Data center travel suspended

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Originally Posted by Mosha

Money that comes out of the Yearly budget to fix a self-fixing issue.

Imagine having to rent a bunch of servers on a short-term lease and only getting two days of use out of them and hiring a bunch of network engineers to install and format them across 3 physical locations for again an issue that will fade in like one or two days. its not chump change

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How is it a self fixing issue when they are suspending it until further notice ? They are delaying the "big boom", nothing else.

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Originally Posted by Mosha

tbf what could they of done not release it? There is no point in building a system that could handle 15k requests a minute when in normal use it wouldn't see numbers that high. just need to wait for the player base to get the novelty out of their system anything breaks when you push it past its limits.

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But what about the people stuck on other DCs?

At the least they should've planned something for that. I imagine they could've made it so that if they had to turn the feature off that they could have also made it so that people stuck on foreign DCs could return to their own still.

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

How is it a self fixing issue when they are suspending it until further notice ?

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That means you can't use it again until things get fixed. Which means no new travel requests, which means less and less server load the more people get through. I hope you can manage to understand the rest.

Why did I know that this was gonna be a shitshow lol

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

How is it a self fixing issue when they are suspending it until further notice ? They are delaying the "big boom", nothing else.

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just chill out and have some patience, you not going to starve to death on the other DC.

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Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

But what about the people stuck on other DCs?

At the least they should've planned something for that. I imagine they could've made it so that if they had to turn the feature off that they could have also made it so that people stuck on foreign DCs could return to their own still.

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I imagine there are some technical limitations that stop them from just booting you back to your home DC. I imagine there are checks and balances between the DCs when you are sent back to avoid any weirdness.

Yes, this was predictable.

No, it's not SE's fault. It's players fault for using it at the same time. Why would you use Data Center Travel right after the patch release when you know a lot of other people will be?

It's like logging in when an expansion release and not expecting a queue. Duh. What did you expect?

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Yes, this was predictable.

No, it's not SE's fault. It's players fault for using it at the same time. Why would you use Data Center Travel right after the patch release when you know a lot of other people will be?

It's like logging in when an expansion release and not expecting a queue. Duh. What did you expect?

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Yes, lets blame the players for using the only advertised feature of this patch.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Yes, this was predictable.

No, it's not SE's fault. It's players fault for using it at the same time. Why would you use Data Center Travel right after the patch release when you know a lot of other people will be?

It's like logging in when an expansion release and not expecting a queue. Duh. What did you expect?

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You'd expect long queue times, not the entire system shutting down. Imagine players wanting to use a feature of a game they pay for.

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Originally Posted by Kabzy

You'd expect long queue times, not the entire system shutting down. Imagine players wanting to use a feature of a game they pay for.

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We were told it would be unavailable sometimes if it was being used a lot, just like the World Visit System.

It's not like this feature wasn't released in 6.18 specifically so its issues, like these ones, can be sorted out in time for 6.2. It's better to have the system stress tested during content drought than when new major content releases.

This feature was originally intended to launch in the 5.5x patches, exactly so the devteam can iron out the kinks in time for EW launch. That didn't work as planned due to lack of hardware.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

Everybody's got their reasons. I came to XIV with an RP community when Wildstar collapsed and we landed on Crystal. Turns out that some of my old raid guild were already established on Aether. While I have some less played alts on Aether once the queues settle down I can bring over my combat main. I have a small cache of map materials that I'm planning on turning into glam items for those same alts.

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Why not just server transfer at that point then?

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

How dare people complain about a feature that was the major part of this patch, and broke on the first hour, and is now suspended until further notice, leaving thousands outside of their home data center with no way back.

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Everyone knows that an online service being swarmed by requests way beyond predictions has quite a high chance of breaking. But instead of thinking "oh well, it happens, better wait a bit", you guys went straight into complain-mode and rushed to the forums to tell everyone how unhappy you were. As always. (Not you specifically btw. This is more a general statement about these forums.)

Showing little understanding and patience while setting up irrealistic expectations and complaining within minutes is the behavior of what we call "Karens".
Don't be internet Karens.

I'm not saying that this issue should go unnoticed or that we should just give SE a free pass at releasing broken stuff. But we should be understanding that there was actually very little that SE could've done to prevent it, that no amount of "preparation" will ever be enough (except if you clearly overdo it), and that they are already aware that the situation is bad for players and especially the ones stuck on another world.
Only then you can write a constructive complaint asking the right things instead of what's basically a passive-aggressive venting box that achieves nothing productive.

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Hello everyone, SE community team,

As you may be aware, the world travel feature has been turned off because SE didn't expect such amount of requests [link to lodestone notice].

My character is currently stuck on another world without being able to go back to my homeworld, making me unable to access some of the game's features.
Could it be possible to make an exception for this specific case and allow people to get back to their homeworld?

Also, could you reach out to us with a roadmap and ETA as soon as possible as the situation is being adressed.

Thank you

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Wouldn't that be a more productive and less toxic way of "complaining"?

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...f8fa50d38f7c36

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Originally Posted by Yoshi-P

Q: In the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXIX, there was a screenshot of Data Center Travel with the description “Data Center Travel may take up to 30 minutes.” Will it always require a 30-minute wait?

A: The 30-minute estimate is based on when the servers are especially congested; the process will typically only take somewhere between less than a minute to three minutes to complete. Note that this will take slightly longer than the World Visit System, as it requires processes to ensure the safety of the character as they are transferred beyond the boundaries of logical DCs, which had previously been impossible.

Furthermore, the Data Center Travel process may require more than 30 minutes when there is a significant degree of congestion, such as the cases listed below.

• A surge of players using Data Center Travel immediately after its implementation
• A surge of players after a patch update or expansion has been released
• Congestion due to player events taking place on the destination data center

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In other words, they predicted this surge but were still unprepared for it? Bad look.

They should've add "Beta" in the feature to stop people from acting as if FFXIV 1.0 happening all over again. Forum never changes.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

In other words, they predicted this surge but were still unprepared for it? Bad look.

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The problem is, that places won't plan for the maximum capacity of requests that happen maybe a couple of times per year (in this case the initial launch of the feature and then any subsequent major patches [a couple of hours]). They are going to plan for the normalized load and go according to that.

The fact remains, people will always dogpile onto a new feature, a couple of days/weeks down the line and then the matter will just eventually go away. You know, much how 6.0 launch was the end of the world for around 2 weeks before it was essentially normalized.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

In other words, they predicted this surge but were still unprepared for it? Bad look.

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More like you all don't understand how server infrastructures work.

Square Memex

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

I blame the Balmungieons, haha. But seriously, it's not surprising at all; people have been itching for this for some time now- i'm sure the system just needs more fine-tuning and perhaps a way for players to not overload the system with queue requests

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The way not to overload the system with queue requests is to not have the system immediately available when servers come up from patch maintenance.

What's the first thing that tends to get done? Try out the new features added with the patch. Lack of other new content to try out coupled with lack of any sort of pre-req content to do (such as the quests we might need to do to get a new raid unlocked) ensured there would be a very high volume of use immediately. Waiting several hours before making it available would have worked out much better since players would already be involved in doing other things, reducing the number that would be trying the service at the same time.

At least it sounds the problem was only congestion so they'll probably have the service reenabled faster than World Visit was reenabled after its initial problems.

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

Yes, lets blame the players for using the only advertised feature of this patch.

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On the one hand, yeah it's undeniably a patch, but it's not like every patch brings actual new content.

X.X8 patches in particular seem to be designated "system" patches that might tweak things or release limits on content rewards, but don't actually include new game content.

At a quick skim of recent patch cycles that had a .X8 patch at all:

6.08: battle system tweaks, OCE data centre

5.58: Trust EXP adjustment; Cloud Deck EX moved from Raid to Duty Finder and mount drop rate increased; loot restrictions removed from Eden's Promise and Paradigm's Breach, and extra items added to chests; improvements to Bozja/Zadnor item drops; Cryptlurker weapon upgrade can be purchased.

No .X8 patch in 5.2-5.4

5.18: Loot restrictions removed from Eden's Gate; adjustments to Eureka Hydatos FATE visibility; Deepshadow weapon upgrade can be purchased; PVP tweaks; gear appearance tweaks.

5.08: Tweaks to submersibles and Mahjong; housing made available on Spriggan and Twintania servers; battle system tweaks.

In summary, it's a patch where they maybe add worlds or systems, but not new activities.

We had 24 hour maintenance for the thing to break instantly

SE's load testing and the load they experience on launch days never seem to match up, either by accident (they just keep failing to predict correctly) or by design (they know the load on launch will be much higher than normal and don't care). Either way I expect the same thing to happen with the island instances in 6.2, best not to touch it right away.

SE must have the same QA testing team as Cyberpunk2077 and Battlefield2042

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Regardless of how much testing they would do, the first thing people are always going to do is dogpile a new feature, and this will always cause congestion to happen, especially when practically everyone and their grandmother dogpile a new feature. Managing that congestion is not very easy to do, especially when the number of requests potentially far exceeds the capacity that the servers can handle. This is basically akin to the community doing a DDoS attack.

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It's also entirely possible to do heavy stress testing in a development environment but then have something unexpected manifest when it's released to the live environment. You try to plan for us much as you can and have a plan for rolling back if necessary if something unexpected happens.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

It's also entirely possible to do heavy stress testing in a development environment but then have something unexpected manifest when it's released to the live environment. You try to plan for us much as you can and have a plan for rolling back if necessary if something unexpected happens.

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Indeed, the thing that people seem to forget is that simulations are often done in accordance with abstract models and these often don't align very well with the outcomes you find when doing it in a real, live environment, so whilst you may be able to simulate the load, you won't necessarily catch the issues that you might otherwise find when doing it in a live environment.

I sympathize with people being unable to log in or being caught on a DC as a visitor when they may otherwise be set for raiding or have plans with friends. But honestly let's face it, there was a fairly good chance this feature was going to crash in some way or another.

To those that were complaining about the Monday release schedule, this is why.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Indeed, the thing that people seem to forget is that simulations are often done in accordance with abstract models and these often don't align very well with the outcomes you find when doing it in a real, live environment, so whilst you may be able to simulate the load, you won't necessarily catch the issues that you might otherwise find when doing it in a live environment.

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Not to mention the system you're working on may be fine, but it may or may not be connected to the great hive of systems that could affect things. Like what happened with the lottery server and the housing server. Sometimes there isn't time or resources to completely mock up exactly the same environment. I know I certainly have times I say "I have tested X, Y, Z, A, B" and then acknowledge "C" could still happen and develop a plan for that.

I definitely sympathize with anyone unable to log in and play or are stuck. But I also sympathize with the developer side because I've been in those shoes having to roll back something that didn't do quite what was expected. That they were able to suspend it so fast says to me that they did have a plan and were watching for excessive activity outside their predictions.

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Originally Posted by Tyrn

SE's load testing and the load they experience on launch days never seem to match up, either by accident (they just keep failing to predict correctly) or by design (they know the load on launch will be much higher than normal and don't care). Either way I expect the same thing to happen with the island instances in 6.2, best not to touch it right away.

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The second one. They know the load will be much higher than normal, but they know it will get better after the initial congestion. There is nothing SE can do to manage unlimited load, unless they invest in cloud servers, but cloud servers are slower and SE decided against them.

We were warned about the initial congestion and it was obvious it could happen.

Question - so if 15,000 people are trying to visit Zalera for example (my homeworld)... ME who lives on Zalera has to wait in a queue of 15,000+ to login to my own homeworld? How is this even remotely fair to those of us with no interest in DC travel and we get stuck for hours trying to go into our damn world?

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Originally Posted by Tyrn

SE's load testing and the load they experience on launch days never seem to match up, either by accident (they just keep failing to predict correctly) or by design (they know the load on launch will be much higher than normal and don't care). Either way I expect the same thing to happen with the island instances in 6.2, best not to touch it right away.

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They test expected loads over normal usage. What's going on today is everyone trying to use the feature all at once...which no amount of preparation could ever really prepare for because that's just simply how hardware and network limitations work and they are not going to spend money on the hardware overhead for a problem that will only last a few days.

Couldn't they have a system in place for handling an overload of requests? Like "Hey there's already 1000 of you trying to hop datacenters right now, the other 14k of you who are trying will have to wait."

Are the data center travel issues also a reason why home world transfer is not available at the moment? Or it's a separate thing?

I suppose this does not bode well for Island Sanctuary, then.

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Originally Posted by Bsrking5

I wonder how many were bots...

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I bet many, i just cant believe the moment it wents live, 15k ppl per minute wanted to travel...

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Couldn't they have a system in place for handling an overload of requests? Like "Hey there's already 1000 of you trying to hop datacenters right now, the other 14k of you who are trying will have to wait."

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They probably do internally.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

They test expected loads over normal usage.

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There is no "normal usage" because SQEX cannot know what "normal" is. :)


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Glandire

Are the data center travel issues also a reason why home world transfer is not available at the moment? Or it's a separate thing?

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yes and no, it is connected but they actually deactivated it preemptively about 2 weeks ago with the plan of reactivating it at after they made sure the expanded/changed around (in case of japan) data centers aswell as data center travel run stable.

so yea, until they have sorted it out home world transfer will stay down, but it isn't like the data center transfer getting overhelmed unexpectedly took things with it or something.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I suppose this does not bode well for Island Sanctuary, then.

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My guess is if those are instances, they're going to be on their own dedicated instance servers. We've seen what happens when players smack the same thing at once where sometimes Duty Roulette can't make instances or people couldn't get into their houses when others were hiding there to avoid lockout or all the congestion with Hunts and Ishgard Restoration. The most that will happen is we'll probably just the congestion message again if we overwhelm that system.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I suppose this does not bode well for Island Sanctuary, then.

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Nope. Definitely not.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

There is no "normal usage" because SQEX cannot know what "normal" is. :)


Cheers

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I guarantee they have the numbers for what they expect normal load to be based on the populations of each DC and the average usage of things like world visit.

It's disappointing that they can't/won't re-enable the home world transfer service, for us that have been looking forward to transferring to a new server.
Maybe all these services are interconnected now that they enabled and disabled the DC visit feature.

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Originally Posted by Glandire

Are the data center travel issues also a reason why home world transfer is not available at the moment? Or it's a separate thing?

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I presume as much.