February 2021 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Immortal]

Yes because I am of the line of thinking that if we cancel our subs they will just shut the game down, but instead of that we should be very vocal.

[Leny]

Counterproductive to say the least. You can't be afraid and complain that you're enabling the fear.

Also, fighting with you is just as unproductive. The ever increasing amount of lag needs to be addressed. Let's not distract from that.

[Alhanelem]

Counterproductive to say the least. You can't be afraid and complain that you're enabling the fear.

Also, fighting with you is just as unproductive. The ever increasing amount of lag needs to be addressed. Let's not distract from that.

One way to improve the lag would be to not all cluster on one server.

[Leny]

I mean hey, it's easy to fix. Force half of asura off and close it to new accounts. Done and Done.

Except that square will actually lose tens of thousands of dollars on transfer income, so that's a hard "no". It also has absolutely nothing to do with Asura. But if you knew how it worked you wouldn't have said that, and it's pointless to try to correct you. It's even worse than yelling at a wall, at least the wall isn't willfully ignorant.

[Alhanelem]

I mean hey, it's easy to fix. Force half of asura off and close it to new accounts. Done and Done.

Except that square will actually lose tens of thousands of dollars on transfer income, so that's a hard "no". It also has absolutely nothing to do with Asura. But if you knew how it worked you wouldn't have said that, and it's pointless to try to correct you. It's even worse than yelling at a wall, at least the wall isn't willfully ignorant.

You know, most major MMOs, including FFXIV (and WoW), routinely offer free transfers from higher to lower population servers to balance server populations, typically with further incentives like a boost to XP and lifting of restrictions on what you can take with you. This is acknowledging the fact that supar server performance caused by overpopulation can harm player experiences and potentially cost them more than the transfer fee.

That's all they would have to do here. And since they sometimes offer discounts on server transfers for come-back promotions, I don't see any technical reason why they wouldn't be able to do this. Because SE itself runs another MMO that uses this kind of load balancing tool, there is really no excuse, not even money, to not offer it here.

Both over- and under-population present issues that impact player experiences. Over populated worlds (Asura, possibly Odin) may have more frequent/worse lag issues, longer waiting to get into content (or in some cases, being able to enter at all), more RMT, etc, while underpopulated servers create their own inconveniences to the player by making it harder to find what you need on the AH and having to plan ahead to do group content and such. incentivizing the playerbase to balance out the populations will make the experience better for everyone.

[Tsukihika]

The gaol related issue has honestly nothing to do with amount of players. When this lag/delay occurs, there isn't even dozen of players present within the zone. It is certainly some weird bug in the game code that throttles server side bandwidth.

Players clustering on a single server merely means more congestion, more competition, longer wait times (which they have addressed to some extent). There's a hard cap how many character models player side client loads, probably to avoid client side frame rate drops. That's why players don't exactly lag in say port jeuno, for example, where there can be hundreds of players bazaaring overnight. Having to load the max amount of character models possible can, of course, stress some older machines and slower connections more. In-game settings even have actual slider for this to reduce the amount of models loaded. Easing client side graphical load (fps).

The real issue arises on situations like Domain Invasion Mireu (and more recently gaol), where the same ffxi server gets spammed by thousands of packet requests every second. It is simply unable to keep up with this due to the send/receive bandwidth of ffxi being capped at 3k something. And your actions end up in a queue to wait server side confirmation while it deals with all the requests sent before that action. And this, is the core issue of all things related to connection lag, as there is simply nothing player can do about the situation, short of moving closer to servers located in Japan, or possibly using a VPN connection (which doesn't always work) that enables lower latency between player and server by ideally reducing the amount of "hops" necessary to reach each other. Some MMOs like elder scroll online work around these issues by limiting the number of players present in each server/zone, and thus setting soft cap on the amount of packet requests each server has to deal with. Even ffxi has partially done similar work around by splitting Ambuscade instances to Legion_A and Legion_B. Although this approach was probably taken more in response to ease ambuscade wait times.

This is my personal viewpoint of the issue anyway. :3

[Tsukihika]

Got the following response from ffxi support center ticket regarding the gaol issue. Posted them links of all the official forum bug reports and other threads regarding this.

"Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting the Square Enix Support Centre.

We are sorry to hear that you encountered a problem in FINAL FANTASY XI. Posting on the forum is the right thing to do, please keep an eye on it for updates. We will also forward your information and link to the game team.

Thank you for your patience, we do apologies for the inconvenience.
Kind regards,

The Square Enix Support Centre team"

So there's some hope of the game team at least becoming aware of the issue. Hopefully it doesn't take them until next month update to fix... but would be better than nothing i suppose.

[Alhanelem]

Gaol does seem special. I don't really see so much of the lag other people have been complaining about for a long time in Dynamis D, Gaol seems to be worse and there are times I can try to do it with no one else doing it on this server. So clearly something that didn't get enough testing before release, or was only tested in isolation.

[Pixela]

This has nothing to do with how many players each server has, it's unique to specific kinds of content.

Also, keep in mind that a post has to be translated and then sent to the developers and they have to consider it and then it has to be translated back. I would not expect to even hear anything (if they plan to address it at all) for weeks. I doubt they even have anyone that can test this outside of Japan, unless the community staff do so.

Because you refuse to punish the company for it's sleights. Openly acknowledge they're doing wrong, but here you are with an active character, paying.

This is incredibly stupid.

You do not use these kinds of tactics when you in a position of weakness, Square would happily shut FFXI down if player numbers dropped. It's always more cost effective to have your players on one game rather than 2.

This is like working for a restaurant that has been closed for months during Covid lockdowns and demanding a pay rise or you'll quit.

[Leny]

Closing is the better situation. It's better to end a toxic relationship than beg for attention.