Final Fantasy 14’s queues can get long—not for roulettes, mind, those are usually pretty nippy—but if you’re trying to complete a specific alliance raid as a newer player, you can be stuck twiddling your thumbs for ages.
Square Enix is planning to make a change that’ll fix that soon, though. In a recent blog post to the game’s website, it’s been announced that same-region player matchmaking’ll be available starting November 10 after a successful trial period on its Japanese servers.
What does that mean? Basically, FF14’s server architecture is into physical data centers (Japan, Europe, Oceania, and North America), then logical data centers, which are sort of like realms in other MMOs. For instance, the NA servers have Crystal, Aether, Dynamis, and Primal (then within those centers are “worlds”, which can be travelled and matchmade between pretty easily).
You’ve been able to hop between these logical data centers manually for some time—it’s pretty common, for instance, for Crystal players to hop on over to Aether to group up with folks for high-end content. But you need to log out to do so, with said parties constructed through the in-game party finder.
After November 10, however, matchmaking for things like roulettes will also be possible within the same physical data center, as will the party finder writ large, cross-world linkshells, fellowships, and friend list and /tell functionality. Travelling between data centers will also be made easier, too.
This is a huge quality-of-life boost that should massively cut down on queueing times—but it’ll also make organising or creating groups for the aforementioned high-end content way easier, too, allowing folks to see and join listings for different logical data centers without having to hop between them.
My secret hope, as an EU player who’s currently stuck on North American ping for community reasons (it’s where all my mates are), is that this sort of functionality might one day lead to cross region travel so I can hop on over to the EU whenever I actually want to do content. A guy can dream.
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