I wanted to share some feedback on how DC travel is affecting the game experience for individual players and for FCs.
I’m an admin of an FC on Crystal, and since DC travel was introduced, a lot of our more active members have had to start traveling to Aether just to do current savage content. Crystal party finder for savage is effectively dead, and it’s now near impossible to fill groups without traveling to Aether. I know that Crystal is not known as a raiding DC, but prior to DC travel, it was possible to prog in party finder.
There’s the added issue of the preferred progging DC becoming quickly congested, meaning players often have to move our characters over hours early, losing even more time with our FC communities and for accessing home world features. My group has had to cancel a planned prog session multiple times because one or more members of the small group intended to prog together was unable to get into Aether.
The frustration with these problems comes up in most pf groups I play with on Aether. I’ve seen the same things brought up repeatedly in FFXIV social media spaces from players on JP and EU DCs, which means it’s a game-wide issue rather than an NA-specific one.
On top of that, competitive PVP is intentionally siloed onto one regional DC at a time, which again encourages DC travel if you want to access that content.
The end result of all of this is that players often have to choose:
A) Staying on their home world to interact with their FC and use home world features
OR
B) Traveling to another DC to actually participate in the content they want to play
In practice, this creates a lot of friction. When people are progging savage in PF, there are often long waits where you’re just sitting around on another DC without access to retainers or other home world features that would normally help pass the time.
For our FC specifically, this has led to us being much less active on our home world. Members are online, but spread across DCs depending on what they’re doing. It ends up feeling fragmented, and social interaction within the FC has definitely taken a hit. We’ve also seen some members become less engaged, take breaks, or quit altogether, largely because the social experience they joined for feels absent. Those who are progging are online less often because they don't want to do casual content while isolated but have to move their character over to Aether hours early.
I get that DC travel was added as an intended improvement, and in some ways it is, but it’s also pushed content and social interaction/community into competition with one another instead of being complementary core elements of the game.
Please find a way to solve for this, whether through a cross-DC party finder, better support for maintaining social and FC functionality while traveling, or other systemic adjustments that allow players to engage in content without being separated from their home communities.
Continue reading...
I’m an admin of an FC on Crystal, and since DC travel was introduced, a lot of our more active members have had to start traveling to Aether just to do current savage content. Crystal party finder for savage is effectively dead, and it’s now near impossible to fill groups without traveling to Aether. I know that Crystal is not known as a raiding DC, but prior to DC travel, it was possible to prog in party finder.
There’s the added issue of the preferred progging DC becoming quickly congested, meaning players often have to move our characters over hours early, losing even more time with our FC communities and for accessing home world features. My group has had to cancel a planned prog session multiple times because one or more members of the small group intended to prog together was unable to get into Aether.
The frustration with these problems comes up in most pf groups I play with on Aether. I’ve seen the same things brought up repeatedly in FFXIV social media spaces from players on JP and EU DCs, which means it’s a game-wide issue rather than an NA-specific one.
On top of that, competitive PVP is intentionally siloed onto one regional DC at a time, which again encourages DC travel if you want to access that content.
The end result of all of this is that players often have to choose:
A) Staying on their home world to interact with their FC and use home world features
OR
B) Traveling to another DC to actually participate in the content they want to play
In practice, this creates a lot of friction. When people are progging savage in PF, there are often long waits where you’re just sitting around on another DC without access to retainers or other home world features that would normally help pass the time.
For our FC specifically, this has led to us being much less active on our home world. Members are online, but spread across DCs depending on what they’re doing. It ends up feeling fragmented, and social interaction within the FC has definitely taken a hit. We’ve also seen some members become less engaged, take breaks, or quit altogether, largely because the social experience they joined for feels absent. Those who are progging are online less often because they don't want to do casual content while isolated but have to move their character over to Aether hours early.
I get that DC travel was added as an intended improvement, and in some ways it is, but it’s also pushed content and social interaction/community into competition with one another instead of being complementary core elements of the game.
Please find a way to solve for this, whether through a cross-DC party finder, better support for maintaining social and FC functionality while traveling, or other systemic adjustments that allow players to engage in content without being separated from their home communities.
Continue reading...