Yesterday was a pretty chill day playing some more Final Fantasy XIV. Since I was extremely sick Monday and Tuesday, yesterday was my first day in the office this week and I maybe pushed myself to return too quickly. When I got home I was pretty exhausted, so I worked on a few relaxing activities the first of which was finishing out the level 60 Paladin quest. After that I played around with the cosmetic system in the game to return myself to one of my favorite outfits. The bunny helm thing is sort of my signature and when playing Warrior I use it with that Artifact armor set pretty regularly. For Paladin I decided to mix things up a bit and go for the Noct Lorica and other pieces of that set. I think it works pretty well.
Another thing that has been happening is I am working on crafting a grouping community. I am not quite ready to reveal it publicly, but the idea is to create a low key chill place for getting groups in Final Fantasy. Essentially I am working on configuring the Discord server and bots to assign roles and stuff like that to make telling who is interested in grouping as which roles simple. Additionally I want everyone that joins the server to take a simple pledge to be patient and understanding with members of the group, and to hopefully let go of any rage before they enter. Right now it is largely limited to cross Data Center grouping, but coming in 6.0 they are opening it to be able to travel between Data Centers.
Since I had to refresh myself on the process last night, I thought I would talk a bit this morning about how you visit another realm. The challenge that I ran into is that I have never actually managed to get a message to successfully reach someone on another data center that I am not already friends with. In theory the syntax should be something like this:
/tell Belghast Sternblade @Cactuar This is a Test Message
That ABSOLUTELY works if you are already friends with the character, but unfortunately there in lies the problem. What I have had to do each time I wanted to friend a player from another world is utilize the world visit system. The first step is you have to go to the main Aetheryte crystal in one of the original capital cities aka Uldah, Limsa Lominsa or Gridania. From the Crystal menu you are going to choose “Visit Another World” which will pop up the middle dialog shown above allowing you to select the world that you are going to travel to. After that you will get a popup that looks and sounds just like the dungeon finder dialog telling you that you are ready to transport and what your source and destination worlds are.
Once you are on the world that your friend resides, you can use the friend search functionality to locate them. After that it is just a matter of right clicking their name in the search dialog and choosing “Send a Friend Request”. After that they will show up in your friends list just like any other friend would with the difference being that instead of your home server as the “Location” it will show their home server. Things like Company information won’t transfer between worlds so they are always going to show up as having a company of — until you actually arrive on their world. Once friended you can do all of the normal things like invite to parties for grouping purposes.
I assume in 6.0 the Data Center visit options will work an awful lot like World visiting. It seems like a needlessly arcane system but it does what it needs to do I guess. If there is an easier way to friend someone across realms I would absolutely love to hear it, but this is the method that seems to work reliably for me. My only guess is due to the other social engineering features of Final Fantasy XIV… adding this bit of friction is designed to make it feel like you are having to go through some effort to leave your own server. I think the idea being that it reinforces server communities rather than it largely being a meaningless designation. I transferred back to Cactuar this morning and was welcomed with someone giving an impromptu concert in the Aetheryte plaza. If the friction of a “visit” system preserves server identity and activities like this… then I can I can stomach the temporary frustrations of it.
I’m definitely looking forward to visiting non-Crystal friends since I foresee keeping an active sub all the way leading up and through the launch of Endwalker. Even with the 9.1 stuff in WoW, I doubt it’ll be too engaging for very long.
I guess I’m used to and don’t find the world visit that arcane. Although some folks don’t seem to understand it – i.e. at least 3 folks in our fc who’ve gone to other worlds and logged out indefinetly.. They’re going to be very confused when/if they come back.
I’m on the Crystal Data Center – but as you said, that won’t be an issue too much longer – and would be interested in helping out on your Discord. I haven’t run everything (not a savage raider nor a EX trial runner), but when it comes to dungeons, story progression, and basic content (including crafting/gathering), I’ve got years of knowledge tucked away about how things work in FFXIV. I play just about nightly and there’s no fear that I’m quitting FFXIV anytime soon.
Keep me in mind! 🙂
And yeah, you’ve got the idea of how visit works. It’s a little clunky at times, but much better than nothing. Be sure to shop across servers before you buy something costly off the Market Board! 😉