EU Data center split.

With the data-center changes coming up, EU will have a rather glaring problem:

50% of the player population will disappear overnight.

Now this might be fine right as the new expansion launches, but it will create issues 2-3 months later.

It will make it a lot harder to do older/less popular content, it will increase queue times, and overall it will increase player frustration.

Has SE promised any data-center merges or compensation for all the players affected?

I doubt they'd just split an already smaller in half and just assume that the players would be fine losing 50% of the people they could group with.

" Has SE promised any data-center merges or compensation for all the players affected? "

Yes, by giving free transfer so basically anyone who being throw to Light/Crystal will be able to transfer for free making Light/Crystal bleed "50%" division.

so by the end maybe if your lucky "Light" will be able to keep at least 25%-35% of the original 50% lol


As for Crystal... who know what gonna happen.

Am speaking about EU servers, but how do you know we have 100% que times right now?
How can you measure que times, if the amount of tanks/healers/dps gets halved? We're waiting in que's as dps anyway, even though we have "100%" playerbase as of right now.

The only problem is less people in the Party Finder, but thats again up to the community. If you're into pug raiding, you are better of transfering with the raid scene. And lets not forget, the raid community isnt that big either.
But thats just me, I dont see it black or white.

Looking at the census numbers going around, both new EU datacenters will hover around 55k players each, while japanese and us datacenters still will reach up to 90k post split. EU population is too low for two data centers.

Chaos currently is has a lower population then both US datacenters, yet is the most unstable. You'd imagine that the first step would be to invest into a single, proper functioning, data center, instead of cutting the population this low.

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Originally Posted by Hustensaft

Chaos currently is has a lower population then both US datacenters, yet is the most unstable. You'd imagine that the first step would be to invest into a single, proper functioning, data center, instead of cutting the population this low.

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This seems to step from Square wanting to solve a problem without spending the money to actually fix it, consequences to the players be damned.

Random roulette times will start largely the same, but finding a group for anything older will be a problem, especially once the expansion hype dies down.

I just wonder why SE is fixing a problem by creating another problem.

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Originally Posted by BambooShoo

With the data-center changes coming up, EU will have a rather glaring problem:

50% of the player population will disappear overnight.

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You are assuming that each server has the same amount of active players, and that is NOT true.

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Originally Posted by BambooShoo

It will make it a lot harder to do older/less popular content, it will increase queue times, and overall it will increase player frustration.

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When Samurai was announced like a DPS, a lot of people get confused like you, do you remember? things like "2 DPSs...no tank and healer, welcome to infinite queue time for DPSs..." wich isn't true at all, but you are doing the same, you are assuming a lot of consecuences with no true information, you don't know numbers, you dont know current populations, you know almost nothing about this topic.

So i suggest to people reading this, just keep calm.

Fearmongering hard...

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Originally Posted by Greywolfamakir

You are assuming that each server has the same amount of active players, and that is NOT true.



When Samurai was announced like a DPS, a lot of people get confused like you, do you remember? things like "2 DPSs...no tank and healer, welcome to infinite queue time for DPSs..." wich isn't true at all, but you are doing the same, you are assuming a lot of consecuences with no true information, you don't know numbers, you dont know current populations, you know almost nothing about this topic.

So i suggest to people reading this, just keep calm.

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Except they've already said that they'd split the population to be roughly 50/50 between the 2 datacenters.

And unlike with the SAM/RDM issue, we actually have numbers that show playernumbers on EU vs NA.

If EU gets split in half it'll be roughly half the size of any NA datacenter.

They seem to be expecting Shadowbringers to significantly boost playercount.

Otherwise, the split on EU makes no sense given that even with peaks of players upon ShB release likely won't surpass what JP/NA data centres have been running on as standard.

That said, maybe they've got some data that supports growth. Such as retention numbers throughout SB. I mean, playerbase growth is what prompted them to release Gold Saucer Mage. So who knows, maybe things won't suck horribly...

Their main issue is they need to be REALLY sure about something like this. As they can't just merge worlds if populations are being too spread out due to housing. While if they remerged a data centre, they'd make a lot of people who transferred and lost their house and furnishings quite unhappy.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

They seem to be expecting Shadowbringers to significantly boost playercount.

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And I believe it will. For 2 months.

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Their main issue is they need to be REALLY sure about something like this. As they can't just merge worlds if populations are being too spread out due to housing. While if they remerged a data centre, they'd make a lot of people who transferred and lost their house and furnishings quite unhappy.

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I honestly think they're vastly underestimating the effects this'll have on EU, and considering their complete radio-silence on the subject despite months of inquiries from me and others, it's all the more worrying.

Back before queues drew from the whole datacentre they still worked just fine. You're still going to have more players available now than you did then.

Raiding is a different story but even then, statics existed and progressed just fine before cross-world PF.

Is it going to require a lot of shifting? Yes. Is that good? Not always. Is it easy? Not at all. But I've been dealing with increasing "paused queue timers" because there's no instance space available much more lately, and I remember the absolute vitriol of the entire community over Pipin and Raubahn Savage. While the "SE is so cheap and just does everything the easy way" meme may be popular, they're not so stupid as to do something like this the wrong way if there's an easier, viable method like everybody here somehow "knows" there is.

And hosting an additional physical server with the amount of power, space, and bandwidth it generates isn't anywhere near as "cheap" as some may think it is. We're talking thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Fat Cat purchases, here.

I see no issues with datacenter split. With free transfer available on all my characters, I can adjust.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hustensaft

Looking at the census numbers going around, both new EU datacenters will hover around 55k players each, while japanese and us datacenters still will reach up to 90k post split. EU population is too low for two data centers.

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The Problem is, EU population is to high for 1 data center, too. 100k seems to be the "stress number" for a DC and we are at 110k.
I much rather have a little more waiting time for queues then a 3 hours login screen on expansion release.
Also SE seems to expect the EU numbers to got up in the future.

The issue that has me somewhat worried is that while they aim to initially split the population in half they also have to offer transfers to let the community try and deal with the fracturing.
With the "raid" servers remaining in Chaos I expect quite a few people who end up on Light to transfer back to Chaos if they don't have anything to tie them to their initial server, making the initial 50/50 split mean nothing.
Me I'm stuck with Shiva because we have a medium house in a nice location in the Mist we'd likely not be able to replace with how the housing market is so there's no point in engaging full on panic mode but I'm worried they didn't really think this through in regards to what the players will do and only looked at the initial numbers.

I assume that they will be quick to lock servers if there seems to be mass migration to one.