New player needs some help!

[Jazz]

So a friend and i got the game and are interested in the RP scene here, since we heard a lot about it. Now we come from GW2 EU and from what we hear things work a bit different here. 

 

So i'm having a hard time figuring out what are the RP servers here? And which one we should try and join before we hop in?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Hiya there!

 

As you've likely heard, FFXIV doesn't have any official RP servers sanctioned by Square Enix. It's all "community" driven.

 

Depending on what times you're active, there are a couple RP-friendly servers people mostly group up on.

 

Balmung (NA / Aether datacenter): The oldest and the biggest. Carried over from 1.0's Besaid server. Locked for dangerously high player population.

 

Mateus (NA / Aether datacenter): The second biggest RP-friendly server. Still growing. Had some RPers before Balmung was basically perma-closed, but stepped up more after and has a more self-sustaining RP population than before.

 

Omega (EU / Chaos datacenter): Was mostly decided upon by RPers across multiple sites to be an unofficial EU RP server. Smaller population, but larger and more coordinated than single-group pickings elsewhere.

 

On the RPC, we have a Linkshell Hall and a Free Company Hall with known [mostly] active groups that are RP-focused in some way, whether in-character or out-of-character. For larger servers (and the formerly large server, Gilgamesh) there are filters to better find groups. If there's not a dedicated button, it gets filtered into the "Other" category. ...should another server grow big enough, they'll also get a button though.

[Jazz]

Cheers for the info man. We're still downloading the game now, and we'll see to join one of those servers when we're done. 

From what i see there's soo much to get into in this game, so we don't really know where to start.

Since we're from EU, how bad would the connection be if we joined up on an American server?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Depends on where in the EU. A fair number of Western European players (think, UK, France, Germany, etc) play on NA servers, although crossing the Atlantic and then all of continental USA does take its toll on latency. It's playable, but not great. RP shouldn't be affected, however, if you're interested in trying different servers out.

 

FFXIV's supposed to be playable content-wise until you have a ping over 200ms, after which dodging mechanics is more an art form than a reaction. Most people aim for at least

 

You can get a basic idea of what your connection will look like by pinging the lobby server for each datacenter. (Any basic command line will do, like cmd.exe on every Windows PC!) You can also run a traceroute using tracert in the command line (windows) for more details on what the connection looks like each step of the way.

 

Aether: 204.2.229.9

Chaos: 195.82.50.9

[Valence]

You can also find the ping while the game is running by running under windows /resmon (Resource Monitor) and take a look in the Network tab: finding the ffxiv process running and the latency is written just next to it.

 

Note that with a VPN active, the new ping will not be shown under the ffxiv process anymore since you're tunneled through the VPN proxy, but you should find a similar process in latency that's named something like "putty" or else.