This week for Final Fantasy Friday I'll share with you some more relics from the past of FFXIV. The game has gone through many changes since it's start, and it's not just new territories, new skills and job reworks, but also lots of quality of life changes.

If you want to hear the full lesson, you can listen to it from Larryzaur in the video above where he talks about how some things were 10 years ago in A Realm Reborn (ARR). Some of its content you have already heard from me in detail and through my own experiences.

The part I would like to highlight today, is a feature which we take for granted these days: the comfort of Duty Finder.

What is the Duty Finder?

You can open the Duty Finder from the game menu, it will list all dungeons and raids which you have unlocked, and you can just sign up for one or more, and the system will find a group for you. Queue times might be longer or shorter, depending on your job role or how popular the duty is. Back in ARR, raids were not available via the Duty Finder, you had to physically go to the entrance of the raid to get in.

Currently Duty Finder will match you with people from all servers within your data center, but this was not always the case. Duty Finder used to be on your own server only, so on each data center there was usually a raiding server. If you were not on that server, you would very much struggle to find a group.

It might sound very inconvenient compared to how things are now, but it also helped to form a stronger raiding community. There used to be Free Companies (guilds) which focused on raiding, so if you got into one, you definitely had your raid group sorted.

Data Center Travel

While we still don't have a Duty Finder which would match you with people from other data centers in your region, at least we have data center travel, which allows players to temporarily visit other data centers in their region, giving a bigger freedom in which server you want to play on whilst also being able to join any raid group in your region.

As some data centers are less populated, you might struggle with finding a group via the Duty Finder here, so people often travel to another data center not just for raids, but even for casual dungeons or to find a group for some of the open-world activities.

It would be great to get a cross-data center Duty Finder one day, which would help even out the population on different data centers in a region.

Community differences

Raiders are nice people, right? Well, sadly not all of them. They can often be impatient or demanding towards casual players and get angry or upset quickly when someone makes a mistake in something which might be trivial for a raider but not for someone still learning the game.

As someone who was characters on multiple servers across various data centers I have noticed that on those servers which used to be the raiding server on the data center I more often encounter toxic behaviour. Many years have been passed since ARR, people moved around to new servers, why does the old atmosphere of a server still hold then? Is it just coincidence or is it something people keep up because that's what they saw when they started to play, but don't really know why that behaviour is common?

How much time has to pass for a community to change?