Island Sanctuary: Separate Instance Servers

When Island Sanctuaries were first announced, I was amazed that Square Enix found cheap enough hardware with the semiconductor shortage to do it.

Now I realize that they didn't put Island Sanctuaries on their own little cluster of instance servers: They slapped it onto the housing servers.

I haven't been able to get into my house, let alone my Workshop to check airships unless I set an alarm and I log in at 3am in the morning.

No one can roleplay inside of their FC houses because you can't get in. We can't decorate our rooms or apartments because you can't get in: Let alone being able to freely zone in and out to go buy things from vendors or the marketboard (Or go craft items).

Can't get in to water our house plants. I sat there clicking non-stop for 15 minutes earlier, until my wrist hurt, and never could get into my house let alone my workshop. I gave up.

Island Sanctuary NEEDS to be moved to its own cluster of instanced servers and taken off of the same servers that our housing utilizes. Not being able to get into an optional island is one thing: Not being able to get into housing to repair, workshops, or access private rooms is another thing.

P.S. I haven't seen any bots out in the world since Island Sanctuaries dropped.

That's because they're all in the Island sanctuaries, farming materia 24/7 and never get booted out or log out. Bots got their own private island where they can farm without being reported: Endlessly. #Yikes

IS definitely cuts into the non-combat materia market. The lack of Disciple gear in the new master books also gives people room to stock up. It'll be interesting to see what happens after the initial rush to get everything in order.

Update: FC member has been trying to get into the house for an hour now. No dice.

Server: Balmung

See it from the bright side, next week most people will be alraedy bored with it and spend much much less time in those, thus freeing instances.
But yeah it absolutely sucks not being able to enter your house cause of it, though I didn't have that problem myself.

No. I'm not going for the low-hanging fruit. I won't. :p

And in a month's time the crush with lighten up enough that your proposed extra hardware would be wasted money.

I can agree that this is problematic on release. But, kinda no different to the general rush to do the new things on new patch/expansion drops. And, just like those cases, the best solution is to just ride it out.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

And in a month's time the crush with lighten up enough that your proposed extra hardware would be wasted money.

I can agree that this is problematic on release. But, kinda no different to the general rush to do the new things on new patch/expansion drops. And, just like those cases, the best solution is to just ride it out.

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Yes the rush will definitely pass. In basic comparison to other content it is a weaker version. The only thing new is the pasture.



One thing the OP forgets and I am not SE apologist. We were due upgrades and this might not have been an issue. When they pushed upgrades back I don't think they gave a date (please correct if wrong). If way back when they announced Island sanctuary and said it would come out after server upgrade they could have pushed it back. But they didn't and would have been just more bad optics.


Islands as content is hit or miss depending on the player. But as proof of concept that the game could give everyone an instanced space, it is huge. We literally know it is running on the instanced house server. SE might have to redo furniture and maybe dumb down gardening. But players can have instanced housing if SE puts money into hardware.

Maybe...just maybe...stop expecting different things from the most congested server of all time which is only thanks to the incredible fact that Balmung is the ERP hotspot for...well...the whole game? Maybe just maybe you should focus more on the fact why you are playing on the server that is known as the Tinder of Eorzea and next time when you have the feeling you can't get into things swipe left and play on a different datacenter.

Try to transfer to a different server, somewhere where the grass is greener and the floor is less sticky. Where catgirls don't emote on each other in every corner of the world and where houses are actually available cause half the population of the server doesn't feel like they have to create another brothel. If you want to live in New Vegas then get used to the traffic i would say.

Long term, one hopes they improve things.

My NA server isn't more than 10 attempts in peak time and I can deal with that. So, while improvements are always nice, short to medium term, I think it's mostly a Balmung problem.

To echo Echo above me, The price you pay for easy access to Catgrills, and Bunnyboys in 2B bottoms.

I mean it's kinda proving the "what Instance Housing congestion feels like" thing :)

Haven't had issues for the past two days regardless of what time of day I try to get into my house or island on Adamantoise nor heard complaints from anyone who wasn't from Balmung tbh.

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Originally Posted by LianaThorne

Haven't had issues for the past two days regardless of what time of day I try to get into my house or island on Adamantoise nor heard complaints from anyone who wasn't from Balmung tbh.

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Not really worth complaining about tbh. The congestion is temporary. Give it a week or two and pretty much everybody will be going "what congestion?" I think most folks understand this.

I needed a mat from the Allagan Supply Node in our FC house but I couldn't get in. Of course it was irritating but not something worthy of banging a shoe on a podium over. I suppose if I was in the mood to do some decorating or had some timed task that needed doing I'd be a bit more put out.

I am not leaving a medium house behind, and all of my friends, and all of my apartments, to move to another data-center. Why? Because there's less level 1 ERP alts from other servers in their Quicksands?

'Transfer servers' is not a response: It's a cheap cop-out. Not everyone is on Balmung for bunny boys in 2B boots and level 1 ERP alts. Some of us are here because it's the most populated RP server (For normal roleplay.)

There's plenty of people on Balmung who have been here since the beginning, and this is where all of our friends, our FC, and our houses are. There's plenty of other servers on the aether data-center experiencing the same problems. This is way worse than it was when all of the new Ishgard housing wards were released. I could still get into my house after just a few tries. I had to spam the door for almost an hour tonight just to get in. Then another 30 minutes to get into my workshop. By the time I got into my FC house, my wrist was sore. Imagine only having 2 hours to play but an hour and a half of it is spent just trying to send your airships back out.

I guess I'm just baffled that there's millions of new players, but zero resources are allocated towards hardware expansion so that instances of 'you can't enter this area due to server congestion' don't happen anymore for anyone.

Plain and simple it's a hardware allocation issue. The game COULD have instanced housing for everyone: If we had the hardware allocation for it. (But this has shown me to not even attempt it until that happens.)

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Originally Posted by Tlamila

See it from the bright side, next week most people will be alraedy bored with it and spend much much less time in those, thus freeing instances.
But yeah it absolutely sucks not being able to enter your house cause of it, though I didn't have that problem myself.

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I dunno, between bots and people going semi-afk on the island, I kinda doubt it.

They should be giving a an actual fix for it and no people shouldn’t have to uproot themselves to go in their home or fc. Just for your information there is people on Balmung that have been there since 2.0 that dont rp or erp and just play there like every other person *rollseyes*

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

I dunno, between bots and people going semi-afk on the island, I kinda doubt it.

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There's a difference between bots, afk people, and few others, compared to "it's a shiny brand new function and literally everybody's checking it out". Some peple will drop it altogether, some others will still living in it 24/7, some others who only came back for patch will go back to not playing at all.
It's like for expansion queueues: yeah queues are huge and unbearable but yu know they'll be gone in a matter of weeks. Even though the bots keep being logged whole time, and people just afk overnight, causing there to always be a queue even of 10 people, it's nothing comparable to the thousands of people in queue on expansion. Same will be for island, and I don't think it's worth spending money on a very temporary problem.

Balmung is kind of a joke right now. I spent 10 minutes clicking before i got in yesterday.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

Maybe...just maybe...stop expecting different things from the most congested server of all time which is only thanks to the incredible fact that Balmung is the ERP hotspot for...well...the whole game? Maybe just maybe you should focus more on the fact why you are playing on the server that is known as the Tinder of Eorzea and next time when you have the feeling you can't get into things swipe left and play on a different datacenter.

Try to transfer to a different server, somewhere where the grass is greener and the floor is less sticky. Where catgirls don't emote on each other in every corner of the world and where houses are actually available cause half the population of the server doesn't feel like they have to create another brothel. If you want to live in New Vegas then get used to the traffic i would say.

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You're trying to be glib here, but this is an outrageously silly, nonsensical attitude. Balmung is a legacy server that housed the RP community as a whole long before it became the most tired meme anyone still thinks is clever or funny, and even if that by and large wasn't the case, new players don't exactly have indications of what unofficial server culture is which before they choose where to land. Those people also have a right to expect the game's advertised features to reliably function even if people who want to keep beating the same dead joke horse don't want to give up their only comedy material.

Expecting a reasonable level of service for a product you're paying for is not asking for too much. If "new features should not make old features inaccessible" is too entitled an attitude for you, good on you for being a standardless consumer who will uncritically jump out in front of a corporate entity to shield it from criticism, but functionality is a baseline axis on which to judge a product when you're spending your money on it in literally every other industry in the world. This isn't a charity, it's a business. MMOs aren't a gift to you that you're lucky to receive, you are paying a multimillion dollar video game company for a product they are trying to sell to you. It's okay to have warm and fuzzy feelings about them if they make something you like (and I do love this game), but you can also hold them to an extremely basic standard at the same time, I promise.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

Maybe...just maybe...stop expecting different things from the most congested server of all time which is only thanks to the incredible fact that Balmung is the ERP hotspot for...well...the whole game? Maybe just maybe you should focus more on the fact why you are playing on the server that is known as the Tinder of Eorzea and next time when you have the feeling you can't get into things swipe left and play on a different datacenter.

Try to transfer to a different server, somewhere where the grass is greener and the floor is less sticky. Where catgirls don't emote on each other in every corner of the world and where houses are actually available cause half the population of the server doesn't feel like they have to create another brothel. If you want to live in New Vegas then get used to the traffic i would say.

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There are so many problems with this argument, first and foremost that the instance server pool that Balmung dips from aren't just for Balmung, but all of Crystal. So everyone on Crystal is having problems. If this isn't the case, then Square should probably allocate more resources for Balmung or turn off world visit while things aren't functioning, but I'm pretty sure it is. But furthermore Balmung doesn't even have a higher native population than other worlds anymore because they've locked it down, nor do we have more houses than anyone else.

This problem isn't new. It has nothing to do with the chip shortage, Balmung, or any other excuses you want to make. It's been going on since Stormblood launched. This is the Great Raubahn Wall all over again and it's caused by failures in content design. Both the MSQ and Island Sanctuary have players hanging out in solo instances for hours. This is the source of the problem.

It could have been alleviated in a number of ways and not all of them require the purchase of hardware.

Feels good on a new server.

I've had 0 issues with getting in my house at any day/time so idk

I usually take most FFXIV issues in stride. However, the problems that have come with the release of Island Sanctuary are really starting to frustrate me because I haven't been able to enter my house since the patch released.

I'm sure Island Sanctuary is great, and I even look forward to trying it one day whenever everyone can actually access to it. But the fact of the matter is the developers willingly released a system into the game that essentially broke housing on my server. Either they failed to test for these congestion issues under a simulated scenario on par with Balmung's traffic, or they did test it and released Island Sanctuary knowing it would create these problems. Either scenario is bad.

I was pleased when they said they were looking into potential solutions. I am not pleased with their remaining solution for players to "try again later" once those potential solutions didn't pan out. I doubt many players in FFXIV are thinking "I need to access my house a moment.. or I could wait and do it in a month or so per the advice I was given, that's fine too..". The developers waiting for a problem they created to sort itself out via a lack of player interest is is not an acceptable solution.

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Originally Posted by Knot_D

I mean it's kinda proving the "what Instance Housing congestion feels like" thing :)

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Me in previous threads:
*posts long, detailed analysis of why instanced housing and what we can deduce about this game's server architecture go together about as well as peanut butter and rancid fish—and the tricks that inn rooms and Grand Company barracks use to get around this (and why, as a result, you cannot visit someone else's inn room or GC barracks)*

Also me, looking at description of Island Sanctuary before the patch:
Huh... fully instanced, and you can visit them? Maybe they found some clever way to make it work, or maybe my analysis was wrong...

Me now, looking at the results of Island Sanctuary's introduction on already-congested servers:
*pained wince* ...ah. So, the answer is "no, they didn't find some clever way to make it work that avoids the problems", and also "no, my analysis was evidently not wrong".

Somewhat belated addition to this: I can see a way that they could make this work... sort of.

If the island did not allow visitors -- a'la the inn rooms and GC barracks -- you could use the same trick, of the instance being run (almost) entirely client-side. You could allow visitors by speaking to the Felicitous Furball mammet and asking them to "open the docks", which would try to instanciate your island on the server -- allowing people to come visit -- but you'd have to manually open it up. Which would be annoying, but from what I've seen, 95% of the time no one has a visitor on their island anyway, so it would make Island Sanctuary have a much lesser impact on server resources.

There are, of course, issues with this. (There are always issues.) The biggest one is that the Island Sanctuary has more sensitive state to maintain; when designing for online play, you have to treat a client -- even the one you write -- as inherently untrustworthy, because someone can always modify the client and send back information they've altered.

For inn rooms, the only inherent "state" for the inn room itself is the orchestrion roll playing; if you modify the game state to say "no, really, I have this orchestrion roll so I can put it on the orchestrion while I'm here"... no one really cares, as it affects nothing. For the Grand Company barracks, the only environmental state is "which of my squadron are out on a mission" and "what have I glamoured the squadron into" -- again, nothing that affects gameplay overall. In both cases, any interactions with actual game systems -- glamour dresser, retainer bell, squadron missions, etc. -- are all self-contained systems which you can still make a call to the server side for; you interact with an object (retainer bell, glamour dresser) or NPC, and it makes the call to the server-side.

The island, however, has a lot of state that actually affects gameplay. Some of the systems (workshops, foraging expeditions, and upgrading/building things) are nicely self-contained and only interacted with via NPCs or objects like the logboards; they could work entirely client-side with a call to the server-side system, hypothetically, like retainer bells and glamour dressers and whatnot. However, there is a lot of state just inherent to the island itself -- which rare animals are currently available (not just the weather/time conditions, but "have I tried to catch them and had them run away during this window"), which resources are up, which tools you have unlocked and so which resources you can get, etc. -- which directly affects your island gameplay and progression, and trusting the client as the authority on that information is a path to someone writing a tool that just... immediately gives you whatever resources you want, or something else cheaty.

(It doesn't matter if the cheating gives an actual material advantage; someone will do it just to show they can. A lot of people who write cheating tools do it not because they actually intend to use the tools themselves, but because they derive enjoyment from figuring out how the game works.)

If I had to guess, I'd say that the reason Island Sanctuary does get instanciated server-side is not "so people can visit each other's islands" but because that way the server is the source of authority on island environmental state. That lets you avoid the possibility of modified clients being used to cheat; the ability to visit a friend's island is merely a fringe benefit made possible by the fact that you're now running the island on the server anyway.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

Update: FC member has been trying to get into the house for an hour now. No dice.

Server: Balmung

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https://i.imgur.com/FAAhF6W.png


Seems like maybe rare animals that don't always spawn were a bad idea, since it leads to people coming up with "strategies" to make them spawn like leaving the zone and entering at certain times.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

When Island Sanctuaries were first announced, I was amazed that Square Enix found cheap enough hardware with the semiconductor shortage to do it.

Now I realize that they didn't put Island Sanctuaries on their own little cluster of instance servers: They slapped it onto the housing servers.

I haven't been able to get into my house, let alone my Workshop to check airships unless I set an alarm and I log in at 3am in the morning.

No one can roleplay inside of their FC houses because you can't get in. We can't decorate our rooms or apartments because you can't get in: Let alone being able to freely zone in and out to go buy things from vendors or the marketboard (Or go craft items).

Can't get in to water our house plants. I sat there clicking non-stop for 15 minutes earlier, until my wrist hurt, and never could get into my house let alone my workshop. I gave up.

Island Sanctuary NEEDS to be moved to its own cluster of instanced servers and taken off of the same servers that our housing utilizes. Not being able to get into an optional island is one thing: Not being able to get into housing to repair, workshops, or access private rooms is another thing.

P.S. I haven't seen any bots out in the world since Island Sanctuaries dropped.

That's because they're all in the Island sanctuaries, farming materia 24/7 and never get booted out or log out. Bots got their own private island where they can farm without being reported: Endlessly. #Yikes

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Housing is such a deterrent sometimes. I remember when ppl used to RP everywhere, but ever since housing came out, some spots became dead or people just stick to one spot.

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Originally Posted by Snowborn

There are so many problems with this argument, first and foremost that the instance server pool that Balmung dips from aren't just for Balmung, but all of Crystal. So everyone on Crystal is having problems.

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This was one of the pillars for Gilgamesh's hate for Balmung before the DC split. Its almost like history's repeating itself.

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Originally Posted by Lunalepsy

Housing is such a deterrent sometimes. I remember when ppl used to RP everywhere, but ever since housing came out, some spots became dead or people just stick to one spot.

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I know right, I used to RP before housing was a thing and people would just RP through all Eorzea. And we only had the ARR areas, now there's just SO many open world areas to possibly RP in, why be limited by housing?