I remember vague mentions of wanting to go on cloud servers years ago i think during heavansward or close to stormblood release but it seems they mentioned it again in last nights live letter but i forgot there was a live letter last night lol.
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They have previously said they considered cloud servers and decided against them, because they are slower.
But in the live letter earlier, they just did not want a repeat of the issue of having to close sales and lock servers when an expansion launches because they felt bad about it.
They will be testing cloud servers in the 6.5x patches and they will put details of it on the lodestone as well. I am not sure how they are going about it but I suppose now that we have Data Center Travel, that if we have a large queue, what we could do is choose to DC travel to a temporary cloud server that exists temporarily to skip the queues when an expansion launches. Or they could mean there are some permanent cloud servers, I really don't know yet.
Why else do you think they aren't already using cloud servers, and they're going to use NA for a stress test?
YoshiP has said in the past that they have doubts that cloud servers will work with the game to their satisfaction though it was something they intended to investigate.
Players are going to get a chance to be part of that investigation now.
One thing that some have pointed out is if it does work out satisfactorily, we'd potentially be much closer to getting cross data center Party Finder.
They were also looking into cloud servers as a temporary way to get more servers during the chip shortage back when Endwalker came out. Just that at the time it wasn't at a price they were willing to allow Yoshida to have as he was willing to pay a higher price if it meant the log in congestion could be eased. It just never got anywhere. These servers could also be part of the Xbox agreement as supposedly Xbox does use the cloud to some extent or whatnot. Between this and the extra servers we already have they should be able to handle any influx of new players coming in with Dawntrail and Xbox players.
Its kinda why they specifically stated theyre going to do a PTR and stress test it first.
We'll see if itll work though but I dont have that many high hopes.
Theyre only doing it as a temp counter measure to prevent 7.0 login queues anyway