Square recently made some interesting changes to Data Center Travel so I’m here to explain them since the actual announcement was a little confusing. A lot of people have been caught in limbo being stuck trying to data travel for hours without the ability to leave the queue! If you wanna avoid this, you have to understand how the new system works.
I’ve also made a handy infographic that you can save and share if you forget the safe data
Here’s a link to the official announcement if you want to read it.
Simply put, despite being opened up again, data center travel is now much more restrictive than what we were used to in Endwalker. There were also some minor changes to world visiting which I’ll touch on too.
This is especially important for statics that have players across different data centers since you’ll need to know the optimal place to meet up so that nobody is stuck in data center travel limbo and late for raid day.
Where Should You Travel
You can save the handy infographic above to remember but I’ll break it down below as well so you can understand where you need to go:
North America:
As of the current patch, any world that isn’t on Dynamis ****will have reduced data center travel capacity. All Dynamis worlds (except Seraph) are classified as “New” which means they’re safe for DC travel.
Europe:
The safe worlds to travel to are Phantom, Sagittarius, Alpha, and Raiden.
Oceania: You have nothing to worry about
Japan:
The safe worlds to dc travel to are Aegis, Gungnir, Kujata, Belias, and Valefor.
How it works
What Square did is come up with a system to strongly discourage data center travel to worlds that are populated. It’s mainly a way to keep party finder alive for all data centers instead of having everybody congregating on one. It works like this:
If you go to a world that is congested, the capacity is limited.
If you go to a world classified as standard that shares the data center with at least one congested world, the capacity is limited.
If you go to a world classified as new or preferred, it has increased capacity regardless of any congested worlds on the same data center so it’s reliable for travel.
If a world has too high of a capacity, travel will be blocked entirely.
NA is a really easy example to look at since every data center has congested worlds and only Dynamis has new worlds
As you can see here, every world in Dynamis is good for travel other than Seraph.
They basically want people to use the underpopulated worlds if they have to meet up with people. As far as world visiting is affected, capacity is only reduced if you’re going to a congested world.
The Good
As annoying as this all seems, being stuck hours in queue on savage launch day isn’t abnormal. If you raided at all on patch day when a tier came out last expansion and had to meet members on Aether for example, you already know that it was a pain if you didn’t plan ahead and travel before the patch went live.
I don’t expect capacity issues to be a massive deal once the hype dies down on the tier in a few weeks. Hopefully this ends up normalizing to where all data centers can have active party finders since the location of statics has much less of an impact aside from when they need people from pf to sub in.
Statics lose out a bit while still being able to play whereas people who have been upset about not being able to play on their home world can hopefully finally enjoy that again. We’ll see if it works out in the long term though because one thing that a unified party finder does is allow people to play easily late into the tier. That said, less people are logged in the further we get from patch release so the reduced capacity may not matter anyway.
The Bad
While I do like that they’re trying to fix things, making a drastic change to how data center travel works the day of a savage launch gives people little time to prepare and pre-travel in advance if they need to. Many statics could’ve been ready to go to Dynamis if they had a few days of warning in advance since people would’ve had time to spread the word. Not everybody checks the lodestone regularly so it’s easy to miss smaller announcements like this.
And for the people who did try to travel, it feels bad to get stuck in the data center travel queue with no escape. That’s right, if you were stuck waiting for hours, there was nothing you could do. No cancel button. Closing the game didn’t do anything. If you were unlucky enough to have a queue error, the game would attempt to place you back into queue without asking you so you’d be stuck all over again in a loop.
This became an issue because there’s a hard cap on how many players can visit a world so if a world filled up while you were in queue, you’d be stuck. A system should be in place to auto-populate all worlds on a data center since if you’re just traveling for party finder, it doesn’t matter what world you’re on as long as you make it to the same data center. A feature like this could’ve alleviated a lot of the stress and frustrations of savage day.
There should also be a way to escape the queue if you don’t want to wait since world visiting has a feature like this.
Another unfortunate thing is non-raiders get caught in the crossfire if you’re traveling for things like hunt trains, s ranks, or even just to buy items from cheaper marketboards. That said, as the raid hype dies down, I expect all of these players to be fine.
TLDR
Hopefully this has explained the new changes a little better. Only travel to new or preferred worlds and check the official world status page whenever you’re unsure about where to go. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/worldstatus/
Square has discussed the idea of a unified party finder but since that is currently supposed to take 2-3 years, they will probably be experimenting with different systems like this throughout the course of Dawntrail’s patch cycle. Share this with your static if they’re having trouble with Data Center travel. Happy raiding!