Starting on March 24th at 8 PM PDT, through the beginning of Patch 7.0 maintenance, the public test will begin to enable those from near and far to play with one another. This is being done ahead of Dawntrail’s release, in order to get ahead of potential queues and server capacity issues when the next expansion releases.
The test will work by enabling cross-region travel from each of the European, Japanese, and North American data centers to play with others in the Oceanian data center region.
With the system trying to connect to a far region, they warn of potential lag and for some slowness, including that there may be slow returns and some server congestion when Dawntrail is out.
While the FFXIV community is ready to commiserate, meme, and otherwise wait when Dawntrail releases, Square Enix is working to make that experience much less likely with the new option.
