Server Plans for Heavensward? Expanding Existing Servers?

I'm excited for Heavensward. Really, really excited. I can't wait.

But I'm also fearful of the number of preorders that Square-Enix is taking in. Despite all of the preorders with A Realm Reborn, the servers were completely unprepared for the number of players who purchased them. Servers were capped during the early access period and Square couldn't keep up. That following Live Letter was so painful to watch.

Players took days off of work only to be locked out from playing with their friends, the game, and losing the only earned vacation time they had for the whole year. I too only have a week I can use.

I am very afraid of taking days off of work for this expansion. I want to feel more secure knowing what kind of cautionary measures Square is investing in to prepare not only for all the new players, but the hundreds of thousands of returning players who will want to try the game again and congest the servers.

Thank you. You've created the best Final Fantasy game in history. People know it.

I'm not sure what they would/could do. Many servers are underpopulated. :/ Why pay to expand the crowded ones or add any?

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Originally Posted by Sadana

I'm not sure what they would/could do. Many servers are underpopulated. :/ Why pay to expand the crowded ones or add any?

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Free transfers from the highest population servers to the low population servers.

I feel like the best thing they could do is to monitor the number of Heavensward preorders and expand each of the servers accordingly. Sure new servers are fun and all, but they won't have an economy like the existing ones. The game hoppers are a PITA, I agree, but sadly if there isn't enough room for all of them to come back on to the servers with L50s lying dormant for the past year and a half, that also means that the players who have been loyal every month won't get on their servers, either. And the friends they've convinced to join the game also won't get on.

I have a friend I've convinced to join the game for the expansion, and I imagine a lot of us have friends who have said they're willing to try it again with everything new coming.

You already know what is going to happen. Look at what the servers did then and what they do now and understand what is going to happen for the beginning of launch.

SE hasn't announced new servers aside from the eventual EU one having a dedicated one closer to home. Other than that, nothing has been mentioned. It's better to assume that the game will be nigh impossible to play on launch rather than take time off from work and then become upset when the exact same situation happens that happened last time with A Realm Reborn.

Their pre-orders just let people understand how unprepared they were. Fanfest and pre-orders both experienced problems because they didn't imagine the kind of stress that the sites would undergo. What gives the impression that SE will implement anything for the launch of the expansion?

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Originally Posted by Veritas-Ancora

I have a friend I've convinced to join the game for the expansion, and I imagine a lot of us have friends who have said they're willing to try it again with everything new coming.

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And that's another thing...lots of returning players will also be back, not just brand-new ones. I hope I don't come off as mean either... I hope that I come off as just someone who understands what SE seems to do time and time again.

Server issues are inevitable and if you really want to your maximise play time, it would likely be better to take the week after launch off instead.

As someone that works with servers, I can tell you that simply adding more servers generally causes more problems then it solves. Using capacity as an example, say we have 1 server that holds 5000 people. During the morning hours it peaks at 4000 players but these 4000 players all log off at night. The night players then log in and peak at 3000. This is roughly how the population would act on a normal day with people logging on/off during their normal playing hours.

The issue arises when say a new expansion comes out and suddenly those 4000 players that usually log off at night decide they want to pull a 24 hour gaming marathon. The server now has 4000 players still online with another 3000 trying trying to log on during their normal hours and suddenly your over the 5000 capacity. Obviously this causes problems and an easy solution would be to add more server capacity to say increase it to 10000. But what happens when the hype of the new expansion dies down and people return to playing during their normal play hours. You now have a server that holds 10000 players that peaks at only 4000 players but is effectively costing you double the price to maintain.

What generally will happen is that you try to alleviate the stress in other ways by reducing the load in other areas rather then by adding new servers, because 9 times out of 10 the new servers are only useful short term but cost you a lot of money. You weather the impact and alleviate it as much as possible until the initial hype dies down and players start returning to normal playtimes.

A good example of this would be SWTOR's launch. Rather then ride out complaints from the longer queue times for a week, they decided to add more servers. They had something like 192 servers at launch because of this but after a week as people moved on to other games or returned to normal play schedules instead of pulling 24 hour marathons, the majority of those servers became deserted.

Most people either ended up rerolling on the more populated servers or waiting around for server transfers because they didn't want to restart their characters and Bioware ended up with a huge number of servers that had a capacity of 5000 players but only ever peaked out at like 300 players.

Obviously the game more or less failed anyway but the fact that server mergers were mentioned just a couple months after launch is never good publicity no matter how you look at it.

2.0 was a relaunch, for all intents and purposes a new game. 3.0 is just an expansion. It may bring back old players to give it another go, but I don't expect too many new players like 2.0.

Don't worry, even though more than the current active players pre-ordered, only currently active AND caught up players can access Heavensward once installed, because it requires 2.55 completion. That's less than one million players still (I think the last count was 4 million players REGISTERED, 5k active among all three their MMOs? something like that).

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Originally Posted by Bluevann

Don't worry, even though more than the current active players pre-ordered, only currently active AND caught up players can access Heavensward

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But this doesn't take into account that no matter where you are at in the story, the overall capacity of the servers will be jammed and overrun with enough people to make some problems. I agree with Cara still. Take the next week off, not the initial one.

the trouble is born of the fact they have forbide the legacy player to leave the overpopulated server, but this player was the one that have call most of friend to join leading the new server to be underpopulated and the legacy server to be full all the time.

transfert now? loosing the guilde rank 8, the house and the personal room? no way. it's SE fault to have listen to crying kids and to have create this situation.

I'm actually curious on this subject as well, since well yea. I would assume they're adding new servers just due to the fact that they're now expanding into the Mac user market with Heavensward, so they can expect a rise in population/player count.

I really hope the bring back the afk auto kick. Its obvious whats going to happen because it has already happened once before at launch of 2.0. People are going to log in as soon as possible and never log back out because they are afraid they wont be able to log back in. So half the players logged in will just be standing around afk blocking anyone else from logging in. If SE doesnt foresee this based on past history then I dont know what to say.

They might just lock the higher populated servers from newer folks, and start opening them up after a few weeks in.
If they don't do that I'd be really surprised.

I don't see that the high population servers need to be expanded, seeing as how there's servers with lower populations available. Why keep cramming more and more people into the same few servers instead of distributing them more evenly?