Global Content Lobby Thoughts

Was thinking about this as apossible band aid to server population issues, or as a way to encourage people to move to smaller servers to distribute populations while still having access to an assortment of people to play with. It goes without saying, I'm disregarding infrastructure challenges or the welfare of the hamsters running our servers. Tirelessly.

So, my thought on global content lobby. Where people from any server can connect/enter in to find others to group with. Here you'll be able to yell, shout, chat, create global parties, and from there, access global instanced areas of content.

I'll use Sortie as an example for this.
Six people who met on FFXIAH.com want to run Sortie together but theyre all on different servers. So, all of them enter/connect to this global zone, and create a global party within it. From there, they would enter a special global instanced area of Drifts #4 where the entry Bitzer is located to queue into that servers instancing for content. This way, other servers instancing instancing isn't affected.

Of course this kind of space could breed RMT, so trade would likely need to be restricted or limited in someway - that way gil isn't transferred across servers, or items used to launder gil.

I can already see this being overrun by RMT who will use this as their safe space to sell non-stop across all servers.

The only thing that matters is server transfers make profit.

They will absolutely never do anything that lessens server transfer profits. That's the beginning and the end of it.

(except close servers apparently which I never ever expected)
((said they should, but never expected them to actually do it))

I figured this could be a problem, but if Gil or items weren’t allowed to be traded that should limit it? Or require like… a player to have 3 jobs 99 with one of them mastered. Or it could be like… a moderated chat heh.


Ah… well… SE being SE and profiting aside….

if fujito hasn't asked for help from the 14 team with this sort of idea, he should. 14 started out really limited, couldn't even have your chocobo out and use duty finder at the same time. now, you can hop servers and data centers pretty much at will, and use party finder across server as well.

now I'm not saying 11's architecture is at all similar, just that there were a lot of "we can't do this" moments until they actually could do it, and did.

In that case, come up with an all servers Auction House where you pay SE 1$ per transaction your characters do, billed monthly on top of normal fees. (SE gets 2$ per transaction that way, buyer & seller pay)
And make server transfers take a lot longer to repeat.
like once per year, and must wait 1year after creating the character.

Sortie is particularly well suited to something like this, since all rewards are personal rewards - either points or direct drops. Just disable trades and bazaar while inside the "global instance", and you're good.

It's funny because IIRC the instance's queuing system already shows you parties in queue globally across all servers right?

Would it be a big change to allow people across servers to connect to the same instance?

I guess things like linkshells, unity chat and across-server functionality would have to be disabled or otherwise managed, but technically it should be feasible.

no, there's no indication they have any form of cross-server communication to even remotely enable this

it would be a cool feature, but i would be utterly shocked if they were willing to add it.. it likely requires an immense amount of back end work

I'll take "the last thing any programmer ever wants to hear" for 2000 please, Alex.

Also "what every programmer says when asked about anything ever".

Right before "how much time do we have to spend on this" and "what resources are you willing to spend".

I was going to reply to this too with a similar sentiment. It's not a matter of "we can't do this" so much as "we don't have the resources available to do this" or "we can't justify spending the resources on this", in my opinion.

If given infinite money and time, sure this idea sounds great. Over here in reality land, it's not going to happen, ever.

Who said they are closing servers? Or do you mean the ones they closed decades ago?

Which is why I asked if the queue is already visible across servers.

I was mistaken in that. From what Thorny said it's a lot of work and won't happen. That's fine.

The only content that has congestion issues is Ambu for 2-3 days, Omen during some campaigns (will be less now they slashed card requirements and the trade ratio), Sheol C sometimes (JP time only?) and Sortie.

Ambu they could add more instances easily surely. Omen is rare and probably already not an issue. Sheol C and Sortie are harder because of zone size?

oh I agree 100%, just a reminder the "we can't do this" is always the first line of defense against anything complex when they certainly can do it, just may not be practical at the time.

if people really want this, make noise and let them know, over and over again.

I put this kind of feature request in the same boat as the people hoping for a complete game remaster. It's not impossible, but it will never be practical, and you're more likely to win the lottery than see this happen.

SE can't even figure out how to unify queues on a single server, or fix autotargeting, or correct packet prioritization in instances - and any one of those things would be a huge QoL improvement and well worth the time spent.

it took me like 4 tries to get into delve the other night at like 4am PST. surely just cos of the campaign, and it was weekend (and im assuming jp prime time) but i was kinda concerned for a minute there.

Closed as in "no entry", not closed as in "out of business." Eiryl's talking about the Asura thing.

During Ballista Royale, they allowed players to use the NPC Tillecoe in Ru'Lude Gardens to warp to a special landing zone version of Ghelsba Outpost (Diorama), which hosted the cross-server tournament (they actually shut down the zone for all players in general and replaced it with this new zone). This was almost 20 years ago, but they were able to leverage one zone and all eligible players from any server was able to join the lobby (you had to specifically be part of the eligible teams). Not sure how they did it, maybe they allowed transport via your character name, since you had to register your team and all characters who participated. Now I doubt anybody who designed this functionality is still around, but they definitely have the ability to enable cross-server communication in some way.

Defaulting AT to 'off' would be a better use of time than trying to fix it. At least, I haven't heard any ideas on how to fix it that aren't essentially a sidegrade.

All they have to do, is invert the order.

Right now it targets blm/rng first (lowest max health)

Switch it to highest max health, it's perfect. It's that simple. Target monks wars drks drgs sams plds runs before nins whms rng blm rdm

....They could also just make the god damn blm rng and nin mobs NOT stand out of melee range. They run in at half health anyway. A very simple solution also.

Distance from player is already known to the server and client - it's how mobs stand in or out of melee range.

Not hard to pick closest mob to you. Even intern level work..

I feel like this is asking them to make ranged attacks and spells only work in melee range...



It probably isn't difficult, but it still requires that you position your character(or your tank/trusts) properly if you want to rely on AT to select your intended next target.


Ideally your tank is the only one facing the mobs at range. You are on the other side of the target facing your tank, with your back turned to the ranged mobs because you don't want to get block/parry/counter/conal/ect so you wouldn't target them anyway. For the situations where you don't have a choice, you do have the awareness to position yourself that it's not hard to switch to the correct target from there.


Sure it's annoying, but the number of people we have assigned to work on this game doesn't actually meet the standard of being called a 'team'. I think the time is better spent elsewhere.

"Closed" isn't a great word then, more like "locked".

They have enough people to completely re-work Limbus and Besieged for i119.

Idk, autotarget would be pretty high on my list if I were prioritising things. They even said they'd work on it roughly a decade ago.

To the best of my understanding, the only cross-server matches were the finals. Most of the ballista royale was between teams on the same server. For the final, they copied or moved characters to a new server. Most likely, the new server only had one zone server for diorama, so they required that characters were present there before cloning them.

I wouldn't really call that cross-server communication, more like they did a manual server transfer or copy to enable the match. The zone is irrelevant to the process.

"We have heard your complaints that auto-target doesn't work very well or as intended, therefore we have decided to delete the autotarget functionality. Enjoy."

That would actually be an improvement.

Saves having to have `wait 60; /autotarget off` in every autoload script.