FFXIV’s new Data Center in Japan is seeing a confusing mix of cultures after the World reshuffle

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-07-06 14:03 JST)

Square Enix released patch 6.18 for Final Fantasy XIV on July 5 (JST). While the patch added the Data Center Travel System to the game, it also brought about a Data Center reshuffle in Japan. A new Data Center called Meteor was added with a handful of Worlds from Japan’s other three Data Centers being moved to it. This has created a confusing and exciting mix of Data Center cultures.

Final Fantasy XIV servers are divided across multiple Data Centers with each one housing multiple Worlds which players can join. It’s also possible to recruit and match with players across different Worlds as long as those Worlds are on the same Data Center. Up to this point, Japan’s Data Centers included Elemental, Gaia, and Mana. But with patch 6.18, a fourth Data Center, Meteor, was added and a handful of Worlds from each of the other Data Centers were transferred to it to spread the overall load.

This makes Meteor a collection of Worlds from across multiple Data Centers. This has caused a mixture of cultures as each previously self-contained Data Center has now come together. Players have even been taking to social media to express their bewilderment at how others play the game.

One example comes from players that were on the Elemental Data Center, which is known for having a lot of English-speaking players, who are surprised at how few template messages are being used in chat.

FFXIV provides template messages players can use that have canned translations that appear for players using different language settings. If you used the template “Hello!” on the English client, it would show up as “こんにちは” to players on the Japanese client. Players from the Elemental Data Center were likely used to having day-to-day conversations using template messages, hence the surprise reaction. The Gaia Data Center also has some unique quirks that players have noticed since the reshuffle.

And then there are players from the Mana Data Center who were stuck in the middle of these two peculiar cultures coming together, which was likely something of a culture shock for them.

Each Data Center having something of their own local rules was made apparent by the creation of the Meteor Data Center. In PVP, players on Gaia use the “◎” marker to mark targets while players from Elemental use the “1” marker. It looks like markers are currently getting jumbled together on Meteor, so hopefully players update their macros to handle both. There are also cases where different Data Centers have different ways of tackling difficult content, so players should get their macros and such sorted out beforehand to avoid confusion.

While Meteor may seem like a haphazard mix of other Data Centers right now, before long, it will likely create a unique culture all its own. It’ll be interesting to see how Meteor develops and changes going forward.

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