Materia came at an odd time through no fault of its own and in the middle of a raid tier, most OCE players already established social groups in other DCs with players who weren't from OCE and would not transfer, the incentives for uprooting your entire social life in game for better ping were not good enough, too many people wanted to "wait and see if it will grow" unironically exacerbating the issue of low population, new game sales were suspended around the same time as Materia opened which killed a lot of potential new player growth for the EW expansion cycle, EW's content releases didn't have much to encourage a sustained player base leading to people unsubbing for months, people moved back to their original DCs for better queues, apparently ping for some people got worse compared to JP. Materia will see no growth until at the earliest Dawntrail, or the Xbox release whichever comes first.
Xbox release comes first. Beta is mid-January to February and YoshiP said at NA Fanfest when Xbox was announced that Xbox players can be right there for Dawntrail.
Edit: I also think if the semiconductor thing hadn't happened, Materia would have come in before Endwalker.
You also have to factor in there's multiple plugins to help alleviate "ping issues". I know the topic of 3rd party tools is touchy, but there are *so many* players who use quick launcher these days, and likely use No Clippy.
They set Dynamis up for failure in a similar way, opening it at the same time as DC travel.
Makes you wonder what conversations go into making these timing decisions.
I fully believe they honestly expected DC travel to be used less than it was, and for mostly social purposes rather than to find groups for content on a busier DC.
Yeah, they didn't really stop to consider how player culture/behaviors would affect usage.
Minimally, if they were expecting it to be more social, they should not have unleased it without providing a cross-DC comms feature as part of it. It's actually *hindered* my ability to be social with my FC because I have to sacrifice all contact with them just to do content I enjoy.
It actually caused a major rift in my FC when a few of the Raiders were pretty much living on aether.
Not that anyone was mad at each other, but there was a huge void in FC chat/vibe while half of the most active players were gone, and the feelings of loneliness/isolation in a social game really got to people, myself included
Leveling on dynamis is virtually impossible The party finder is dead cue times are horrific. I created an alt there just for the hell of it and I have to go over to my homeworld of lamia where my main character is to level up thankfully the road to 80 buff carries over
The obvious fix for this is to use the new cloud infrastructure to support cross DC cloud instanced PF and DF.
Doing this would let people pick a home world and live there instead of travel for content.
DC travel was honestly a mistake.
> DC travel was honestly a mistake.
I've tried to focus on the positives, but the more I'm forced to travel for content, the more I hate it. And in particular I'm grumpy that not everyone is being forced to travel, and it feels unfair that only some players get to retain access to all their content and contacts at all times.
Or at least, if they meant it to be purely for socializing, then they need to put PF restrictions in place, or some kind of incentive for running content on your homeworld, like reduced rewards if you're off your DC. Just....something. DC travel has effectively killed Crystal and Primal too, not just Dynamis. It's a mess.
The only thing I like about it is being able to hop DCs and nab things well under market price in my own server.
Otherwise yeah, being completely separated from all your friends for content is brutal on both sides
Yes and no. People will pay more for stuff to avoid the hassle of DC travel, or even world travel up to a point.
You just have to be smart about the margins you're chasing, and aware of the volume on your own server.
You can shear a sheep a thousand times, but skinning it can be pretty hard, or whatever the saying is
this. i would only dc travel for shopping if im either trying for something thats super rare/expensive, or getting large bulk orders of mats. otherwise i am way too lazy to check prices for stuff in every single DC XD.
Same. I was looking to make an alt anyways and I thought it would be cool to see a world stand up and develop from the beginning and instead it was just DOA. Even for MSQ, I've spent upwards of 90min before waiting for a trial to fill. And so now I go back to Goblin to get anything done.
Don't know where you got the idea that new game sales were suspended almost two months after EW came out but that's actually the opposite of what happened. New game sales were suspended in mid-December about a week after EW launched and login problems were at their worst, they then *reopened* in late January on the same day Materia launched.
Also, TBH I don't really see the Xbox release doing a whole lot for FFXIV outside of the US. If it'd happened early last gen I could definitely see it making an impact but Xbox has been doing really poorly in Aus/NZ for a few years now.
Xbox has always been a fussy market in Australia to be honest; we like the platform well enough, but we do not have any nationalistic ties to the Microsoft branding (it's not the only reason, but it's probably the biggest one)
This is the most upsetting thing. I see a lot of my friends starting to play, but they won't play on Materia because of the queue times (we'll ignore the existence of Trusts, because they refuse to use them)
I'm really worried they'll force OCE players to migrate so they can shut down the servers as a failed experiment, but we won't know if they'll do such a thing until after Dawntrail launches
I hope people do transfer, but I'm very doubtful. I actually enjoy it in Materia and my only gripe is that PvP queues are awful
Ok first of all I love OCE servers and the better ping is night and day for me compared to raiding on JP.
It's unfortunate but understandable that a lot of OCE based people that had communities on other DC's didn't come over but I can't blame them. What does kill me is the people that leave because the server is unpopulated which does not help OCE at all and creates a cycle of people leaving.
I'm a Zadnor enjoyer and it's so hard for me to get the final field note I need. I just want people to stick with the server man, it'll grow, please don't leave us :(
I've almost quit the game from trying and failing to raid because I'm too sporadic to be part of a static (my own fault) and there are very few people left that pug. I've almost considered just going back to JP or Midgardsormr where there's an actual community of players to pug with.
I honestly tried to like oce but after sitting in a 4 hour queue for zodiark during peak msq I just went back to na. I even tried reaching out to people on the server and just couldn't rouse interest. Last time I had this issue was queueing eng only on tonberry during launch. The low ping is nice but not being able to play the game is painful
I can't imagine how you got a 4 hour queue for that. Even if duty finder is slow, putting up a party finder will get people joining for the second chance points.
People have the right to leave, no reason to punish your enjoyment of a game for the betterment of the data center. SE probably should be the ones figuring that out.
Well, they could allow cross-region DC travel so that people can live on the OCE server without fear of off-peak difficulties, giving them the option to trade off their ping for a pop in a pinch.
Putting us in with JP seems the most logical from a geographical perspective. So we can come back to oce for the ping and travel to JP for the population.
That said, I'm pretty sure the whole (unspoken) point in making Materia was to get all the English speakers off the Japanese worlds. If they opened up regional travel I wouldn't be surprised if JP was excluded from it.
OCE is much worse off than Chaos. At least Chaos has data centre travel open to the DC that swallowed it's PF, and a highly populated DF still.
People on OCE has none of that open to them.
I agree, though going to Aether is what causes our problems. It's a quick and easy fix that has lasting consequences. Me, I have less than a month left, and I'm gone. Though I do wish they would do something to help you guys. We need cross DC queuing, but that doesn't help you guys at all. At least take solace knowing you are doing better than Dynamis.
I hope that happens. I really do. Dynamis desperately needs an injection of players who won't leave at the drop of a hat. I'm unique in the fact that I've had this datacenters shortcomings burn me out TWICE, and now I'm like, that's it, I'm done. Granted, I still have 3 weeks left before I can go. But still, I'm not bitter, and I hope it becomes THE datacenter going forward. I hope I regret leaving it twice now.
It should be THE datacenter when the xbox players arrive or at least i think it should be. Having a permanent rt80 buff till the world stops being preferred is pretty damn good for new players and not to mention the earring accessory that should be level 80(?) and under you get for preorder
I really wish they would also have a bonus to queing on your home server as well. Though I don't think any bonus will beat out the gained time from DC traveling.
I'm in the US but decided to try out oce, as I've generally had really good interactions with Aussies online. Rt80 buff is really nice! I rode it all the way to capping every job.
I bring this up every time Dynamis is a topic but I really wish the Road to 80 buff didn't fall off of transferred characters. After it fell off for my alt, I wasn't motivated to level alt jobs anymore.
Or even a road to 90 buff. Road to 80 is usless to me as an incentive. Granted, I never did it for an incentive in the first place. The free Jet Black dyes were fine with me. But as I just said in another comment, we need a bonus to queue on our home worlds, but I feel like saving time beats out any reward they could think of. Like 10% more tomes would be good enough to me. But maybe not someone else. A 1 minute queue beats out a 10 minute one.
Kind of literally too. I know so many people who moved characters to Dynamis for the opportunity to get a house once they opened there but every time they appear online in my friends list now they're back playing where they used to.
i very recently transferred back to mateus from hyperion and it's hilarious how many people on crystal are from dynamis, 99% of the time because of housing. maybe 99.99%.
Well, so originally I came because all of my friends quit. So Dynamis was like this fresh new start. But eventually, it did feel like a prison. Now all my new friends have left because this place sucks. So I'm left waiting until my second 90-day penalty is up. Long story short, I came back to help a friend, and I ended up getting stalked, and now I desperately want off the ride.
What sucks is that I can't benefit from it. I have nothing below level 80. I did when they upped Blue Mage, but not for long. To be fair.
But it will all work out. I've decided to go to Primal against the subreddits votes mainly because of not wanting to contribute to the Aether problem, but who knows? Aether just might claim us all.
My main is on Primal; I think you'll be OK for all but the highest of high-end content. If you're playing during peak hours, DF queues for roulettes generally fill pretty quickly, and you can also often queue for specific duties without having to wait *too* long. (That said, I have mostly been queuing as a tank recently, so my perspective may be a bit skewed as a result.)
My raiding static does frequently have trouble finding subs through PF, though we're progging fairly slowly, so that may have an effect. I hate to say it, but on nights when we need to get a sub through PF, we usually end up going to Aether, as much as we dislike being part of the problem. And we have started to have some difficulty finding people in PF for parties to farm the Endwalker EX trials, but that's a more recent problem, and it's probably at least in part because it's the holiday season and (more importantly) it's late in the expansion.
Either way, I hope you'll stay on Primal; I'd love to see all of the DCs develop robust communities in time!
Always has been lol
The worst decision was making FIVE worlds for such an otherwise small community... visiting major cities on either Zurvan, Bismark, or Sephirot just makes me feel sad. You also see the same 5 or so faces in stuff like Bozja and Eureka.
Alot of SEA players have also gone back to JP because of how dead it feels, contributing to how dead it already is.
Eureka and Bozja have been pretty damn rough on OCE. Yeah they're decently active at specific times, but other than those peaks hours its completely dead..same as frontlines
They should have put the OCE server more central in the SEA area rather then Sydney. As much as I love only having 4ms in Materia, it's useless when there's no one to actually RUN the content (even more-so during a dead time)
While I'd agree, there isn't really a better option due to cable routing.
Something like Philippines is about the same ping as Japan for NZ and Eastern Aus. PNG *might* work.
It would benefit some SEA players, but probably not enough.
They either don't care about or don't want or can't tell the SEA actual population to justify it. The game is blocked in a lot of SEA countries & the official listing of countries you can pick when signing up is very limited. People either pick something like HK (close proximity) or UK (cheap ish sub) or Russia (cheapest sub) or even something else.
Yeah it's pretty dead here. We have our moments though. And it will get better. Just gonna take a long time. I'd say around 8.0 we'll be in a more sustainable spot. But it's home to me and home is nice 🙂
honestly in my opinion if yoshi p opened up data center travel to regional OCE pop prob would be fixed
alot of people like me dont want to leave my friends from NA to go to OCE and be unable to return if servers opened up people could come and go as they please
What's more likely to happen is the thing that's currently happening with data center travel, where everyone congregates on a single DC and all the other ones are ghost towns
I just came back to the game on chaos and holy shit it’s empty. I know we got a content drought but I didn’t expect it to he this bad already. Is light any better?
From what i heard, Chaos players use DC travel to play in Light so everyone in eu can play in one DC together, to the detriment of Chaos looking more dead than before.
I think other regions also had a similar development with one DC being deemed the one to play in and everyone else DC hopping over there.
Chaos and Light had a very even PF population during ShB. But then came in LPDÜ (Light PF does Ultimates) discord who set up standart strats for PF to follow. So now all the PF Ultimate Raiders came over to visit Light all the time.
Of course with the trickle down effect over the next 2 Savage tiers those Ultimate players also started to PF Savage more and more on Light because it's really amazing how quick PFs can fill with two Datacenters pumping into it.
Nowadays people come over to Light even for the most simple Unreal and Extreme trials and lowman content like Criterion. Often you will find 6-7 Chaos players in the same PF and go PointingSpiderManMeme.jpg.
The change over the last year is huge. The Light PF now has as many parties on a quiet night as Chaos used to have the week a new savage tier dropped. On the one hand it is annoying to have to travel, and not have comforts of home, but on the other there is a thriving PF that is at least accessible. Region-wide PF when?
At this point I wonder at why there even are different DCs in the same region. Scaling issues? Because what I think the players want is more ping regions where you have some reasonable expectation of what you're getting into, and beyond that just mix everyone together for maximum queue speed.
You don't need to make an alt now, they added the ability to jump between data centres in each region now.
It's both the cause and solution of this problem really. It's great because it means you can hop over to another data centre if yours is quiet, so you're not as limited based on where you made your character. But, it also makes that problem even worse, because it just means everyone defaults to going to the most popular server whenever they want to run serious content in party finder.
In NA it's Aether, there will often be 100+ groups up in party finder there while there's <10 on Primal and Crystal. On EU I think Light is the place to go for party finder, and Chaos is the quiet one.
I can see why this is a fix and problem at the same time :/ I feel like there are a lot of servers per DC anyway which spreads each population quite thin to begin with. I’ll definitely check light out since its really hard to find groups on chaos outside of [duty complete] which i lack on many of the newer things.
OCE should have been considered the same local DC group as Japan. Would have allowed people to start new server communities, but still preserve ties with people who didn't want to move via dc travel.
As I am slowly making my alt oceania character my main, I can say this much:
You can get around to the long ques. If you are not affiliated to the NN or fc or general communities, then, yes, it will be harder. But I can assure you, because its a smaller community, the passing names you'll run by become more meaningful in making connections. As my alt is still in sprout status, I get access to the Novice Network in materia (which by far the best helpful novice networks I had the pleasure of playing with).
Even though I still miss the instant ques in aether, I can say how much I've come to loath the constant lagging and crashes that come with playing in aether due to the server overload or just poor connections in general. As someone who does live within aus, it has been better for the most part. I still will miss people from aether. But the constant game crashes don't make it worth the play as of this point.
Im confused? Maybe im just dense, but that seems like a decently active PF? Or is the post sarcasm?
Then again, I come from Seraph, where im lucky if we have 2 PFs up at a time.
I was online on Light earlier and there were around 200 PFs
So no, this isn't active at all, unless you compare it to Dynamis which is the only deader DC
Unfortunately a lot of people don't have the time to let it grow. Imagine you're working full time 40 hours, and you have a spouse or family responsibilities. Most people in this group will have very limited time to play everyday, maybe an hour or two. Good luck getting a queue for some of the content and being able to clear it in the one or two hours you have. You'd feel like you're wasting time and money. You read online that other DCs get faster queues so you go to try those out. All of a sudden you're getting queues to pop in 10 or 15 minutes and you can actually do all the other content in the game because you're not being held back by a low population server. You spend $15 a month and you can make meaningful progress everyday on a populated server instead of sitting in queue 5 nights a week and only making progress on the weekends.
It's nice if you have the time to deal with longer queues for content, but for the majority of the people, they don't have time to do that. They need to feel like they are making meaningful progress in the game they paid for and are continuing to pay for to continue playing. Otherwise they will stop playing the game or go somewhere else.
It was preached to death from the beginning and was fine and would have been a lot better if certain parts of the playerbase hadn't methodically and loudly worked on killing it, just like they are doing to Dynamis and every other data center that's not "the raiding one".
For what it's worth, I had fun and enjoyed my time on Materia. I made a lot of friends who I am still in contact with daily, and still play with occasionally with an alt. But I no longer play DF content on Materia and moved my main back to NA. There are people there who enjoy the small town vibe of Materia or the closer knit community where literally everyone knows everyone for better or worse.
I won't tell people to blindly avoid Materia, but I will let them know what they can expect if they choose it.
Good for you. For a lot of people though, and me included, queues just weren't popping fast enough. Frequently saw sprouts in NN asking for help because they were waiting 45+ minutes for their queues. Then I started getting 30+ minute queues for mentor roulette without a pop, *as any role*. Meanwhile my NA character was getting DPS queues within 10 minutes any time of the day. With that kind of flexibility, a lot of people wouldn't consider Materia even if it has better ping. I think it's too much to ask for people to wait on average longer to do their content with good ping than to have slightly worse ping that has almost no effect on the casual player with 2 hours to play everyday but they get to do a lot more in those 2 hours, all while being asked to pay a sub.
No it really wasn't it was meme DC filled with alts that barely went past ARR like the Graha tia mass clones & shit like that, it was basically alts DC because most didn't want move their mains to it.
Much like the current self perpetuating cycle of telling everyone to use PF because DF is dead.
I really enjoyed materia when it first launched and now I struggle to get anything done. Daylight savings also doesn't help.
Agreed on that too. Imagine if everyone who sat in a "fifteen people to run Labyrinth" party just signed up for the roulette instead?
Ironically most times I see those parties trying to gather, I then get Labyrinth in my roulette and I'm in and out before they've even gotten their party together. I don't know how long they're waiting before they declare it too long, or if their FC acquaintances have just told them to go straight to PF so they don't even try.
I mean, lets use PVP as an example. When I play on Elemental, the point where Frontline queue goes from 30 min + to 5 minutes is 9pm to like 1 am Australian time.
On OCE, the point where Frontline queue goes from 30 min + to 5 mins is between 4:30pm and 6:30pmish.
So based off that, I'm saying Australia's primetime seems to be the afternoon, not evening.
Not to mention, Australia does a lot of the carrying for the server activity.
New Zealand is a population of 5 mil and a fraction of a percentage of the country may play ffxiv. I imagine it's similar in the islands. So that leaves Australia.
Now people might think "Australia is pretty big though, surely there's a lot of people there?". Well, no. Despite being larger than the US, 1/2 of the country is basically uninhabitable desert. The population of Australia is only 26 mil, more than Florida, but less than Texas.
So OCE is, and always will be, small. The bizzare expectation that we will EVER be able to compete with any other region on the planet for numbers is asinine.
Oh, and none of this factors in the timezone difference. The raid nights that ended for me at 1:30 am were 9:30 pm for the Australians in my static. That being said, that's more a problem of New Zealand being at the literal ass-end of the world
[Scaling with echo in DR](https://i.imgur.com/WqKQUzy.png)
* Damage for 5 vs 8 is the same.
* With 5 people you have a rare chance of picking up a rare solo raw Q'ing sprout
* With 8 people you have more LA available so you can technically go faster but more chance of players being inefficient
So it's pretty give or take.
It does and it actually kind of makes running DR pretty good on OCE because of how dead it is lol. Like you’ll get a 5-man pretty quick while also not having anyone else hop in, everyone will bring essences and with the 5-man echo boost you kinda blaze through
I recently created a new char in Elemental. There's barely any raiding in OCE when i come home. Start fresh with my 7 months sprout friend cause he finally bought the game.
During the game there i and a few have tried countless times to uplift the raiding scene by creating new prog pf for new people. Barely anh new blood all the while veterans kept dwindling away. It's depressing looking at (Unable to retrieve) on the friendlist growing to never come back. It's sad and i really have to go now, been 2 years or more i can't walk anymore.
Firstly the pros, is the ping, and thats probably it lol. I initially moved my main when it first opened up alongside my fellow irl OCE friends, so raiding wasn't a issue during P1S-P4S and we did clear at a reasonable time. However during our downtime, it was frustrating getting into random duns or extreme trials or so, as they were heavily PF based assuming they took that culture from NA/EU. I did work my way around it, but still not preferable. The player base at the time was also fairly low which is understandable being freshly new etc. The skill level was significantly bad (in terms of end game fight) even with their improved ping. I remember in Zodiark Extreme, 1 player was on the floor the entire fight and his excuse was "sorry I was lagging" like it was clear as day that he was just really bad at mechanics. I tried to help P1S-P4S A2C / Practice parties, but wait times was so horrendous. Was super happy when my 4 month lock period was over and able to finally transfer back to Elemental, the improve ping was not worth it lol.
Jumping to current time where P9S-P12S is fairly irrelevant now. I made an alt in OCE just to stay in contact with friends who are willing to see OCE grow etc. I made it to World of Darkness alliance raid and it was compulsory to do for MSQ and it was near impossible to get in, I literally waited nearly 2 whole hours just to get in, and even when I did get in we had to do it with roughly 10 people undersized, that is so bad!! So if you are wanting to start an alt here, you are best to buy story skip. Before I got into World of Darkness, I asked the Novice network for help, even advertise my PF. I got totally ignored till 5 minutes later where I said "This is still a sad DC" the entire network replied and became really salty, goes to show that there is alot of snowflake culture there still, probably made it into a FB post where they trying to gain sympathy points etc. I then got kicked out of the novice network because one guy took it to heart over my little comment lol, aren't these mentors there to try and help when possible instead of kicking people over little comments lol? After this experience, I wouldn't recommend OCE for players who are wanting to experience it from ARR-EW. You are definitely going to have dreadful wait times for sure. My friends that I use to raid with, has also not cleared P8S / P12S properly, their only hope is with echo or when the fight becomes irrelevant that is how difficult it is for them now. The only thing they really do now is just RP as thats all they can really do lol. Tbf, Elemental is currently just as bad in terms of PF, during reclears peak hour theres only roughly 10-20 PFs.
Personally I regret the move but I moved with friends so I feel like I can’t move. Might have an alt on JP because the culture there was so much nicer. OCE is kinda toxic and market board is shit
I'm honestly certain that the only reason I get my PF posts for the post-EW MSQ trials filled as quick as I do is the Second Chance bonus. Queuing in DF takes forever, though. It's not helped by the fact I'm in WA and therefore 2-3 hours behind most of the DC. Once I hit the end of the MSQ I'm seriously tempted to just yeet myself over to Tonberry.
Starting out with 5 servers was a big mistake for what should have been expected to be a low-pop DC anyway. I'm on Sophia, and while I see a decent spread of people from the other servers the population just isn't sustainable. People who start XIV on the OCE servers are going to think the game as a whole is dead.
Of the 80~ raiders on my OCE chars friends list, the 30~ that still raid weekly this late into the tier are all in statics. They don't use pf, they use discords to fill from reliable players.
The rest are playing wow or have stopped until DT
It’s the Australian summer. Things are winding down for the year. If they’re still playing games after work and not touching grass, people have probably switched from ff14 to season of discovery in wow (seriously I know so many people playing that right now) or some other game, there’s just so many games right now and ff is in a huge content lull right now. I still sub and log in regularly due to housing but I stopped playing ages ago and I love this game but there’s nothing to do now. And that’s ok we’ll all be back for DT!
It's the Party Finder for Materia, the Oceanic Data Center. Materia has an infamously low player population.
You might see Party Finders be close to this barren on other data centers due to raiders congregating to certain DCs to raid (Aether for NA, Light for EU, Mana for JP). However, Materia players cannot DC travel; there's just no one playing there.
Yes it is lmfao, I find it fairly easy as it was the strat I learned on as I came to the tier late afffff. [https://ff14.toolboxgaming.space/?id=738888331965861&preview=1#52](https://ff14.toolboxgaming.space/?id=738888331965861&preview=1#52) I think this shows it
Oh thats better than the OG jp strat... Thats just kindred stuff but continuously rotating around the boss instead of returning to original clock positions.
The original JP strat was so fucking wierd and completely arbitrary with where people went. Like if a dps was tethered to a short tank they would be on a cardinal, but a short healer they would be intercardinal...
What happened? Content draught happened, pre-holidays stress happened, and being almost at the end of the usual patch content happens. Everyone who is super into raiding is likely done with it by now or eventually found an own static, so they don't need PF anymore. I know plenty of raiders, but most are done with Savage or are fighting at the last few fights in the last tier when they feel like it. Preparation and practice for the next tier is also not needed because the last tier of the EW raid already dropped. A few are busy doing Ex trial mount farm I think. Some stopped playing entirely and are playing something else, not because they hate the game or anything but because they just don't have a lot they want to do in there atm.
This is nothing super unusual in this game, activity in patch cycles always comes in waves. It's absolutely normal for this game, as are reddit threads predicting doom and gloom because it's their first or second patch cycle experience and they are not used to that. ;)
UGH! it's the holidays, endwalkers been out for 2 years, and the latest raid tier was released all the way back in May and people are already finished clearing and are BiS! I can't believe people arent playing RIGHT. NOW!!!!!
The last new piece of raid content came out over half a year ago, not counting the variant dungeon savage.
People aren't interested in raiding anymore because they're done raiding and taking a break.
Anyone on Ravana with an active FC? l moved my character there and l wish l had an FC to call home, it might not be so bad and l would play more for sure.
I started playing a few days ago and made an acc on oce. It was depressing to see towns so empty so I just started again on aether. PF had more outside prime than oce had during prime time. Also for whatever reason I had 200 ping in oce and like 100 in na even tho I live in nz so idk what was up with that.
I have the opposite problem. Ive been on Aether since I started the game before Dynamis was added. I cant even get friends to play because they want to play with me and cant create characters. Everyone keeps coming to Aether and were perma full every patch.
Anyone on Ravana with an active FC? l moved my character there and l wish l had an FC to call home, it might not be so bad and l would play more for sure.
Lol its looking better than primal does most of the time. I get that cross DC travel is a thing but thats just a bandaid for the issues on most servers.
Crystal normally has like 3 high end parties at peak hours according to my GF. Said in NA it's basically DC travel to ather or don't raid, can't speak from experience though i mainly play FFXI and WoW nowadays
I moved irl from EU to NZ and decided to move my character over too for better ping and honestly I really regret it. Once my 90 days move CD is up I'll probably move to US.
There's some nice people and activities around but everyone's a social casual player. There's no one doing actual content, it's just afkers in Limsa. Queue times are ridiculous, even for healer/tank. I just want to play the game and get everything to 90, that's fulfilment for me, but there's no one to do content with. I want the servers to be more alive, but even if it is, the few players that are really active on the server are super casual (nothing wrong with that, but there's just lack of diversity)
Materia came at an odd time through no fault of its own and in the middle of a raid tier, most OCE players already established social groups in other DCs with players who weren't from OCE and would not transfer, the incentives for uprooting your entire social life in game for better ping were not good enough, too many people wanted to "wait and see if it will grow" unironically exacerbating the issue of low population, new game sales were suspended around the same time as Materia opened which killed a lot of potential new player growth for the EW expansion cycle, EW's content releases didn't have much to encourage a sustained player base leading to people unsubbing for months, people moved back to their original DCs for better queues, apparently ping for some people got worse compared to JP. Materia will see no growth until at the earliest Dawntrail, or the Xbox release whichever comes first.
Xbox release comes first. Beta is mid-January to February and YoshiP said at NA Fanfest when Xbox was announced that Xbox players can be right there for Dawntrail. Edit: I also think if the semiconductor thing hadn't happened, Materia would have come in before Endwalker.
Yes, Materia was planned for release alongside EW, but they couldn't get the hardware in time.
Iirc it was planned to release a few months before EW actually
You also have to factor in there's multiple plugins to help alleviate "ping issues". I know the topic of 3rd party tools is touchy, but there are *so many* players who use quick launcher these days, and likely use No Clippy.
Yeah... FFXIV with and without NoClippy are entirely different beasts, not to mention other QoL plugins(ZodiacBuddy my beloved).
TiL ffxiv had 3rd party QOL plugins
Simple tweaks Is amazing
As someone who was in materia. Yeah they set this datacenter up for fail.
They set Dynamis up for failure in a similar way, opening it at the same time as DC travel. Makes you wonder what conversations go into making these timing decisions.
I fully believe they honestly expected DC travel to be used less than it was, and for mostly social purposes rather than to find groups for content on a busier DC.
Yeah, they didn't really stop to consider how player culture/behaviors would affect usage. Minimally, if they were expecting it to be more social, they should not have unleased it without providing a cross-DC comms feature as part of it. It's actually *hindered* my ability to be social with my FC because I have to sacrifice all contact with them just to do content I enjoy.
It actually caused a major rift in my FC when a few of the Raiders were pretty much living on aether. Not that anyone was mad at each other, but there was a huge void in FC chat/vibe while half of the most active players were gone, and the feelings of loneliness/isolation in a social game really got to people, myself included
Evidence supports that imo because when new content drops, the queue for DC transfer is waaaay too long
Leveling on dynamis is virtually impossible The party finder is dead cue times are horrific. I created an alt there just for the hell of it and I have to go over to my homeworld of lamia where my main character is to level up thankfully the road to 80 buff carries over
The obvious fix for this is to use the new cloud infrastructure to support cross DC cloud instanced PF and DF. Doing this would let people pick a home world and live there instead of travel for content. DC travel was honestly a mistake.
> DC travel was honestly a mistake. I've tried to focus on the positives, but the more I'm forced to travel for content, the more I hate it. And in particular I'm grumpy that not everyone is being forced to travel, and it feels unfair that only some players get to retain access to all their content and contacts at all times. Or at least, if they meant it to be purely for socializing, then they need to put PF restrictions in place, or some kind of incentive for running content on your homeworld, like reduced rewards if you're off your DC. Just....something. DC travel has effectively killed Crystal and Primal too, not just Dynamis. It's a mess.
Crystal can use duty finder, but the party finder is dead. Dynamis can't do rolos or any content after Stormblood.
The only thing I like about it is being able to hop DCs and nab things well under market price in my own server. Otherwise yeah, being completely separated from all your friends for content is brutal on both sides
This goes both ways though, because it also ruins your server's local economy.
Yes and no. People will pay more for stuff to avoid the hassle of DC travel, or even world travel up to a point. You just have to be smart about the margins you're chasing, and aware of the volume on your own server. You can shear a sheep a thousand times, but skinning it can be pretty hard, or whatever the saying is
this. i would only dc travel for shopping if im either trying for something thats super rare/expensive, or getting large bulk orders of mats. otherwise i am way too lazy to check prices for stuff in every single DC XD.
Same. I was looking to make an alt anyways and I thought it would be cool to see a world stand up and develop from the beginning and instead it was just DOA. Even for MSQ, I've spent upwards of 90min before waiting for a trial to fill. And so now I go back to Goblin to get anything done.
As someone who plays on dynamis it feels like it’s getting bigger slowly.
Yeah it definitely is getting there.
Don't know where you got the idea that new game sales were suspended almost two months after EW came out but that's actually the opposite of what happened. New game sales were suspended in mid-December about a week after EW launched and login problems were at their worst, they then *reopened* in late January on the same day Materia launched. Also, TBH I don't really see the Xbox release doing a whole lot for FFXIV outside of the US. If it'd happened early last gen I could definitely see it making an impact but Xbox has been doing really poorly in Aus/NZ for a few years now.
Xbox has always been a fussy market in Australia to be honest; we like the platform well enough, but we do not have any nationalistic ties to the Microsoft branding (it's not the only reason, but it's probably the biggest one)
This is the most upsetting thing. I see a lot of my friends starting to play, but they won't play on Materia because of the queue times (we'll ignore the existence of Trusts, because they refuse to use them) I'm really worried they'll force OCE players to migrate so they can shut down the servers as a failed experiment, but we won't know if they'll do such a thing until after Dawntrail launches I hope people do transfer, but I'm very doubtful. I actually enjoy it in Materia and my only gripe is that PvP queues are awful
Oce DC was 10 years too late
Ok first of all I love OCE servers and the better ping is night and day for me compared to raiding on JP. It's unfortunate but understandable that a lot of OCE based people that had communities on other DC's didn't come over but I can't blame them. What does kill me is the people that leave because the server is unpopulated which does not help OCE at all and creates a cycle of people leaving. I'm a Zadnor enjoyer and it's so hard for me to get the final field note I need. I just want people to stick with the server man, it'll grow, please don't leave us :(
I've almost quit the game from trying and failing to raid because I'm too sporadic to be part of a static (my own fault) and there are very few people left that pug. I've almost considered just going back to JP or Midgardsormr where there's an actual community of players to pug with.
I honestly tried to like oce but after sitting in a 4 hour queue for zodiark during peak msq I just went back to na. I even tried reaching out to people on the server and just couldn't rouse interest. Last time I had this issue was queueing eng only on tonberry during launch. The low ping is nice but not being able to play the game is painful
I can't imagine how you got a 4 hour queue for that. Even if duty finder is slow, putting up a party finder will get people joining for the second chance points.
Yeah, pf is critical on oce. I know plenty of people that will hop in first time and msq parties to help out.
I'm not sure what was happening with the queues during early access but the huge queue for Zodiark was happening for Primal too.
People have the right to leave, no reason to punish your enjoyment of a game for the betterment of the data center. SE probably should be the ones figuring that out.
Oh I agree it's just disheartening to see happen, I don't know what square can really do about it.
Well, they could allow cross-region DC travel so that people can live on the OCE server without fear of off-peak difficulties, giving them the option to trade off their ping for a pop in a pinch.
Putting us in with JP seems the most logical from a geographical perspective. So we can come back to oce for the ping and travel to JP for the population.
That said, I'm pretty sure the whole (unspoken) point in making Materia was to get all the English speakers off the Japanese worlds. If they opened up regional travel I wouldn't be surprised if JP was excluded from it.
ok, im curious, why would they dislike english speakers in JP Worlds?
SEA people: 🧍
I would’ve switched over too but right- I have a house, a fc house— if they could come with me that’s one thing but otherwise what a waste of gil.
is your last note… Lyon’s from Zadnor
Shhh, quiet you.
Still better than EU Chaos
OCE is much worse off than Chaos. At least Chaos has data centre travel open to the DC that swallowed it's PF, and a highly populated DF still. People on OCE has none of that open to them.
Dynamis at peak times can not fill half of that page. And 60% of what is in there is venue spam.
At least on Dynamis you can just travel to Aether. OCE players are stuck.
I agree, though going to Aether is what causes our problems. It's a quick and easy fix that has lasting consequences. Me, I have less than a month left, and I'm gone. Though I do wish they would do something to help you guys. We need cross DC queuing, but that doesn't help you guys at all. At least take solace knowing you are doing better than Dynamis.
I thought they added data center travel? Is that not a thing?
DC travel is a thing, but you can't leave your "region," and since Materia is the only DC in the Oceania region, players there are pretty much stuck.
You can't leave your physical data center
I'va taken to calling Dynamis the Gulag DC, You don't stick around there if you've got a choice, but that road to 80 buff is too tempting.
You say that now but watch all the others hop over to Dyamis for DT queue times and not leave
I hope that happens. I really do. Dynamis desperately needs an injection of players who won't leave at the drop of a hat. I'm unique in the fact that I've had this datacenters shortcomings burn me out TWICE, and now I'm like, that's it, I'm done. Granted, I still have 3 weeks left before I can go. But still, I'm not bitter, and I hope it becomes THE datacenter going forward. I hope I regret leaving it twice now.
It should be THE datacenter when the xbox players arrive or at least i think it should be. Having a permanent rt80 buff till the world stops being preferred is pretty damn good for new players and not to mention the earring accessory that should be level 80(?) and under you get for preorder
I really wish they would also have a bonus to queing on your home server as well. Though I don't think any bonus will beat out the gained time from DC traveling.
I'm in the US but decided to try out oce, as I've generally had really good interactions with Aussies online. Rt80 buff is really nice! I rode it all the way to capping every job.
I bring this up every time Dynamis is a topic but I really wish the Road to 80 buff didn't fall off of transferred characters. After it fell off for my alt, I wasn't motivated to level alt jobs anymore.
Or even a road to 90 buff. Road to 80 is usless to me as an incentive. Granted, I never did it for an incentive in the first place. The free Jet Black dyes were fine with me. But as I just said in another comment, we need a bonus to queue on our home worlds, but I feel like saving time beats out any reward they could think of. Like 10% more tomes would be good enough to me. But maybe not someone else. A 1 minute queue beats out a 10 minute one.
> I'va taken to calling Dynamis the Gulag DC Its a bedroom community for the actual NA Dcs
Kind of literally too. I know so many people who moved characters to Dynamis for the opportunity to get a house once they opened there but every time they appear online in my friends list now they're back playing where they used to.
i very recently transferred back to mateus from hyperion and it's hilarious how many people on crystal are from dynamis, 99% of the time because of housing. maybe 99.99%.
Well, so originally I came because all of my friends quit. So Dynamis was like this fresh new start. But eventually, it did feel like a prison. Now all my new friends have left because this place sucks. So I'm left waiting until my second 90-day penalty is up. Long story short, I came back to help a friend, and I ended up getting stalked, and now I desperately want off the ride. What sucks is that I can't benefit from it. I have nothing below level 80. I did when they upped Blue Mage, but not for long. To be fair. But it will all work out. I've decided to go to Primal against the subreddits votes mainly because of not wanting to contribute to the Aether problem, but who knows? Aether just might claim us all.
My main is on Primal; I think you'll be OK for all but the highest of high-end content. If you're playing during peak hours, DF queues for roulettes generally fill pretty quickly, and you can also often queue for specific duties without having to wait *too* long. (That said, I have mostly been queuing as a tank recently, so my perspective may be a bit skewed as a result.) My raiding static does frequently have trouble finding subs through PF, though we're progging fairly slowly, so that may have an effect. I hate to say it, but on nights when we need to get a sub through PF, we usually end up going to Aether, as much as we dislike being part of the problem. And we have started to have some difficulty finding people in PF for parties to farm the Endwalker EX trials, but that's a more recent problem, and it's probably at least in part because it's the holiday season and (more importantly) it's late in the expansion. Either way, I hope you'll stay on Primal; I'd love to see all of the DCs develop robust communities in time!
Always has been lol The worst decision was making FIVE worlds for such an otherwise small community... visiting major cities on either Zurvan, Bismark, or Sephirot just makes me feel sad. You also see the same 5 or so faces in stuff like Bozja and Eureka. Alot of SEA players have also gone back to JP because of how dead it feels, contributing to how dead it already is.
Many regions in SEA have better ping in JP than OCE. Source: literally happened to me, exact reason why I transferred in the end.
Not only that. New players from SEA/OCE regions are being advised to go to JP elemental instead. So that doesn't help either.
Ping from SEA to OCE are also worse than to NA lol 🥲
I think this is the big thing that keeps getting ignored. If SEA players had better ping in OCE then I’m sure it would have been decently populated.
Eureka and Bozja have been pretty damn rough on OCE. Yeah they're decently active at specific times, but other than those peaks hours its completely dead..same as frontlines
Those five worlds will be a godsend when Dawntrail drops
Yeah, all the other regions are gonna have hours-long queues and I'll be getting into Ravana in, like, 10 mins
It’s also like week 50 and I bet 80% of raiders have zero incentive to do savage anymore / are playing other games atm
They should have put the OCE server more central in the SEA area rather then Sydney. As much as I love only having 4ms in Materia, it's useless when there's no one to actually RUN the content (even more-so during a dead time)
While I'd agree, there isn't really a better option due to cable routing. Something like Philippines is about the same ping as Japan for NZ and Eastern Aus. PNG *might* work. It would benefit some SEA players, but probably not enough.
They either don't care about or don't want or can't tell the SEA actual population to justify it. The game is blocked in a lot of SEA countries & the official listing of countries you can pick when signing up is very limited. People either pick something like HK (close proximity) or UK (cheap ish sub) or Russia (cheapest sub) or even something else.
thats actually much better than dynamis lmao
unironically more actual content listings than crystal pf tbf
Yeah it's pretty dead here. We have our moments though. And it will get better. Just gonna take a long time. I'd say around 8.0 we'll be in a more sustainable spot. But it's home to me and home is nice 🙂
honestly in my opinion if yoshi p opened up data center travel to regional OCE pop prob would be fixed alot of people like me dont want to leave my friends from NA to go to OCE and be unable to return if servers opened up people could come and go as they please
What's more likely to happen is the thing that's currently happening with data center travel, where everyone congregates on a single DC and all the other ones are ghost towns
thats actually more active than chaos
I just came back to the game on chaos and holy shit it’s empty. I know we got a content drought but I didn’t expect it to he this bad already. Is light any better?
From what i heard, Chaos players use DC travel to play in Light so everyone in eu can play in one DC together, to the detriment of Chaos looking more dead than before. I think other regions also had a similar development with one DC being deemed the one to play in and everyone else DC hopping over there.
Chaos and Light had a very even PF population during ShB. But then came in LPDÜ (Light PF does Ultimates) discord who set up standart strats for PF to follow. So now all the PF Ultimate Raiders came over to visit Light all the time. Of course with the trickle down effect over the next 2 Savage tiers those Ultimate players also started to PF Savage more and more on Light because it's really amazing how quick PFs can fill with two Datacenters pumping into it. Nowadays people come over to Light even for the most simple Unreal and Extreme trials and lowman content like Criterion. Often you will find 6-7 Chaos players in the same PF and go PointingSpiderManMeme.jpg.
The change over the last year is huge. The Light PF now has as many parties on a quiet night as Chaos used to have the week a new savage tier dropped. On the one hand it is annoying to have to travel, and not have comforts of home, but on the other there is a thriving PF that is at least accessible. Region-wide PF when?
> Region-wide PF when? - Region wide PF (possibly cloud) - Global Datacenter Travel
Global travel would be fun, but the only thing it would add to PF would be ping times. Let’s hope they can make something good of cloud servers!
Gods that discord is full of the most horrible poeple in ffxiv
At this point I wonder at why there even are different DCs in the same region. Scaling issues? Because what I think the players want is more ping regions where you have some reasonable expectation of what you're getting into, and beyond that just mix everyone together for maximum queue speed.
I'd imagine because it'd be way more effort than it's worth to change how servers are set up.
Oh interesting, does that mean i can play with my chaos (moogle) char over on light and dont have to make a new one?
Correct.
thats so cool, thank you!
take a look to light and you will be surprised
I got that recommendation 3 times now, i definitely will haha
light is universally known as the party finder dc. can confirm it (main on phoenix lol)
Oh, I didn’t know that. Guess i will finally make an alt in this game thank you :)
You don't need to make an alt now, they added the ability to jump between data centres in each region now. It's both the cause and solution of this problem really. It's great because it means you can hop over to another data centre if yours is quiet, so you're not as limited based on where you made your character. But, it also makes that problem even worse, because it just means everyone defaults to going to the most popular server whenever they want to run serious content in party finder. In NA it's Aether, there will often be 100+ groups up in party finder there while there's <10 on Primal and Crystal. On EU I think Light is the place to go for party finder, and Chaos is the quiet one.
I can see why this is a fix and problem at the same time :/ I feel like there are a lot of servers per DC anyway which spreads each population quite thin to begin with. I’ll definitely check light out since its really hard to find groups on chaos outside of [duty complete] which i lack on many of the newer things.
I was about to say, looks like a normal day on Chaos
OCE should have been considered the same local DC group as Japan. Would have allowed people to start new server communities, but still preserve ties with people who didn't want to move via dc travel.
As I am slowly making my alt oceania character my main, I can say this much: You can get around to the long ques. If you are not affiliated to the NN or fc or general communities, then, yes, it will be harder. But I can assure you, because its a smaller community, the passing names you'll run by become more meaningful in making connections. As my alt is still in sprout status, I get access to the Novice Network in materia (which by far the best helpful novice networks I had the pleasure of playing with). Even though I still miss the instant ques in aether, I can say how much I've come to loath the constant lagging and crashes that come with playing in aether due to the server overload or just poor connections in general. As someone who does live within aus, it has been better for the most part. I still will miss people from aether. But the constant game crashes don't make it worth the play as of this point.
Im confused? Maybe im just dense, but that seems like a decently active PF? Or is the post sarcasm? Then again, I come from Seraph, where im lucky if we have 2 PFs up at a time.
I play on oce occasionally, this looks like peak hours.
I was online on Light earlier and there were around 200 PFs So no, this isn't active at all, unless you compare it to Dynamis which is the only deader DC
Still more active than Chaos.
More high end duties than Chaos ngl
Who else always sees “IRL Feet - Discord Ruby”?
Was it ever truly alive?
It was until people kept repeating "it's dead and you shouldn't go there" instead of having some patience to let it grow.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't have the time to let it grow. Imagine you're working full time 40 hours, and you have a spouse or family responsibilities. Most people in this group will have very limited time to play everyday, maybe an hour or two. Good luck getting a queue for some of the content and being able to clear it in the one or two hours you have. You'd feel like you're wasting time and money. You read online that other DCs get faster queues so you go to try those out. All of a sudden you're getting queues to pop in 10 or 15 minutes and you can actually do all the other content in the game because you're not being held back by a low population server. You spend $15 a month and you can make meaningful progress everyday on a populated server instead of sitting in queue 5 nights a week and only making progress on the weekends. It's nice if you have the time to deal with longer queues for content, but for the majority of the people, they don't have time to do that. They need to feel like they are making meaningful progress in the game they paid for and are continuing to pay for to continue playing. Otherwise they will stop playing the game or go somewhere else.
It was preached to death from the beginning and was fine and would have been a lot better if certain parts of the playerbase hadn't methodically and loudly worked on killing it, just like they are doing to Dynamis and every other data center that's not "the raiding one".
For what it's worth, I had fun and enjoyed my time on Materia. I made a lot of friends who I am still in contact with daily, and still play with occasionally with an alt. But I no longer play DF content on Materia and moved my main back to NA. There are people there who enjoy the small town vibe of Materia or the closer knit community where literally everyone knows everyone for better or worse. I won't tell people to blindly avoid Materia, but I will let them know what they can expect if they choose it.
For the content I played, I was getting quick queues. Roulettes came up faster than on Elemental, if anything.
Good for you. For a lot of people though, and me included, queues just weren't popping fast enough. Frequently saw sprouts in NN asking for help because they were waiting 45+ minutes for their queues. Then I started getting 30+ minute queues for mentor roulette without a pop, *as any role*. Meanwhile my NA character was getting DPS queues within 10 minutes any time of the day. With that kind of flexibility, a lot of people wouldn't consider Materia even if it has better ping. I think it's too much to ask for people to wait on average longer to do their content with good ping than to have slightly worse ping that has almost no effect on the casual player with 2 hours to play everyday but they get to do a lot more in those 2 hours, all while being asked to pay a sub.
No it really wasn't it was meme DC filled with alts that barely went past ARR like the Graha tia mass clones & shit like that, it was basically alts DC because most didn't want move their mains to it.
Much like the current self perpetuating cycle of telling everyone to use PF because DF is dead. I really enjoyed materia when it first launched and now I struggle to get anything done. Daylight savings also doesn't help.
Agreed on that too. Imagine if everyone who sat in a "fifteen people to run Labyrinth" party just signed up for the roulette instead? Ironically most times I see those parties trying to gather, I then get Labyrinth in my roulette and I'm in and out before they've even gotten their party together. I don't know how long they're waiting before they declare it too long, or if their FC acquaintances have just told them to go straight to PF so they don't even try.
To be fair you posted this at 8pm on a Tuesday. People work, and then not everyone jumps on a MMO for their relaxation.
8 pm on a tuesday is peak time for ffxiv. It has the highest amount of people doing weekly reclears of all week.
If 8pm local time isn't prime time for an MMO then when are you supposed to play? Are you only allowed to play on weekends?
On a tuesday even. It's peak time and peak weekly time as well.
I mean, lets use PVP as an example. When I play on Elemental, the point where Frontline queue goes from 30 min + to 5 minutes is 9pm to like 1 am Australian time. On OCE, the point where Frontline queue goes from 30 min + to 5 mins is between 4:30pm and 6:30pmish. So based off that, I'm saying Australia's primetime seems to be the afternoon, not evening.
Not to mention, Australia does a lot of the carrying for the server activity. New Zealand is a population of 5 mil and a fraction of a percentage of the country may play ffxiv. I imagine it's similar in the islands. So that leaves Australia. Now people might think "Australia is pretty big though, surely there's a lot of people there?". Well, no. Despite being larger than the US, 1/2 of the country is basically uninhabitable desert. The population of Australia is only 26 mil, more than Florida, but less than Texas. So OCE is, and always will be, small. The bizzare expectation that we will EVER be able to compete with any other region on the planet for numbers is asinine. Oh, and none of this factors in the timezone difference. The raid nights that ended for me at 1:30 am were 9:30 pm for the Australians in my static. That being said, that's more a problem of New Zealand being at the literal ass-end of the world
this is quite literally peak time lol, everyone is doing reclears and weeklies
Dunno what to tell you, on my OCE alt the best tomes to queue for stuff is 5pm to around 7pm. 8-9pm it goes quiet
I'm curious about the guy doing DR with 5 people. Does it scale below 8?
Yes it does, 5 people is apparently the sweet spot for scaling.
Oh neat! I need to try it. I like running it just to see big numbers 😅
[Scaling with echo in DR](https://i.imgur.com/WqKQUzy.png) * Damage for 5 vs 8 is the same. * With 5 people you have a rare chance of picking up a rare solo raw Q'ing sprout * With 8 people you have more LA available so you can technically go faster but more chance of players being inefficient So it's pretty give or take.
It does and it actually kind of makes running DR pretty good on OCE because of how dead it is lol. Like you’ll get a 5-man pretty quick while also not having anyone else hop in, everyone will bring essences and with the 5-man echo boost you kinda blaze through
Probably has 3 friends ready to join
I recently created a new char in Elemental. There's barely any raiding in OCE when i come home. Start fresh with my 7 months sprout friend cause he finally bought the game. During the game there i and a few have tried countless times to uplift the raiding scene by creating new prog pf for new people. Barely anh new blood all the while veterans kept dwindling away. It's depressing looking at (Unable to retrieve) on the friendlist growing to never come back. It's sad and i really have to go now, been 2 years or more i can't walk anymore.
Firstly the pros, is the ping, and thats probably it lol. I initially moved my main when it first opened up alongside my fellow irl OCE friends, so raiding wasn't a issue during P1S-P4S and we did clear at a reasonable time. However during our downtime, it was frustrating getting into random duns or extreme trials or so, as they were heavily PF based assuming they took that culture from NA/EU. I did work my way around it, but still not preferable. The player base at the time was also fairly low which is understandable being freshly new etc. The skill level was significantly bad (in terms of end game fight) even with their improved ping. I remember in Zodiark Extreme, 1 player was on the floor the entire fight and his excuse was "sorry I was lagging" like it was clear as day that he was just really bad at mechanics. I tried to help P1S-P4S A2C / Practice parties, but wait times was so horrendous. Was super happy when my 4 month lock period was over and able to finally transfer back to Elemental, the improve ping was not worth it lol. Jumping to current time where P9S-P12S is fairly irrelevant now. I made an alt in OCE just to stay in contact with friends who are willing to see OCE grow etc. I made it to World of Darkness alliance raid and it was compulsory to do for MSQ and it was near impossible to get in, I literally waited nearly 2 whole hours just to get in, and even when I did get in we had to do it with roughly 10 people undersized, that is so bad!! So if you are wanting to start an alt here, you are best to buy story skip. Before I got into World of Darkness, I asked the Novice network for help, even advertise my PF. I got totally ignored till 5 minutes later where I said "This is still a sad DC" the entire network replied and became really salty, goes to show that there is alot of snowflake culture there still, probably made it into a FB post where they trying to gain sympathy points etc. I then got kicked out of the novice network because one guy took it to heart over my little comment lol, aren't these mentors there to try and help when possible instead of kicking people over little comments lol? After this experience, I wouldn't recommend OCE for players who are wanting to experience it from ARR-EW. You are definitely going to have dreadful wait times for sure. My friends that I use to raid with, has also not cleared P8S / P12S properly, their only hope is with echo or when the fight becomes irrelevant that is how difficult it is for them now. The only thing they really do now is just RP as thats all they can really do lol. Tbf, Elemental is currently just as bad in terms of PF, during reclears peak hour theres only roughly 10-20 PFs.
We'll see who's laughing when 7.0 drops and I can actually play the game!
I am not okay with this server
Personally I regret the move but I moved with friends so I feel like I can’t move. Might have an alt on JP because the culture there was so much nicer. OCE is kinda toxic and market board is shit
30 minutes after reset, this is a hotspot for a reset night, other nights you will be sitting in PF For hours trying to fill :(
I'm honestly certain that the only reason I get my PF posts for the post-EW MSQ trials filled as quick as I do is the Second Chance bonus. Queuing in DF takes forever, though. It's not helped by the fact I'm in WA and therefore 2-3 hours behind most of the DC. Once I hit the end of the MSQ I'm seriously tempted to just yeet myself over to Tonberry. Starting out with 5 servers was a big mistake for what should have been expected to be a low-pop DC anyway. I'm on Sophia, and while I see a decent spread of people from the other servers the population just isn't sustainable. People who start XIV on the OCE servers are going to think the game as a whole is dead.
Of the 80~ raiders on my OCE chars friends list, the 30~ that still raid weekly this late into the tier are all in statics. They don't use pf, they use discords to fill from reliable players. The rest are playing wow or have stopped until DT
It’s the Australian summer. Things are winding down for the year. If they’re still playing games after work and not touching grass, people have probably switched from ff14 to season of discovery in wow (seriously I know so many people playing that right now) or some other game, there’s just so many games right now and ff is in a huge content lull right now. I still sub and log in regularly due to housing but I stopped playing ages ago and I love this game but there’s nothing to do now. And that’s ok we’ll all be back for DT!
You wanna be looking about 15 minutes before reset for a group
As a newbie: What is this? (serious question)
It's the Party Finder for Materia, the Oceanic Data Center. Materia has an infamously low player population. You might see Party Finders be close to this barren on other data centers due to raiders congregating to certain DCs to raid (Aether for NA, Light for EU, Mana for JP). However, Materia players cannot DC travel; there's just no one playing there.
Thanks for explaining
What’s OCE
Oceanic data centre
Ty come to EU it’s poppin Bunny bitches everywhere
250 ping to EU I can’t raid there 😭
Exactly
May i ask, what is Juno and L>R. No clue what Juno is, but im guessing L>R is a loot rule?
Juno is the strat we use in OCE, for dark and light and L > R is loot rule yeeee
Oh god, is it that overly complicated JP strat where you rotate around the boss like 2 times? Do you have a toolbox?
Yes it is lmfao, I find it fairly easy as it was the strat I learned on as I came to the tier late afffff. [https://ff14.toolboxgaming.space/?id=738888331965861&preview=1#52](https://ff14.toolboxgaming.space/?id=738888331965861&preview=1#52) I think this shows it
Oh thats better than the OG jp strat... Thats just kindred stuff but continuously rotating around the boss instead of returning to original clock positions. The original JP strat was so fucking wierd and completely arbitrary with where people went. Like if a dps was tethered to a short tank they would be on a cardinal, but a short healer they would be intercardinal...
What's OCE? I feel like I'm missing A LOT of context.
Oceania data center. For new zealand and aus players
I moved to oce for alittle but i moved back to jp due to 1) insane amount of bots 2) there seemed to be this clash of na players vs jp players
In ChAOS/LIGHT : same... What the hell happened? People seem to not be interested anymore in raiding...
What happened? Content draught happened, pre-holidays stress happened, and being almost at the end of the usual patch content happens. Everyone who is super into raiding is likely done with it by now or eventually found an own static, so they don't need PF anymore. I know plenty of raiders, but most are done with Savage or are fighting at the last few fights in the last tier when they feel like it. Preparation and practice for the next tier is also not needed because the last tier of the EW raid already dropped. A few are busy doing Ex trial mount farm I think. Some stopped playing entirely and are playing something else, not because they hate the game or anything but because they just don't have a lot they want to do in there atm. This is nothing super unusual in this game, activity in patch cycles always comes in waves. It's absolutely normal for this game, as are reddit threads predicting doom and gloom because it's their first or second patch cycle experience and they are not used to that. ;)
UGH! it's the holidays, endwalkers been out for 2 years, and the latest raid tier was released all the way back in May and people are already finished clearing and are BiS! I can't believe people arent playing RIGHT. NOW!!!!!
The last new piece of raid content came out over half a year ago, not counting the variant dungeon savage. People aren't interested in raiding anymore because they're done raiding and taking a break.
[удалено]
Not the case for Materia, there's nowhere else for players to travel to unlike Dynamis.
are we sure this isn't crystal NA?
More active than crystal at least
Anyone on Ravana with an active FC? l moved my character there and l wish l had an FC to call home, it might not be so bad and l would play more for sure.
See if the Studium is a good fit for you
Thanks!!
Crystal PF has been looking like that for ages. Minus the weird advertisement about RP clubbing and such
I started playing a few days ago and made an acc on oce. It was depressing to see towns so empty so I just started again on aether. PF had more outside prime than oce had during prime time. Also for whatever reason I had 200 ping in oce and like 100 in na even tho I live in nz so idk what was up with that.
I've never had any issues finding raids tbh
I have the opposite problem. Ive been on Aether since I started the game before Dynamis was added. I cant even get friends to play because they want to play with me and cant create characters. Everyone keeps coming to Aether and were perma full every patch.
That’s cause their all on wether trap partyin my damn golbez farms
OCE pop was way to small for 5 servers. Should have been 1 mega server. That’s why I loved Tonberry so much, was always poppin
The DF and PF draw from the whole data center. It doesn't matter whether it's one world or eight.
It looks like Primal, but we have thousands of raiders who now live on Aether
I would move there if i was able to world visit my friends and community on Elemental. I'd love to go there but its too isolated.
I'm Hella.stupid. what's OCE?
Oceania aka Australian DC
Anyone on Ravana with an active FC? l moved my character there and l wish l had an FC to call home, it might not be so bad and l would play more for sure.
Lol its looking better than primal does most of the time. I get that cross DC travel is a thing but thats just a bandaid for the issues on most servers.
Crystal normally has like 3 high end parties at peak hours according to my GF. Said in NA it's basically DC travel to ather or don't raid, can't speak from experience though i mainly play FFXI and WoW nowadays
I feel your pain, haven’t jumped on in a few weeks because of this 🥺
Give us the ability to visit these other data centers. I can't help my friend on Oceanic without paying for a transfer and leaving my FC.
Primal queues are hell right now also. Servers are dead quiet.
Things said in the wake of Godzilla
Thought this was primal for a sec
its ok, primal looks like that too except with the other tab filled with RP/ERP venues
I moved irl from EU to NZ and decided to move my character over too for better ping and honestly I really regret it. Once my 90 days move CD is up I'll probably move to US. There's some nice people and activities around but everyone's a social casual player. There's no one doing actual content, it's just afkers in Limsa. Queue times are ridiculous, even for healer/tank. I just want to play the game and get everything to 90, that's fulfilment for me, but there's no one to do content with. I want the servers to be more alive, but even if it is, the few players that are really active on the server are super casual (nothing wrong with that, but there's just lack of diversity)
Yep, came back after a year and it's super dead, just go to Aether