Fixed it for you.Quote:
Originally Posted by gumas
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07-02-2019, 12:42 PMHero188
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07-02-2019, 12:45 PMLinadaeWhat are you talking about? I'm on Balmung. You know, Balmung? The server that has been over populated since day ONE of ARR that is STILL over crowded. You know what my highest queue was (that wasn't ddos'd enhanced)? 27. That's right. 27 person long queue...on BALMUNG. Do you know why? Because when Crystal was added everyone and their uncles on the other Crystal servers decided to move to Aether and Primal. Perhaps if they'd stayed our queues would be longer and yours shorter but no the word from Aether was "RPer's are BAD PLAYERS! Come to Aether if you want to be able to do raids and dungeons because the new expansion will be dead on arrival on Crystal!"Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
And they listened, and they transferred. Well...guess what? We're still getting dungeons done. Pretty quickly and easily because RPers actually are just as good as everyone else. We have to be because it's the ONLY way we'll get the gear we want for roleplay. Now we just get the added benefit of low queues because everyone else has a phobia of us.
Want your experience to be better? Transfer. Because as I said before, NO company would add extra servers as long as they have half a dozen servers still mostly empty. They will just encourage you to move on your own. Keep it up and you might find yourself on the wrong end of a server split and shoved into Crystal against your will. -
07-02-2019, 12:46 PMFellgon
You post sounds like demanding...and as a players all we can do is ASK politely for a change...not demanding like i seen not just on this but in another post, sounds like youre a boss or something, SE not going make a move for anyone who points fingers in theyrs faces.
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07-02-2019, 12:47 PMValkyrie_Lenneth32gbs of ram is nothing in the server space. literally nothing. And 3.5 ghz xeons also means nothing. How many cores are these? also. You are thinking 1gbit links, not gbyte links. these are very different.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
Most of the servers I work with at an enterprise level start at 256gigs of ram, with some at 512gigs. As for cores? anywhere from 12-28 core xeons. Depends on the need of course. Most of our links are 25gbit now, with 40s and 100s at the network backbone.
For a server engineer you sure dont seem to know much about modern server infrastructure lol.
You also didn't include the most expensive part of any server farm, the SAN storage. -
07-02-2019, 12:48 PMHyoMinParkSorry. That money has to go into the FFVII Remake. Please look forward to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
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07-02-2019, 12:48 PMHero188I was already on the wrong end of a server split. I was on the Japanese server in 1.0. When the new data centers and new worlds were created i was pushed to Balmung.Quote:
Originally Posted by Linadae
That is how i know it does NOT work. Been though it in 1.0 to 2.0 and have STILL been having the same problem ever sense. -
07-02-2019, 12:52 PMHero188The quote is for fail-over off-site servers. Not on premise fully paid servers which is why its a monthly charge.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth
I know VERY WELL what 32gigs of ram will do in a server. Will do plenty fine as fail-over when traffic is FAR too high.
You must have gotten you're degree at the school of google, probably written on toilet tissue. Kudos for the crayon on it. -
07-02-2019, 12:53 PMstarxloveThe virgin Square Enix vs. the chad IT broQuote:
Originally Posted by Gula
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07-02-2019, 12:56 PMHero188Lol is it going to be anything like the first FF7 remake no thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by HyoMinPark
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07-02-2019, 01:00 PMValkyrie_LennethFail over servers work great, when it's not something like this. You are severely underestimating not only how their servers work, but what they need hardware wise. They clearly have backup servers in essence, as that's how we get the zone instances, and they have increased player capacity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
Maybe now you will stop telling people to dog pile on a single server or datacenter. It's clearly worked well for us on crystal though. No login queues for me at all. Thanks for telling everyone crystal was dead! -
07-02-2019, 01:02 PMRareItems
Balmung here, the always congested server xD No issued!
Also Just because the game says "Queue is at 1200" doesnt mean u just sit there and wait for it to load you in. Wait 1 minute and try again xD. -
07-02-2019, 01:07 PMshaielSo you only want to hear people agreeing with you when you don't work for Square Enix and we aren't sure you do have correct information about how their servers work. Lol. People are trying to give you solutions and talk with you but you're just telling everyone to be upset like you are. My friends and I are happy paying for subscription fees on this game, and it's not for no reason. If you're this unhappy, then stop subscribing so the bean counters at square enix can feel the difference. Will it be a big difference? Probably not. Not until a lot of people leave for the same issue. Which I doubt, because this game's expansion launch day has been relatively smooth and fine despite what you say. I'm really glad I moved one of my toons out of Gilgamesh. I haven't had any queues in Famfrit or Louisoux other than when they got DDOS'ed, which was fixed immediately.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
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07-02-2019, 01:11 PMSelova
I was there for Warlord's of Draenor launch. This completely pales in comparison. The queue times are a absolute joke, but armchair IT experts will continue to whine no matter what the queue time is.
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07-02-2019, 01:14 PMgumasalso sometimes queue can be deceiving too, once i login and had 1850 queue and you know what? a minute later it went down to merely 20 and another minute, i got in.Quote:
Originally Posted by RareItems
so yeah, no biggy. and its not like iam going to stare at my queue number too, i can always alt tab and browse internet or something else. -
07-02-2019, 01:18 PMAkira
heavensward early access was far worse, if you got kicked or had to log out you were stuck retrying over and over because the queue was either broken or didnt exist yet, this is by far the smoothest launch ive seen them do and im on Balmung
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07-02-2019, 01:42 PMPretzJG
Here is something I want to point out, that I haven't seen anyone point out yet, your math is wrong..... If you are taking your info from ffxivcensus.com and are taking the currently listed All World All Characters total of 15,632,019 characters and multiplying it by 15.00 a month then yes you get 234,480,285 dollars a month IF everyone only had 1 character total and each and EVERY character was currently active. Of course it's not true as I myself have about 9 characters across all the worlds, I only play 2 but others are from trying out servers as I didn't want to play and then pay to transfer if the server was feeling empty. However even ffxivcensus.com CLEARLY has a listing for ACTIVE Characters and that is only a total of 668,550 so again IF everyone only played 1 character that was active that would be a net of only 10,028,250 a month. Yet AGAIN many players have multiple characters that are active, and if they consider the subbed status of an account as active then that means they count even my other 7 characters I don't log into as part of that 668k, so it's not even the correct figure even then. See the big difference if you actually do the math? You are claiming they have 200 million coming in each month when it's closer to just 10 million, and maybe not even that. However given that the live letter did mention a 1 million active subs then clearly they are making 15 million a month, still a VERY FAR OFF figure from your insane claim that they make 200 million off of FFXIV. They would have to have over 13 million subscribers to make 200 million in 1 month.
Also here is something, you're saying you had a 2 hour long queue wait time? What time of day was this?? Were you constantly closing the game and trying to log in again, cause that would reset your queue position to the back of the line. Also I have my main characters on Faerie, which is right above your server in the list on Aether, I have for the past few months now logged in seeing a queue of around 20 people, but I get in in less than 5 minutes. You are on one of the most highest Active Character count realms, at 16,150 characters according to ffxivcensus.com and my Faerie is at 11,989. So yes your answer is either to put up with queue times or move to a lower population server. If your FC doesn't want to move, then stay and wait it out, and here's another tip, FFXIV doesn't kick you out for being AFK, keep yourself logged in and you'll not ever have to worry about the queue times until maintenance kicks you out. -
07-02-2019, 01:43 PMEndeleon
The irony of someone on gilgamesh making this thread, lmao. Of course you think servers are crap! You refuse to not be selfish and ridiculous and just move to a different one!
You want a different solution? I'm sorry but that's just not going to happen, dude. If there's so many people in a room that you can't move, the only solution is that people need to leave the room. -
07-02-2019, 01:45 PMTalinthisthats pretty shitty bro. glad i only have to wait 30 seconds. biggest queue i have seen was 120.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
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07-02-2019, 01:47 PMSaberMaxwell
Literally the smoothest expansion launch in XIV's history, and one of the smoothest expansion launches in MMO history.
"Why are your servers bad SE?" -
07-02-2019, 01:51 PMEndeleonI know right! The queue is like 1000-2000 tops for Gilgamesh, and nonexistant everywhere else. SB had queues of 20K!Quote:
Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell
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07-02-2019, 01:53 PMSaberMaxwellNot to mention stability once connected to the actual game. Only DC'd once this entire early access period and that was during the DDoS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Endeleon
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07-02-2019, 02:01 PMKirsten_RevThere are many reasons to buy more servers, but handling traffic spikes which occur for roughly 2-4 weeks every two years is not on that list. This is like suggesting Best Buy open a new store right next to the old store because people have to wait in line awhile on Black Friday.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188
There are a number of other things wrong with your post - your equating total accounts with total active accounts, your odd Rule of Four that completely ignores the underlying hardware, and your near-certain exaggeration of actual wait time - but the illogical course of action you'd like SE to take to resolve your woes is the worst offender. Just breathe, or maybe take a vacation for a week. It's still early access, and the official launch of the expansion happens in a matter of hours. This is the Black Friday of FFXIV that occurs every couple of years. Shape your expectations accordingly. -
07-02-2019, 02:11 PMMistakeNot
Adding a bunch of extra servers just to handle a temporary peak in population would be plain stupid.
Doing that would just mean that 3-4 months down the line people would complain about servers being ghost towns and talk about server merges.
Adding servers to the game is easy. Removing servers is not.
So SE won't add servers until there is a long-term need for extra servers. -
07-02-2019, 02:31 PMAlestorm
One could point the question to Blizzard as well, over 14 million subs at it's peak and even now WoW has toaster servers.
It's unlikely we'll get a real answer though. -
07-02-2019, 02:37 PMTitaniaZero
Yes let's add more servers. Maybe the player count will remain like this for the entire two year period of this expac... oh... wait... it won't. It'll dive off and servers will become empty. Players will complain that instance queue times are too long now, not a lot of people doing fates and hunts. All because someone wanted to alleviate their problems for a single occurrence this expac cycle.
Though I am a tad peeved that Hyperion is congested. The mid pop server has somehow grown too large, all in the span of a few months... huh? Why? I'm sure that panic back when Crystal was formed is what created this. -
07-02-2019, 02:59 PMMingqin
New servers is a bad idea, it's a bad idea because every MMO experiences a rush of returners at the start of a new expansion, these people generally show up for a variety of reasons, some for the story, some for the content, either way many of them won't be playing next month.
They'll be shooting themselves in the foot to create more new servers to accommodate a temporary problem. -
07-02-2019, 03:37 PMSonKevin
Transfer to a less congested server. I've had at most 20 or so queue this entire early access.
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07-02-2019, 04:24 PMNekoNova
To OP : You need to know how Japenese companies work to understand why this is happening. They are completely different than US/EU counterparts, and simply have a different culture/work environment.
source : CapCom JP work experience -
07-02-2019, 09:37 PMMaero
If you are talking about long queues for early access it is a norm. They are not technically full from my understanding but limit them as to not blow up.
Someone in my FC explained it but i was busy and did not catch it all, lol -
07-03-2019, 02:09 AMAdrestia
All in all, this has been a very smooth MMO expansion launch. We’re not looking at rollbacks, thousands of people aren’t getting 3102’d for the entire early access period we paid for (pre-ordering is paying by sacrificing your ability to wait for reviews and decide not to purchase), or getting stuck kneeling-to-loot for hours on end (oh, vanilla WoW memories). And we’re not being blocked from accessing the expansion by the need to click a quest instance NPC for a double digit number of hours hoping to get an instance. Stormblood launch was a straight up embarrassment. We only had, at least while I was awake, one unexpected downtime. This was not, as you have heard, the result of a DDoS attack. Data from Kaspersky, Akamai, and Arbor Networks shows no such activity.
SE has also given us some, limited tools to mitigate the damage of unforeseen problems. Free server transfers and world visit do act as a pressure relief valve in the event of unbearable problems. I have friends on Gilgamesh who transferred to a lower-pop server before launch so that they’d dodge Gilgamesh queues. As a result their queues have been at most a few minutes long instead of an hour or more.
Despite these clear advances in mitigation techniques, SE is not absolved of all responsibility to implement a modern, elastic network infrastructure. Splitting servers into more logical clusters (e.g. Aether/Crystal), especially in the same geographic datacenter, is ancient tech. It’s like believing the sun revolves around the Earth. It’s not just wrong, it’s the polar opposite of correct. Modern DevOps techniques would see these servers *combined* from the customer perspective. You’re not forced to choose which instance of Netflix, Google, or twitch.tv you connect to, and all the same content is available on all of them (except where licensing arrangements dictate otherwise). If half the Azure DevOps Services nodes go down, my team doesn’t lose access to our code or our ability to collaborate on it.
Many boogeymen are often brought up to try to establish why it’s different for FFXIV. Why their data, for mystery reasons, much be so much harder to transmit than 4K Dolby Vision Netflix, or more CPU intensive than computational fluid dynamics, or more database load than Facebook. “Spaghetti code,” I hear, as our DevOps team manages VB .NET Framework 3.52 applications in these elastic structures, with our customers never noticing. Because it should be, and is, transparent.
I’ve seen our AWS bills, and I can confidently state that $5000/mo doesn’t go as far as one might hope. But the XIV network’s design is basically bloat, waste, and inefficiency. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if they can reduce total cost of ownership. But it would require upfront investment, which is not likely to happen while enough of the public will make excuses and move goalposts and say “this is fine” as all their magic kingdoms are burning around them. -
07-03-2019, 02:30 AMValkyrie_Lenneth
That was a lot of words to say "I'm not experienced in this kind of workload with these specific requirements"
Video streaming is a whole different thing from game servers.
And yes, there was a ddos attack at the time, people confirmed it from outside sources, providers were being hit as well, especially level3. -
07-03-2019, 02:52 AMAdrestia
I could go into a much longer diatribe on interactive services at scale but that would take even _more_ words. If you’ve been in the MMO space for long you should know that EVE Online hosts 120,000+ concurrent users in a single-sharded service. Not “total subscribed accounts” or “active” over some broadly defined period of time. Concurrent. You can find some reader-friendly articles explaining the basics of the (10 year old) tech online.
“People” “confirmed” it by which you mean someone in the forum posted, without context, a map based on Arbor Networks data that showed pretty lines entering and leaving the US? Botnet activity is background noise. The botnets any random guy with a tor browser can hire for $10 are well-handled by commercial anti-DDoS solutions. If you want to lose sleep at night, think about what a DNS amplification attack against real critical services would do. But no one is investing that much in hitting MMOs. There are minor-scale DDoS attacks against games now and then when there’s a profit motive, like being able to dupe items in a P2W economy. But DDoSing games “for the lulz” is pretty much a dead art. Turns out when people from Lizard Squad and LulzSec started going to federal prison with decade-long sentences, people backed off of casually DDoSing games just because they could. -
07-03-2019, 03:33 AMMelichoir
Assumnig that there are 650k world wide and the average sub is 14 USD ( I know it fluctuates based on region, but there is people who pay more or less, so for simple math lets say its 14USD), SE pulls down 9.1 Mil a month, or 109 Mil a year from subs alone for FFXIV.
That soudns like a lot of money, but then lets start looking at overhead costs. Se employs 4.3k people, with an average salary of 273k. Now that figure probably is including an overpaid management, so lets say the average is closer to 70k (average game dev salary). That means per year, 301 Million in salaries alone. Thats 3x the cost they get from Subs. Mind you, SE supposedly pulls down about 2.4 Billion a year. But subs only make 4% of their revenue, where as employee costs are about 13% of that revenue. Then we get into property costs, Tariff costs, server costs, equipment costs, third party costs (lawyers, janitorial staffs, etc), development on game projects (next xpac along with any other SE game) and you start quickly eating into how much money they make. This gets even more nutty when you find out they made less money in 2018 than they did in earlier years.
Point being, even with 650k subs, it's not so straight forward to have good servers. Not that they cant fix things and do better, but you need to be cautious about thinking that a high sub count means theyre swimming in cash. It's not that cut and dry. -
07-03-2019, 03:36 AMNanaWiloh
OP claiming to work on Servers does not mean crap!! You are not the one handling SE servers. You dont know their server infrastructure your making blind anger filled guesses as to what the problem is, secondly any joe blow can claim to too work on servers so your wasting your breathe on that one.
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07-03-2019, 04:00 AMAdrestiaWhoa. Calm down. Take a breath. I’m skeptical of some of the OP’s claims as well, but in your rush to post your outrage you’re one run-on or typo from a heart attack.Quote:
Originally Posted by NanaWiloh
No matter what, remember that regardless of what SE’s current infrastructure is, there are industry standards. If they (and they certainly did) chose to ignore the collective wisdom of the DevOps community, that’s on them. Thankfully, there are larger businesses with older tech who are still managing to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. They can do this because the industry has put a massive amount of focus into providing layers of abstraction that can make the client, the server, or both completely blind to the fact that they’re being dynamically load-balanced and elastically scaled.
I can tell you from experience, the hardest part isn’t the technology. Once you get the right stuff approved for the job, it’s not too bad to implement. Not trivial, and there’s a reason DevOps professionals get paid well (Unlike most software developers. Holy crap do we get hosed by comparison). But seriously, the hardest part is convincing management that it’s time to catch up and do the right thing. Gaping security vulnerability? “They probably won’t hack us.” Critical performance instability? “We can just reboot every night until we decide to figure it out.” That’s what holds the dev and infrastructure teams back. Not that we’re being asked to solve unsolvable problems. -
07-03-2019, 04:05 AMNanaWilohI am well aware money holds the dev team back. They are at the mercy of the people upstairs, if Yoshi gets told no about a bigger budget then there is not much he can do now can he? I have no doubt he has asked and gotten told no as well as yes. But the server issue seems to be one he is not getting much of a yes on.Quote:
Originally Posted by Adrestia
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07-03-2019, 04:59 AMSpirited-Away
2hrs waiting and still not in, i’ve given up, they’re taking the **** now.
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07-03-2019, 05:27 AMKirsten_RevIn fairness, one cannot really compare EVE Online to most other MMOs. The technical side - as any of those reader-friendly articles explains - is an issue, yes, but there's an interrelated and critical content design factor as well. EVE Online was built with the viewpoint that players are the content. XIV, WoW, and most other MMOs are not - their content is presented to us by the development team in the form of stories, scripted fights, etc., all of which take place in a physical world that SE manually constructs for us. This physical world makes single shards unwieldy, because there's only so much space into which physical avatars can be placed. Could you imagine the visual clutter if every world-shard was combined for XIV? Just finding a Market Board to click in the Crystarium would be a nightmare. It's no different than why FPS titles limit the number of people in a given online match, rather than allowing for a global free-for-all on a single piece of land.Quote:
Originally Posted by Adrestia
This also means the elasticity you're talking about really isn't something SE could achieve, because shards can't simply be spun up at will without consequences. Unlike a collection of movies on Netflix, worlds may start from the same stock template, but then they change in a way that has to remain persistent - people buy houses, goods are listed on the market board, etc. So one shard rapidly becomes distinct from all the others. That's not an architectural flaw; it's a feature. As a result, while there would be a couple of benefits to a more modern architecture - the removal of logical data center separation, for instance - it likely wouldn't really help with server congestion issues at the launch of an expansion. -
07-03-2019, 05:42 AMAdrestiaGood post.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirsten_Rev
It’s true there will always be a base capacity requirement to fit the needs of the game. The idea behind servers-on-demand is to minimize waste. You don’t often notice waste in housing because it’s basically all taken all the time, although you can easily see that because each large plot is “burdened” with several medium and small plots, the cost of adding a large plot now has the additional cost of adding a full district.
With split world servers, you see the waste even more dramatically. Why have low pop/ghost town worlds that are on hardware 6’ from hardware that’s at max capacity and bursting at the seams with new login attempts? A more modern approach would be to simply say those both of those servers are part of the same cluster. If one has a free vCPU and memory to spin up another zone server (say, a Crystarium instance to avoid market board area overcrowding), then it can do that. Under this model, if they don’t have the resources to spin up a new zone, it’s because they literally do not have them; not because they’re being under-utilized due to inefficient partitioning. Arguably at this point the answer is to then launch an instance on pay-per-use cloud computing, up to the point at which they have to say “hold on, a 4 million dollar AWS bill just isn’t in the cards this month.” But even if they wholly refuse to add capacity on demand, at least they’re no longer wasting the capacity they already own. -
07-03-2019, 05:45 AMEdaxThe population of the entirely of North America itself is 579 Million. I think you exaggerated the problems with the NA servers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero188