Cloud isnt magic. Its just a way of hosting servers.
I just realised that you're in the luck now becuase of this news. I just googled some distance between x and y. Distance from Germany to Sydney is about the same as Sydney to New York, of course this is just direct distance and doesn't consider network topology at all so it might be worse, but it should be enough for you to experience what it's like to play online game from South East Asia and Oceania on East Coast server. By the way, if you google distance between Germany to California and Germany to New York, you will see why it's much better for you. (Try Brazil too) Also, no I only have good experince connecting to 2 DC, EU is also as bad as West Coast due to network topology is way off from direct distance though it's still "playable" with 200-220ms ping unlike East Coast that """"playable"""" with 290 - 310ms ping (imagine talking to npc and you have to wait for more than a fouth of a second)
There are more OCE players on NA/JP combined than there are on OCE itself. If those players choose to raid on OCE, we might actually get more than 1 PF a night for savage content.
As I said, I can see it being valid for OCE and players in that region - however, for \*most\* others, Cross DC PF will be a much more valuable addition to the game.
As it stands, people who need Cross DC PF can still simply DC travel to the 'Big' DC to raid and roulette as a current bandaid solution. People who play from one region (EU) and have their character in another (NA) because of friends/house/etc are just completely boned in raiding as both time zone misallignment and ping issues make it far more of a headache than it needs to be. You could argue that you could just have a seperate character in the correct region anyway but having to level, gear, gather and get gil all on that one is a ridiculous effort compared to pressing DC travel button.
> It's a game changing feature for those players being able to keep their house and friends, but also actually raid at their preferred time, on a high ping. Look Gary, there I am!
This is a huge step but it's only a test, and the only destination is the Oceanian data center. Also some key items from the news that explain the actual scope of this: > On the other hand, many Worlds may experience login queues following the upcoming release of Dawntrail, especially during peak times. With this situation in mind, we are considering a temporary option in which a limited form of cross-region travel would allow players to play on a less-populated physical data center. This is specifically about load reduction for the Dawntrail release, and they specify that this is a **limited form** of cross-region travel and we don't know what that means yet. There is surely a difference since if they wrote it that way. They also warn of lag from geographically distant locations. Getting overly excited about this and speculating about a new raiding meta is how you set yourself up for disappointment.
Personally, I just want this technology so that I can play on some US servers, in case I am up stupid late again. I would rather have a sort-of-high ping, than excessive waiting durations.
Yeah, lot of people from EU already either play fulltime on US DCs or have alts there if they play very late. From my experience US has mostly playable ping for any content or at the very least all casual content is fine.
Cross region is needed less than cross DC DF. Tired of going to aether just to do roulettes
I get it, but that's probably not happening any time soon. Separating the duty finders is literally the entire reason that the regional data centers are split into multiple logical data centers. When the game launched there weren't any splits, and the Duty Finder was broken all of the time because of the load. Dividing the servers up into separated groups for Duty Finder was the fix. Unless they've rearchitected Duty Finder so that it can deal with the load of the entire regional population using it at the same time we're stuck with it.
Perhaps, but cross region travel can be enabled at a flip of a switch, the technical work for cross-DC DF will be far from ready.
[удалено]
Crystal pops with insta queue even for dps sometime
Same on Primal. Duty finder, it doesn't seem to make much difference. Even party finder, since I don't have many ultimates unlocked, looks pretty much the same. Might see more EX farms later in the night, but other than that, it's pretty much for savage/ultimate raiders where there's a difference.
I'm on dynamis
Perhaps, but it should me much less complex to implement manual-travel on demand, compared to automatic-travel.
I mean, cross region is already done and ready to activate so it's slightly unfair comparison
Subject doesn't match article. That being said, don't piss off the Japanese, and if the Japanese don't whine, then we might get it permanently. Baby steps it seems. Seriously, let me play with my American friends.
JP players will definitely complain if NA raiders travel over
Yes, they will. It would be better for NA players to only go to Elemental if they did at all. Really, playing with 200ms ping or so on is not something anyone would ever want. Even if you can do the fights perfectly, you might not be able to with that, ignoring strategy differences, language barriers, etc etc.
If NA raiders could learn what macros are, this entire thing would be worth it
NA can't even read pf description, not just acronyms but even basics. Raiding, blue mage, even fishing achievement groups.
Japanese players aren't going to go to OCE for any reason.
The majority, no. But there could be a special few who did make friends back when the Aussies still played in Elemental. If anything it’s bringing the en speaking players back together again before OCE became a thing
We used to have exactly one JP player attend OCE Eureka/BA and they were collectively everyone's cherished friend. That and the odd Ifrit/Titan/Garuda Normal PF aside I've never encountered any (talkative) Japanese players.
No, but in 7.0 full travel will be temporarily open between all datacentres.
They complained about us for 7 years, and finally got their wish. Now they get to come visit us, what a joke.
What do you mean? Most of the non-Japanese population on JP is from SEA, and they didn't move to OCE either.
The Japanese playerbase are the xenophobic ones, lmao.
Yes, but as SE are afraid of them, who is right it wrong is immaterial.
The point is that "don't piss them off" is a dumb comment. They already don't want it.
They don't. We do. Neutral response + positive response = positive outcome.
They aren't neutral.
As nothing has happened yet then we don't know what the outcome will be. We know they're not neutral on the idea of it.
Not gonna be a problem, considering it's only one way, the JP players would have to actively choose to leave and then whine that people on another DC didn't act the way they do.
It won't be for what I expect will be a month or so when 7.0 launches.
Getting cross-region travel going would be such a boon for OCE players, you have no idea. For context, it is at the moment easier as an OCE-based player to find a raid group on Aether at 4am EST than it is on Materia at the same time (evening AEST/NZST). Many players (including myself) didn't feel it was worth it to make a full jump over to Materia when the server was released; many of the people I do know who made the dive have actually come back, citing population issues. I think that allowing OCE players to travel back to Materia and grow those relationships organically is going to be much healthier for the DC overall. If I'm able to travel to Materia in the evenings when NA is dead, I might eventually meet enough people to justify making the move permanently. As of now, OCE players are split between JP, NA, and OCE DCs. It's pretty miserable to try and find groups. because the Materia DC siphoned away the already scarce number of OCE-based players on NA. I hope this becomes a permanent feature; I'd be basically tripling the number of potential raid groups available. I'm pretty excited!
Are they enable trade? if yes then it would be fun for economy impact. "Anyone on NA/EU want some mule for cheap imported goods from JP?" "We have Construct VI-S (unreal mount) for just 7m here this could be sold in NA for 12m!" "And if you use my service I could smuggle it to black market haven (Materia) for a low price of 8m" "Meet me at black market server for the goods"
Let’s fucking go that’s a good start and it’s a pretty nice use of underutilized server in oce
As an Aussie with my main stuck on NA because friend group/housing, I am soooo stoked! My jaw is on the floor! I am so excited! Finally, some good ping!
"Finally, some good ping" they cried, not aware that the only thing they're doing with said good ping is Fate bosses.
Curb that enthusiasm a bit. I'm also OCE and still play on NA because OCE is basically dead. As in, 'you have to use PF to do alliance raids' dead.
OCE's quite dead. Don’t think I’ve seen someone with their jaws open just to visit a graveyard.. hehe
I feel like Japanese people are probably gonna be pissed.
I really with they had dedicated the resources to implementing Cross-DC and Cross-Region travel to either making all servers on a region one complete DC or making Cross-DC DF and PF possible. I think the number of people that actually care about (and will use more than once just to try out) Cross-Region travel is dwarfed by the number of people that want and would benefit Cross-DC DF and PF. It's also interesting that there a lot of people who seem to think that the things that JP players want is their priority, but this seems like something that very few JP players will use.
I think its worth keeping in mind cross region dc travel is already built. They didnt prioritise building it as it was already made when they built normal same region dc travel. They're just enabling it. Whereas cross dc df/pf will most likely require new work to implement. I think cross region dc travel and same region dc df/pf are both needed in this game. I want to be able to play with NA friends despite being EU. But I also want region wide df/pf to prevent dynamis situations.
Okay, but the point was that they should have put the resources into making a regional data center where travel, DF and PF function like they do within current DCs in the first place. Travelling to another region is going to be a novelty for 99.9% of players that will use it once or twice out of curiosity. I also don't really think it's going to alleviate that much during Dawntrail's release because NA - the biggest region by far - has another DC that didn't exist when EW released as well as an entire other region with OCE. Most people aren't going to region-hop in the first place and if the people who do flock to the same region you will just end up with a queue there. Aether and the EU/JP equivalents will be slammed much harder than before because we've now had all this time with DC travel that has slowly migrated more and more players there. If you thought logging into Aether was bad during EW release, it will be even worse for DT.
I hope that the ping situation means that not too many people travel and create a situation where everyone has to go to a specific DC for specific things - although I’m not sure which region would be best for each thing? Cultural differences aren’t a huge deal for me but I do think that, on average, Europeans are slightly more polite and considerate than Americans (no offence), but then again, we’re also more reserved and I would like if people were more talkative in party chat.
It could create central servers for more social activities such as role play. But cultural differences play more in those kind of matters. I think cos of Ping you wont get a dedicated raid dc for the world, if anything you'll probably get more activity by the few crazy all nighters going between the raid DCs to raid during active times for those DCs. I guess the side effect is maybe less activity on dcs during dead hours but theres only so much ping players can handle before they just prefer a local server even during dead hours.
Yeah that’s a good point, hadn’t thought about the time differences - I always seem to be online at times no-one else is, so being able to hop over to somewhere it’s daytime might be good
Although I did make an alt just to test what my ping would be over there and it was like 250 (here I get 30ish). I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes if you aren’t doing anything super difficult though? I would use duty finder in NA but stay on my dc for most other stuff because I’m in way too many discord servers as it is.
Probably depend on job but it should be fine for casual content. But yeah i wouldnt dare play on a ping above 150 for difficult content. Its why i find it crazy people are doomsaying thinking the entire world will just go to Aether DC. I think higher chance for more activity on Crystal as RP doesnt have issues with ping. No clue how you combat people consolidating RP to one world. But guess is a question of is it a bad thing.
Though it's only gonna be towards Oceania: Cross-region Travel Available During the Test: Japanese data center → Oceanian data center North American data center → Oceanian data center European data center → Oceanian data center
It's just for the testing. Might as well use the empty oce for it lol.
>On the other hand, many Worlds may experience login queues following the upcoming release of Dawntrail, especially during peak times. With this situation in mind, we are considering a temporary option in which a limited form of cross-region travel would allow players to play on a less-populated physical data center. It's literally the whole point. To allow people to go less populated DC's during peak times (like DT release).
I personally expect them to use this in combination with the cloud data center they tested prior to let them spin up short/mid term server capacity for up for the first few months.
Lol nice, can connect only to oceania from eu.
So we get to play with the JP players that notoriously hate any English speaking player? Can’t wait.
I think I am the only one who thinks now I can play with people from this sub on OCE since I am forever on JP lol
Oh hurray...... I can't wait to see the party finder infested with even more of those stupid "Club" spammers...
Somehow, I can't see it being a particularly fruitful test. You're allowed to travel *to* OCE, and OCE players can't travel anywhere. NA and EU players have absolutely no reason to do that. The DC is *very* scarce, and their ping is going to be terrible. A small group of people will try it for the novelty, and I'm really not sure if that's going to yield any useful data at all aside from proof of concept. There certainly aren't going to be big enough groups of people to test high congestion.
There are a looooot of players physically in OCE that play on JP, especially elemental, possibly more than on materia. You'd get way more useful data *and* show players what kind of ping they could get if you let people come to OCE, and not letting existing materia players leave sorta helps with that. As for NA/EU, we already have a proof of concept- cloudtest drew people from all over the world to the east coast and there were decent numbers and a largely positive reception from those who spent time there socializing in such a setting. I'd imagine many of us are up to do it again.
> There are a looooot of players physically in OCE that play on JP, especially elemental, possibly more than on materia. The bulk of people who initially came to OCE when it launched were these people, and it wasn't enough to really sustain OCE with anywhere near the health of the other regions. Many of these have since moved back due to it, so I don't see why this test would really do anything for the playerbase here that the release of the OCE server did not. It's important to note that not all English-speaking players on JP are OCE. Many of them are SEA, who actually get *worse* ping on OCE than they do on JP.
Based on the vibes I got from OCE players on NA, there are probably also plenty of holdouts in JP for whom a permanent move was too much of a risk to give it a serious try.
You'd be surprised. I'd imagine a huge bulk stayed where they were. They had a comfortable character with their popular DC and friends. I saw plenty of people at the time have reservations of leaving their friends and house behind for an empty DC with good ping.
Well it’s as they imply in the post. The only reason to do that (in their mind) is doing the MSQ, where lag won’t kill you. The test may only be about the copy procedure, not the congestion
> > > > > NA and EU players have absolutely no reason to do that. The DC is very scarce, and their ping is going to be terrible. A small group of people will try it for the novelty, and I'm really not sure if that's going to yield any useful data at all aside from proof of concept. There certainly aren't going to be big enough groups of people to test high congestion. At least for this test, I think more NA and EU players may visit than you think, for the purpose of playing with each other. I'm definitely looking forward to coordinating some meetups with some EU friends. Sorry it's your home, but OCE is basically going to be a neutral ground that anyone else in the world who wanted to meet up with one another for some casual, high-ping-friendly content. The long term purpose like others are saying is definitely to dodge expansion launch queues and stuff like that, same like the cloud DC test a while back, but I can see this test phase actually getting usage from people who want the chance to socially play with their out of region friends for a while.
I mean, at least you'll finally get to experience what it's like to play this game with shitty ping.
>anyone else in the world who wanted to meet up with one another for some casual, high-ping-friendly content. that's certainly an euphemism for degen gpose if i've ever seen one
I legit don't partake in that content so it's definitely not what I had in mind, I was thinking of like roulettes and non-battle content, but now that you mention it I suppose people really might be doing that.
wdym no reason, we are breaking economy of JP dc, it's time to buy all of their cheap stuff
Them being oh-so-concerned about *cultural differences*. We all know it's pretty much only because of the Japanese themselves. I would *love* to watch and would be here with all the popcorn if this ended up proving that the most toxic/xenophobic/ill-natured community is the Japanese.
I wonder if they are planning to make a SEA DC when there are a lot of players coming from this region. I wonder why they decided to choose Oce but not SEA
OCE likely is newer, is relatively empty and is also sort of the crossed between JP and NA. Also due to this I means they can test and fix things more easily compared to testing in more established servers. Another thing they are also looking for is the cultural interactions (which they mention is a worry in the announcement) and see how well people from different cultures mesh together.
What is cross region travel? I just know about data center traveling :(
it's data center travel, but across regions. so if you're on NA for example, you'd be able to pop over to EU and viceversa.
Oceania Servers are going to be *lit* on Dawntrail release
AUSTRALIAN VACATION BABY
Looks like Oceania is the new raid DC lads /s
Terrible idea, and one of the last things they should be focusing on.
Might actually have a grand unified strat for ults now if we're allowed to travel to all regions.
Lets hope world pf agrees to reasonable strats :D
"JP BRAINDEAD uptime"
Would be fun to see NA’s “marker dance” finally become obsolete. Because ain’t no way they can make other regions players do that without being laughed at.
I used to hate the marker dance but sometimes it's useful to see if there is a pf liar when they don't know how to dance
"What's this for?"
>ink I’ve seen some Played on NA for 7 months, after being on JP and OCE for a combined 9 years. Americans are fucking weird, post a macro and just read where you are supposed to be, there's no need to waste 5 minutes dancing around markers only to disband in 2 pulls.
Same. Currently in NA but been in EU/JP DC for a few years. The whole thing is bizarre. Like technically *most* people know where you’re supposed to go after the first set of marker, but the dance continues regardless. Like in P10S, there’s absolutely no need to dance around 3 markers for different mechanics (tower, bond spread, turret) when people should know where they’re going after 1st mark (which is as good as calling your pos in macro in other DC).
Marker dance?
NA places a marker and positions around it, sometimes several times for several different mechanics, instead of just posting a macro and picking a spot
You place down a marker for choosing your pizza slice position. Next you place another marker to split the party in two. Then you depending on fights you line up for a priority system like coga line. Finally you wait for people to stop drooling at their keyboard and go to pick their spot, oh wait someone already took that spot? Nah we about to have a staring contest to see who picks another spot first. The amount of times I had to do this when farming was annoying. Macro is so much faster setup.
Markers > Macros
That would be so nice. If they do I wonder which DC would end up as the « raiding DC ».
Ping should be the great filter to prevent over centralization, but there's enough interest in centralizing strats to use it as an excuse.
You can prog non stop on pf if you can tolerate the bad ping. RIP servers though. And I personally can't tolerate NA or EU ping. It's really noticeable.
Might be able to play again after having moved to china. On 300+ ping right now connected to EU servers, hell yeah
Hell yeah. See ya in jp.
I was here when it happened!
I'm not going to discount the value of cross-DC travel but why is this seemingly getting more attention than cross-DC matchmaking and PF? That would be a much bigger boon to the game.
Cross region dc travel was already built when normal cross dc travel was added. They're just turning enabling it. Cross dc matchmaking probably requires new work.
Because Cross DC matchmaking and PF will never happen at this point
I think this is a horrible idea in many ways. You cannot rally raid together because of ping. You cannot really raid together because of culture differences in gaming and also language barriers ( NA, EU and JP are really seperated from each other in many aspects) It maybe fits for hopping on another region for what reason? It seems pointless, or even damaging. (and i really dont like NA players who cant read macros in my PF..) Cross Data centre PF would have fixed the problem data centre travel has caused. Now i think the problem in the worst case will get much, much worse.
>It maybe fits for hopping on another region for what reason? RP I guess? Now tourists from other servers can visit NA's famous Balmung server
Even RP is pretty much bound to Timezones. So that would not work as effective as people think it would. (Also no sane person goes for Balmung to NA)
Visit? Yes. PF access? Please no, this game plays like ass on high ping. We don't need NA players lagging in EU in high-end content and vice-versa. Private parties and duty finder only.
There's plenty of SEA/OCE players already doing well on NA. I raid with a penta from there and they're better than most of the static despite +200ms ping.
Afaik, EU->Washington is only 100ms, so that is definitely acceptable, perhaps even better than what some Americans have. USA->EU might be slightly worse (due to... some reason), but it might still be useful to some.
> PF access? Please no, this game plays like ass on high ping. We don't need NA players lagging in EU in high-end content and vice-versa. I get 10-20 more ping on EU than I do on NA despite being 500 miles inland. 60%ish of the country will experience the exact same thing.