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Originally Posted by blgrnboy

Coming from the IT industry, I don't think you guys quite understand the problem. Most of the time, it's not that the servers aren't big enough. You can write a code that does the same thing 1000 ways, each more efficient than the other. Sometimes even during betas, you will not see the problem, but once you load your system with enough users to present that threshold, it is downhill, and fast.

I think they say these problems in Early Access, but they weren't going to delay the launch date because of it, especially with such a small time gap. I am not trying to defend Sony or any other company for that matter, I just want you all to know the perspective of this with someone who works on capacity issues of hosted applications for a living. This is one of the biggest struggles in the IT industry right now.

You're absolutely right. God knows, there is no real way to prepare for the excessive amount of "force" a new server might receive from an untested and unrelenting amount of users - with or without subscriptions. The fact is, it simply isn't scale-able.

If you have (what you project to be) 20% of your subscribers in beta, and it loads your servers 10%, this does not mean that 100% of your subscribers = 50% load on the server OR that the engine you've built the game on is tested to work well with a 50% load. There is no way to test that at all. I imagine early release was their effort to get as much of the load as they could before the official release - a preemptive preparatory stage. Granted, it didn't work so well.

Now: The problem (I would assume) most people and myself are having ISN'T that they can't log on. It's that legacy members were corralled into 25% of the servers when we make up the majority of the active, current subscribers. Furthermore, we can't transfer between worlds freely to help them relieve stress. I'm sure many of us would gladly do so. There is also the lack of "owning up to it", we as a species need something to point fingers at. Since we can't move our characters... We CAN'T help. So it's them.

We could make characters on other servers. But we want the ones we stuck out 1.0 with, and we can use them, move them, and simply put that sucks.

I say, give all players a "percentage full" list (with fill-rate based on their idea of best usage-to-user ratio), and allow everyone to transfer and balance the servers ourselves. I will gladly take a JP server now, because I'll move there with all my friends - a small band of 5-6 people who live in Alaska with me.