Quote Originally Posted by Arcon View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Tsukino_Kaji View Post
It's will be an incredibly high amount of additional information across the entire server, constantly. Your "streamline" would slow the game down.
Stop posting your misinformed garbage all across the forums. You clearly have no idea about anything at all.

Here's the amount of information that it will send:
- Less than a byte when logging on.
- Less than a byte when logging off.

How is that "an incredibly high amount", and what do you mean "across the entire server"? If you mean it's getting sent to everyone who is connected that's bullshit. It will (logically) only be sent to your LS. It's the same "incredibly high amount of [..] information" as sending "/" to your LS chat (a lot less even, as I've heard FFXI chat is encoded using UTF-16, where even 1 bit would be enough for this, plus a header). So that's less than what would happen if people actually said "Hi" instead.

If you wanna argue, fine, go ahead and argue, but stop making shit up to bring your point across.
The only incorrect part was 'incredibly high'. This feature would indeed be causing a server load and sending data around non-stop, because people are logging in and out non-stop. Depending on the linkshell and friendlist size, you're looking at 64+100 messages per person (at max). Each of those 164 needs to looked up and checked for online status.

Those are not going to be 1-bit or byte messages, more like 100 bytes with headers and message content.

And no, that's not a lot, but with communications being limited by the PS2, every little byte adds up. For PC it's laughable, but with PS2 this needs carefull consideration.

When servers are brought down or up, or even just a provider deciding to block FFXI for w/e reason, this could cause a cascade of messages, crashing clients or even whole servers. Unlikely to see it actually happen, but it is something to consider with a feature like this running on ancient hardware like PS2. It's barely capable of keeping up with normal gameplay as it is...