Auction House - Removing the 7 item listing cap

[Kaisha]

I would suggest to lower it, might help with server lag in port Jeuno for some people.

Auction House/Search both operate independent of the zone servers.

[bungiefanNA]

Historically the item limit was 8 (it was reduced to 7 in the July 2002 update - see http://jpbutton.bluegartr.com/?p=157). Why would this be a problem now?

The servers were notoriously unstable back then. That's about the month I started, and they were having such issues keeping the game up and running that they gave 2 free months to all accounts instead of just 1 month free. That was probably one of the things they changed to fix the crashing of the systems, because the AH and player search would crash all the time the first few months of the game.

[Jile]

Greetings!

By increasing the number of items by even 1, this would apply to every character in the game which would cause a spike in server lag. Rest assured that the development team is looking into this, but they would like to proceed carefully.

Just a thought if the resource use is that substantial.... but how about some of those previous-world servers be 'dedicated' ah servers. Phoenix-AH/server with Phoenix-World/server and the processes would not have to lag our world... Now, can I have my 20-item per character listings? lol

[Reiterpallasch]

Other games will let you list literally hundreds upon hundreds of items, but going from 7 to 8 in FFXI could crash the servers. Nice.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Just a thought if the resource use is that substantial.... but how about some of those previous-world servers be 'dedicated' ah servers. Phoenix-AH/server with Phoenix-World/server and the processes would not have to lag our world... Now, can I have my 20-item per character listings? lol

They probably pirated the downed servers for FFXIV.

[Camiie]

Other games will let you list literally hundreds upon hundreds of items, but going from 7 to 8 in FFXI could crash the servers. Nice.

This is what I don't get. Other games have no issues with text flying all over the place, listing tons of items on the AH, real time updates, and many thousands of characters per world/realm. With FFXI it seems like the least little thing added could send the servers spiraling into an unplayable lag-fest. What the heck?

I know where I work when our in-house email server started approaching critical mass we took action. If FFXI's servers are teetering so close to the edge of disaster what action is being taken to remedy that? Is this a hardware, coding, or bandwidth issue or all of the above?

What would happen if, by some miracle, we got a huge influx of new players? Would that also reduce the servers to a laggy mess? If the server structure can't handle more AH slots or more widely reaching /yell "channel" why can or can't it handle more players? What's the difference, and what will be done if it can't? I can answer my own question with "free and/or forced transfers," but if that wasn't enough what then? What would it take for the infrastructure to be improved or is that simply never going to happen no matter what?

[RAIST]

It may not necessarily be the servers themselves.....well, not entirely. Alot of other games are regionally divided. When all your US East players are seperated from US West, EU, etc....you don't have the NETWORK latency issues involved. There is as much as a 200ms shift between regions, sometimes more during peak times. Not to mention the screwy traffic shaping that goes on that creates issues as well.

[Xantavia]

Other games will let you list literally hundreds upon hundreds of items, but going from 7 to 8 in FFXI could crash the servers. Nice.

If anything, I would think that it could possibly be related to the fact that the game is still playable on dial-up.

[Nala]

Wow im suprised a thread on the forums the no police haven't hit yet.

[Riggs]

Considering this problem of sever spike, how exactly is it caused? i mean merging two severs in to 1 must surly put more strain on that severs auction house than just giving 1 more slot to the existing people so it must be to do with the programming and how it relates 7 items to 1 person times a couple of thousand.

So why not split the auction house in to 2 seperate systems, so you would click on the counter and you get a choice option 1 armoe and weapons or option B crafting materials, food etc and that way you could give everybody 7 slots on both systems