If you are not familiar with it, FFXIV has data centers (DC) in North America, Europe, Japan and a fairly recent addition, Oceania. Each DC is home to multiple servers and apart from Oceania which only has one DC, each region has multiple DC. In ancient times to be able to join duties with other players you had to be on the same server. So all the raiders were gathering on a few dedicated servers and if you wanted to raid, that's where you made your character or you had trouble finding a group.
Then came the update of being able to travel between servers in the same DC and even when you queue up for a duty, it will throw in people from servers in your DC, making queue times a lot shorter and having the perks of hopping around the servers if you are on a shopping trip and things are cheaper on other servers than yours. Not to mention the hunt trains, which are organised runs of hunting down the open-world notorious monsters upon spawn and the train goes from server to server, it's great fun!
Recently we got the possibility of traveling between DCs in our region, giving us even more possibilities for the above activities. When you queue up for a duty, it still only matches you with players from your own DC, but maybe one day we will get this expanded too. When this system got introduced we were told that they have the possibility of cross-region DC travel (if you can't follow me, I'll put it simple, you could travel from Europe DC to North America DC and play with the people there) but they were reluctant to introduce this as different regions have different cultures (especially Japan, but as someone who plays both on EU and NA DC, there are differences between these 2 as well) and they were not sure how these would match.
Starting next week until the release of Dawtrail we are getting a limited cross-region DC travel to trial and based on feedback from this they want to introduce the feature from Dawntrail, mostly to help players spread out between all available servers and help with the queue times. Here is the article if you want to read it:
To sum it up, everyone will be able to travel to Oceania DC, but not to other DCs.
My initial thought (and many creators' who I follow) was yay this is great I can play with my friends, and I can get stuff over to my alt on the other DC, and yay I can play with more people from my stream community and help newbies everywhere! And not to mention how amazing it would be if in one region the servers are congested, you can just hop over to the other side of the world where people are asleep so you get shorter queue to log in (in exchange for a higher ping)
But not everyone in the community is taking this so happily. The system shines light to some issues which absolutely need addressing before they would implement this permanently (and I think this is why they let people go to one place but not everywhere). And I must stress that these issues and concerns are absolutely fair and valid, but I was pretty shocked by how a certain part of the community just straight away declared that the whole idea is bad and they shouldn't be doing it.
The main concern is around harassment and stalking. FFXIVs block system is not the best and without going into too much detail the main issue is if you remove someone from your friend list you still remain on theirs, and they will see your location so they can come to you, go into your house and all you can do is block them so you don't see what they are saying but you still see them and can be followed around by them, and even changing your name won't help because they can still track you.
The other concern is that already less-populated servers can become even more deserted than they are now, because everyone will try to flock to the more preferred server for the activities they like to do, let that be RP, raiding, party houses or whatever. (imho this is already happening with server travel and DC travel, the cross-region travel won't make it worse)
I will write another post on what this whole thing made me think about the structure of the FFXIV community as this post is already possibly the longest I have ever written :D but would really love to hear your thoughts on it, especially if you have similar systems in other MMOs.
Is it a good thing to let people travel freely and play with whoever they want from the wider community?
My solution to this would be, and possibly this is what SE is leaning towards as well to create a hub DC where everyone can travel to and play together, but those who don't want to participate are safe back in their own servers without strangers coming in and impacting their culture and everyday life they got used to.
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