Long gone are the days when you couldn't leave your assigned server in Final Fantasy 14; the 2019 patch introduced the ability to hop between servers in your own datacenter, and the 2022 update takes it a step further by introducing the Now you can hop between centers. Players had hoped it would extend to moving across regions, but that hasn't happened. Until now. A few things.

Here's the good news: cross-region travel will be tried from March 25 until Dawntrail is released. The bad news is that you can only move to data centers in Oceania. This means that players on Japanese, North American, and European servers can move to Oceania's servers, but Oceania players can't move from where they are.

It makes sense to use the Oceania data center as a guinea pig; it was just added in 2022, and while some players have migrated, many have chosen to remain in the already established community. The area is a perfect testing ground and will hopefully be used to alleviate congestion during the release of the upcoming expansion Dawntrail.

"With the release of Dawntrail, there may be login queues on many worlds, especially during peak times." With this in mind, we are considering a temporary option that would allow players to play in less populated physical data centers through limited region-to-region transfers."

Those who were around when Endwalker was released will remember the hours-long lines, the 30-minute AFK timer, and the pain of the game being discontinued due to its sheer popularity. It makes sense that the team would want to avoid a repeat of those situations. Besides, having everyone go to Oceania might make the multi-region gatherings more exciting.

Whether this will lead to a full-blown cross-region trip remains to be seen. The system has been in place since 2022, but director and producer Naoki Yoshida is hesitant to publicly introduce it on a broader level. He cites concerns about confusing cultural differences between regions, which is also mentioned in Lodestone's post.

"As previously announced, our system can facilitate cross-regional mobility, but we are still evaluating this feature given the often vastly different market economies and social norms between data centers. We will continue to consider community feedback as we consider whether this feature should be enabled."

This concern is warranted, at least to some extent. We would like to see a difference in the way raid mechanics are handled in each region. Show a pastebin to a European player or an in-game macro to a North American player and watch the fists fly (just kidding, sort of). But Yoshida could use a little more faith in the community, and I hope this trial proves that players from all over the world can play and co-exist.