I like how everyone who plays this game suddenly has 15 years of experiencing managing these servers now, so they can weigh in on the technical reasons for doing it.
I like how everyone who plays this game suddenly has 15 years of experiencing managing these servers now, so they can weigh in on the technical reasons for doing it.
IMHO the reason for the new DCs and server shuffles is likely an attempt to avoid creating another "Raubahn or Pippin EX" scenario again during the 5.0 launch. We know for a fact that the reason these things happened is due to the sheer volume of players congesting to those instances and clogging each DC's instance server. By creating a new DC and lowering the number of servers per DC they can ensure that the volume of people hitting those instances at the same time is manageable and does not cause the instance server instability we saw during the 4.x series at said choke points.
This is an attempt to bolster the serviceability of the instances, unfortunately there is a sacrifice to go along with it, but if splitting the community a bit more ensures that I don't get stuck on MSQ 10 quests in on launch day, I'm all for it.
Some of us do work in IT and, while we may not have explicit insight into XIV's server architecture, we understand enough to make educated guesses about the kinds of problems they may be running into based upon the symptoms and issues the system is displaying.
I see that as selfish, you rather have SE cheap out solutions to problems that are preventable by other means over having people break up statics and friendships? I am so happy there are people supporting this because they are not negativity impacted and do not understand the full ramifications of this situation.
this ya, you can easily draw lines between the dots based on how other games work, and what devs tell us with this game. For example, that huge post by the UI dev about the inventory displaying 50 count bags, that huge work around and him complaining about the 1.0 netcode really shows some of the problems this game has that shouldn't be there (I/e fund the staff more, get more staff to allow them to fix the code)
For what I see in other games these are tiny DC's and the game feels slow and dead as is, what is going the game feel like during these moments in the cycle? It will most likely be a true ghost town like the current state because "not enough content, time in between patches", and yet you are only worried about congestion for 2 weeks, what about the under population problems once new runs off? we ALREADY have problems in that regards, and this would make it even worse.
Really? was this a thought ever? how will this impact the SLOW TIMES?
Cheap out...? LOL Tell you what, if you agree to pay the $25k a year I was quoted the other day to have an offsite DR server to host a few VMs which won't be running constantly like SE's are and I'll agree that adding more server space to your datacenter rackspace rental is cheap. (Forgot to add.... with high availability SLAs... Can't forget those.)
I mean what I said, how much does the player base pay the game vs what they spend?
I am sure they are not going to tell you due to the huge discrepancy, so yes, they are cheaping out solutions. As for you comment, I been paying such fees for 5 years. Did you magically forget how much people spend on this game? all those overpriced mog station sales and overpriced retainer fees?
I hope SE stays the course on this.
... Where to start?
1) You've been paying such fees for 5 years? Are you really comparing the ~$12 a month you pay (~$144 a year) to the fees that SE pays for server rack space? My $25k (note $25,000 a year which is 173.6x higher than what the average pay is) was for 5 VMs (sic- Virtual servers) that are in standby mode. When those go active they jump to approximately $100 an HOUR to run. For SE, to add one server to the DC is going to cost at least a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to run if not more.
2) Mog station profits are not directly flowed back into XIV's budget. The money you spend on that $30 mount does not go directly into Yoshida's coffers.
Running an MMO is not a cheap endeavor. Adding new hardware assets is not cheap nor is it especially easy to reconfigure. You spend a lot of time and money doing these things and all of it is a cost-benefit analysis.
MMO's are all about meeting new people.
So in that sense, moving servers is in the spirit of an MMO.
Even though I am on here constantly trying to make Blue Mage a full job, I wanna go on the record saying that it is absolutely absurd to split people up who are playing an MMO on such weird arbitrary standards. It affects far less people, but I consider this a bigger deal than Blue being limited. It just doesn't affect me so I don't have much to say on it.