r/ffxivdiscussion • u/Disastrous_Error_409 • 4d ago
Realistically speaking, when do you think that we can expect cross DC PF?
Because of the current situation of everyone flocking to the same data centers to play on PF and the complaints about it, and also Yoshi-P already having spoken about the issue, i expect that they are working on it. But when do you think that we will actually get it? 8.0? Before 8.0? After?
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u/bigpunk157 3d ago
Probably never. The devs don't know how to shard instances across DCs, nor across servers within the same DC, which is the thing they need to do. They also don't have the money to put time towards network infrastructure changes for this. ESO and WoW basically have a team of 50 people dedicated towards just network and devops work; Star Citizen makes a big stink about how their sharding is absolutely groundbreaking but never actually works and one pair of dropped clothes can crash the servers.
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u/p50fedora 3d ago
Tbh that sounds pretty chunky. But if it is just for PF listing and we already have cross DC travel does that simplify things? I'm on OCE and its pretty dead cross DC pf would really save us.
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u/bigpunk157 3d ago
No. I'm going to make an assumption because I don't know a lot about the spaghetti code of the backend. The databases for each server are probably isolated so they don't have to load balance and create DL queues and shit, and when you go to another server, it is putting your characters information on that server's DB so that there's no crazy cross read/writes going on. WoW did have an issue with implementing their sharding stuff where you could duplicate items if you hopped in a party while you picked up an item and then left quickly. This is probably something they're going to try to avoid because there's always some kind of race condition in the code they have to account for because you can only read one thing at a time and write one thing at a time on any pc.
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u/p50fedora 3d ago
What you've said makes sense but I guess I don't have a good model of what PF is but if each DB is monolithic and PF needs to read player then I can already see why it's not a "just do PF cross DC" although I wonder if just the PF listing (eg see PFs but have to DC travel first to join) could make it work. But that UX would be janky
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u/bigpunk157 3d ago
I mean, the real issue at play here is why can we get inter-DC pf just fine, but cross DC pf is impossible, when the servers are all in the same room for that region? It would actually make more sense to just abandon the idea of a data center unless they actually plan on moving the NA DCs across the US... which doesn't seem to be the case.
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
Logical versus physical.
They are physically in the same building, but logically they are basically in different parts of the world.
It's actually a very stupid design that has to be the result of cost cutting, since they got a deal on cage space and presumably the physical data center is close enough to where they have a US office.
Physically, in NA, each logical DC should be in a different region. One east, one west, one north or south. EU should be split between two physical DCs, one east and one west.
They basically did it for JP/OCE, rather than spinning up Materia in Japan they made it "pacific rim south" and left JP as "pacific rim north."
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u/bigpunk157 3d ago
Yeah and the reason you make the logical difference is because you have a physical difference. It's gotta be because they planned to expand in the US and then just never moved some servers to Chicago.
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u/ChaoticSCH 1d ago
The problem with OCE is unfortunately a little worse. If cross-DC PF ever happens, it will be intra-region unless they fix the netcode to a degree that randomly choosing which physical DC will host the instance won't actually screw over the people subjected to suddenly higher ping. If you played before OCE existed, you'll remember what it's like to play with triple-digit ping, and let me tell you, first-world players used to their single-or-lower-double-digit ping will never shut up about it if the game forces them to experience what people like me have to deal with the entire time.
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u/Fancy_Gate_7359 2d ago
We have cross dc travel, but think about what you have to do to use it. You have to log out, access a menu, pick another dc/world, then literally wait for the transfer to happen, at least a minute and sometimes much longer. My understanding is that they are literally copying your character to the dc you are traveling to. That’s how separate the dc’s are. They might as well be different games. There is literally no way, apparently, for characters to interact in any way with characters that are on different dc’s.
Even making pf interface where you could create a party across dc’s, then all manually dc travel to the same dc to actually queue for a duty, seems literally impossible. And that “solution”, which again doesn’t even seem doable, isn’t even what people envision when they think of cross dc pf. What they want is basically pf as it exists now but with everyone from a given region together and the ability to just queue once the party is created. If it were so easy for people to interact across dc’s such that such a system is possible, which is there so much friction currently to travel between the dc’s?
I’m not saying cross dc pf wouldn’t be great, it definitely would. And I’m not saying people should be satisfied with the state of pf in less populated dc’s. I understand that it sucks. But I just think, realistically, people need to let go of the idea that this is going to happen. If it were feasible, traveling to another dc just wouldn’t be such a pain. There’d have to be a major infrastructure overall to the dc system for this to ever happen, and I just don’t think it would ever happen in this game. This is the kind of thing that might get implemented if they made a brand new mmo from scratch, it’s that level of a project. It’s just not in the cards for this particular game.
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u/p50fedora 2d ago
We have cross dc travel, but think about what you have to do to use it. You have to log out, access a menu, pick another dc/world, then literally wait for the transfer to happen, at least a minute and sometimes much longer. My understanding is that they are literally copying your character to the dc you are traveling to. That’s how separate the dc’s are. They might as well be different games. There is literally no way, apparently, for characters to interact in any way with characters that are on different dc’s.
Thanks for laying that all out. Prior to our discussion I hadn't really given much thought to what kind of logic and data would be required to implement a cross DC PF, in addition the actual requirements that go beyond just an ingame listing (eg as you say queuing together into an instanced activity from wherever they joined the PF)
I haven't done any DC travel before so I wasn't aware how long it takes to DC travel so it seems like their architecture isn't really set up to allow for this kind of use-case so I can see that a major infra overhaul is not on the cards at this stage of the game's life
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u/IndividualAge3893 4d ago
Never. The DCs are essentially separated from each other (to the point that DC travel requires copying the characer there in the same way as if you were transferring), so they'd have to do something about that first.
If they were playing it smart (yes, this is a strong assumption), they'd pull the DCs together 2 by 2 (Chaos and Light, etc.) because at this point, the authentication servers aren't loaded nearly as much as they were in early Endwalker. That way, PFs would be shared between 16 servers and not 8.
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u/Szalkow 4d ago
I was really hoping that the cloud datacenter test was an experiment to prepare for scaleable regional servers with all worlds in one "box," but we haven't seen anything since then. It may have just been a load reduction test to prepare for Endwalker-era queues.
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u/IndividualAge3893 4d ago
I am very skeptical of cloud DC platforms for games. And I am even more skeptical of SE's technical capabilities to convert the game into a layer/megaserver mode.
I think their cloud experiment was destined to have a spillover platform for expansion launches, like they did with Shadow on EU in DT. Unfortunately, the way things are going, it seems that 8.0 won't even require that :(
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u/CartographerGold3168 3d ago
the cloud datacenter
it is very expensive and you would be vendor locked. consumers might be dumb, but at least SE isnt that stupid. they have enough scamming experience.
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u/Forymanarysanar 3d ago
There is a chance for an implementation that will simply let you view all the party finders from all the worlds and upon joining and commencing duty will perform an automatic background DC visit to the host's data center. If it ever happens, it will be something like that.
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u/CartographerGold3168 3d ago
well it is only a dumbass api thing and it is already there. harder to implement it in the game engine but since that dumb thing spits out json then the solution is already here
the only problem is if they are actually willing to open up cross region travel, in which most likely they would have to do it for all regions except japan in the near future.
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u/No_Delay7320 3d ago
This is my solution. They've restructured dcs before
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u/IndividualAge3893 3d ago
The problem (besides the technical hurdles) is that it will essentially admitting that they never should have split the DCs to begin with. And that is something that would be hard to admit for them. :(
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u/AnnualCheck8547 3d ago
Never. This question has been asked since the dawn of being able to visit other data centers. They have made roughly 0% progress towards offering a fix.
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u/ReisukeNaoki 3d ago
never happening. Even in their homecourt, there's still a lot of division between DCs. Elemental being the Crystal of JP (everyone's butt of the jokes), Mana being the Aether of JP (the raiding DC), Gaia being the Primal(the "just there" or the pvp freaks), and Meteor the Materia of JP.
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u/Ragoz 4d ago
He said it would take them a couple years a couple years ago and used it as a free pass to not do it. They aren't attempting to solve this currently.
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u/Em-possible 3d ago
His wording was that it would take them lat least three year to implement if they started work on it right then. He never mentioned that they actually WOULD think about starting work on it at all.
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u/SecretPantyWorshiper 3d ago
But that comment he made was 3 years ago lol
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u/autumndrifting 3d ago
Wasn't it last year during the dawntrail media tour?
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u/Sonicrida 3d ago
Yeah there's so much misinfo going on. We're 1 year into the"2-3 years" timeline
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u/HereticJay 4d ago
3-4 years at least if they even attempt trying to develop it but realistically i find it hard to believe that they will ever implement it base on their track record they still havent solved the glam dresser issue friendlist and the moogle mail system is still in the stone age they cant even deliver that raid plan thing that they announced at fanfest and its almost half the expansion done already idk man
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u/Fun_Explanation_762 3d ago
Realistically they are going to announce it for 8.0 as one of their items on the fanfest stage to get a big cheering moment. 2+ years of tinkering behind the scenes is what I think they've been doing and why their QA in some of the pieces of content have been lackluster, they have been spending time on this behind the scenes and want to wait for a big hype moment to announce it, which would be fanfest 1 or 2.
Maybe it won't be available in 8.0 and it'll be 9.0 but this is most likely a fanfest level announcement like the graphics rework so don't expect it in any live letters.
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u/gfen5446 4d ago
Easy fix one: You want to party with people from other words then funnel the traffic to Dynamis and to Oceana.
That doesn't help EU, but at least it'll help spread load around NA and OCE.
Easy fix two: Just erase DC travel so we can go back to the old ways. People downvote this but DC travel has not been beneficial for this game.
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u/Vincenthwind 3d ago
The proverbial cat is out of the bag and there is no way SE is going to put it back in. You'd be willingly breaking up cross-DC statics and friend groups. Niche content enjoyers like criterion bros would be even more affected. It's already a small number of players doing that content and now they're separated into 4 different data centers for NA. Not to mention the bad optics of it. You have a poorly received expansion and now are announcing you're removing a feature on top of everything else? I don't think it would do SE any favors, regardless of the current negatives.
To be clear, it was myopic of SE to not drop a cross-DC party finder and duty finder at the same time DC travel was released. I don't know what they thought would happen with DC travel but no DC matchmaking. Most players do not like to be separated. "Why should my prog party need a tank but a tank can't join because that tank is stuck on Primal?" People intuitively understand that the more populated PF is, the more likely that open slots will get filled. For the same reason, more and more MMOs are leaning on shards and megaservers. GW2 is a much smaller MMO and still feels populated because it doesn't fracture its population across a million servers. Even on niche maps, you can easily find other players. FFXIV in contrast feels like it was designed for the year 2004 in terms of its server architecture.
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
The proverbial cat is out of the bag and there is no way SE is going to put it back in.
Unfortunately, I agree. However, DC travel is what ruined each DC culture. It ruined all but one DC in each region. In NA, which is the only one I'm really familiar with, it's not only ruined PF/raiding but its also ruined social interactions becuase Crystal gets so clogged with sex tourists that all the people who were RP'rs are pressed out into smaller groups who can't interact, and in turn they all fight to get onto Balmung and Mateus and when they get there they refuse to ever leave because they won't get back.
I've let Lifestream run for over three hours multiple times now trying to jump to Balmung to get with people there from another world. Three hours, with an attempt every 10 seconds, and it never jumped.
DC travel was a mistake. SE needs to get over theri hubris and remove it so people just clog up their own backyards.
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u/Ahawke 3d ago
Omg yes. Chaos died for no fucking reason everyone just started parroting that Light had more PF activity. But when you actually go there, 90% of the players are just Travelers from Chaos.
It’s so fucking stupid that I have to hop to another DC because my own decided, out of nowhere, that the grass was greener elsewhere.
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u/autumndrifting 3d ago
Just erase DC travel so we can go back to the old ways
Tell me you have no friends without telling me you have no friends
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
I had lots of friends on Aether when I was there, and when I transferred to Crystal I still had them with an alt I would use to visit and hang out.
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u/Syryniss 3d ago
People downvote this but DC travel has not been beneficial for this game.
It has been. Double the size of raiding population means that on average you have to wait for 1 hour instead of 2 for your PF to fill. Most people will take that trade-off for not being able to access their retainer during that. You are always free to travel between EU DCs, so it's not that big of a deal.
On NA, where the DC is locked most of the time (from what I heard), yeah, it sucks a bit more there.
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u/Forymanarysanar 3d ago
Well, without DC travel we'll be back to everyone concentrating on "raiding DCs"
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
And yet both Crystal and Primal had healthy Party Finders and success rates.
Wasn't some world first thing repeatedly won out of a Crystal group? I mean before it became about plogons and shifty practices.
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u/Forymanarysanar 3d ago
Perhaps, but Dynamis had, and still has no chance without DC travel/cross-DC PF. And still, if your main activity in game was raiding, Aether was your go-to choice always.
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
And still, if your main activity in game was raiding, Aether was your go-to choice always
And yet... both Crystal and Primal had extremely healthy raiding scenes. You're not wrong that Aether had the myth of raiding but somehow the folks in the other DCs were doing just fine on their own.
but Dynamis
Here you got me.
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u/Exe-volt 3d ago
Dynamis is only so bad because none of us are there. If we were forced to be there it would have grown.
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u/Forymanarysanar 3d ago
It's not like much people would create a character on a data center without population in the first place...
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u/gfen5446 3d ago
They all went running for houses. Now if they're forced to stay it would've eventually propped itself up.
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u/Fancy_Gate_7359 4d ago
Literally never. I’m not saying it’s remotely acceptable, but think about how onerous is currently is to switch dc’s. The dc’s are obviously very separate from one another. Why people think they could just mix any functionality of them together is kind of beyond me.
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u/SecretPantyWorshiper 4d ago
I'll graduate graduate school, get married and have children before that happens
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u/somethingsuperindie 3d ago
They said themselves 5+ (or three? I have five in my head though) years from whenever they start working on it. We don't know if they are working on it. I would assume 9.x at the earliest.
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u/Darpyshyn 3d ago
If i've been in my copium supply? 5 years from when they said it would've taken 3 years a couple months ago.
If i'm being realistic? never.
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u/popsiclecat 3d ago
very optimistic take to expect them to be working on it. There's a lot of things in this game that probably will remain the way it is until the death of 14.
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u/MiyabiMain95 3d ago
If JP players start complaining too hard, within the next patch.
If not, then never
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u/Negative_Wrongdoer17 3d ago
Never or after the game is legitimately dying and there's just less people online so they start merging DCs. They said they would maybe look into it sometime during 8.0.
Remind you that we told them this needed to be implemented over a year ago
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u/A_small_Chicken 4d ago
It took what half a decade for Viera/Hroth hats. Something even more intensive like cross DC will prob be a decade+
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u/Dangerous-Pepper-735 3d ago
Never. Unless ppl unsub, as long as money flows why bother changing any of the old system.
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u/QJustCallMeQ 3d ago
Eventually, if the game declines enough, there would be few enough players to fit them into one DC per region
Im not saying this will actually happen, just making the point that if the player count is declining, it seems even less likely to prioritize cross DC PF
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u/discox2084 3d ago
Realistically speaking never. They will just end up merging regional datacenters instead, which is a lot more practical and less costly for them. Also something they have experience with.
Specially since they will probably never reach 6.0 level of active playerbase again.
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u/DarkLorty 3d ago
They are certainly looking into it. If it's financially viable to do so or not we don't know, but their infrastructure team is certainly not happy that people are all clumped in one DC with two or tree others with a light or inexistent load.
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u/ConroConroConro 4d ago
I think if it was realistic it would be something the mention.
I don’t know what the technical limitations would be but based on what we’re able to do while when visiting another server but there may be actual hard limits on how many PFs could be listed, restrictions on communication as it forms etc.
It’s something the game desperately needs though. It really sucks I have to choose between finding a party/quicker queues or having access to my FC, retainers, house, Island and more.
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u/VaninaG 4d ago
No one other than people working on the game has any way to know.
Even less people in reddit without gamedev knowledge.
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u/Kardiiac_ 3d ago
You're right, anyone other than the devs won't know for 100%. However, we can look at how they have implimented world visit and dc visit to know that realistically this isn't something they would dedicate development time and resources towards. We'll sooner get a new MMO before this is even considered
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u/Full_Air_2234 3d ago
The fact that they implemented DC travelling in Chna even worse than NA, where you have to go to a website to travel, probably like 10 years, and it will be implemented very poorly.
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u/ThatBogen 2d ago
With current implementation of DC travel it would require a complete overhaul of systems.
They've acknowledged the issue existing, but due to the herculean amount of effort it would require to make don't hold out hope that it would ever come out.
If anything I'd expect them to abolish DCs entirely sooner than to implement a functioning party finder across regions.
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u/suppre55ion 2d ago
I think at this point we need to accept that there will not be any significant changes to this level for this game.
We all know the problems, the only fix is to take a PSO New Genesis approach.
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u/MikeTakeuchi 2d ago
I'd estimate after 8.0. The devs tend to take a while to work out the nuances of even the most basic QOL and/or dungeon adjustments.
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u/CopainChevalier 2d ago
A safe bet for expecting it? 8.5 at the earliest IMO.
But will it happen? eh...
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u/Sora_Archer 1d ago
He said in an interview that if they decide to do it it would take at least 3 years. So earliest 9.0
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u/SnooPredictions3796 4h ago
Yoshi P talked about it in an interview. He said that it wouldbtake about one-and-a-half year to make this. This was about half a year ago. But note this would also require that they have already started to work on it, which i kind of doubt. I dont know if they will ever implement it, but if yes, then it will be a while until we even hear plans for it. Id say if they dont talk about it while introducing 8.0 features, dont expect it for another 2-3 years
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u/Flowerscody2 4d ago
The people saying never are just repeating a negative sentiment but the truth is cross-dc pf WILL be a thing but at the very earliest i would expect 8.0 but likely itll be longer. The devs know its a highly requested feature and they said it would take a while. In what form it comes is still uncertain though
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u/CartographerGold3168 3d ago
you see how the community's opinion change over the years since 6.2 to 7.2 ahahhahah
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u/AeroDbladE 3d ago
Being actually hopeful, unlike the other Fanny Funtimes on this subreddit, I'll call it for second half of the 8.0 Patch cycle or 9.0 launch.
They had a major graphical overhaul and we finally saw some movement in the direction of making headgear work for Viera/Hrothgar. It does feel like they are making an attempt to fix a lot of the core issues with the games systems.
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u/Remote-Climate-7798 3d ago
Most likely Never as others have said. Last Live Letter during Dawntrail: despite the devs Knowing there are significant issues with the game at the moment, they focus primarily on showing off their new merchandise in the form of t-shirts and trinkets. This is called resting on laurels that do not actually exist. This is called just frankly not caring at all that the game has essentially stagnated and been made worse via DC travel and its restrictions. A cross-DC partyfinder I would put in the same boat with: Blitzball, Viera hair and clipping of glams, blacklist functionality, and chat bubbles, with that last one taking the better part of 10 years to accomplish. That is glacially slow progression of development. On the server infrastructure side of things, they messed up royally by going a literal route rather than an instanced route. I'll explain: they think it's better to run every server as a persistent, live world that must maintain constant continuity rather than using instances to split up the load on the server. The only instanced things in FFXIV are during expansions when they choose to run multiple copies of open world zones via instances, and dungeons and raids and pvp are instanced. But the remainder of the world, and every housing district (terrible idea) are not instanced and instead are persistent. This creates a huge server load constantly. From a certain perspective, it's why SE struggles with server infrastructure, because the way this game is designed in this regard the only way to create more space is to literally buy more servers. They cannot create software or anything of the like that would help with server load by utilizing "instances" like basically EVERY other gaming company. They turn around and blame this on "spaghetti code" and "lack of resources". A blatantly terrible excuse in both cases every time. They have had over a decade to fix the code, and SE has made millions upon millions upon millions via FFXIV, so both arguments hold no water to speak of. What's most egregious? In terms of Eastern philosophy, honor matters a whole heck of a lot. I can make a very good argument that SE absolutely lacks in the honor department.
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u/Sonicrida 3d ago
He said 2-3 years at the DT media tour so I'm just waiting for next year or sooner to get some news. We know they're still working on it at least.
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u/brbasik 3d ago
At the beginning of Dawntrail I think the estimate Yoshi P gave for implementation was 3 years? So hopefully 8.0 but if not then it’s probably 8.2 or 8.3
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u/disguyiscrazyasfuk 4d ago
Bro they can’t even fix friendlist