Why are we still perpetuating this server congestion meme?

>game is at its lowest population in literal years
>supposed to believe log in queues are 30+
>supposed to believe in sudden server "congestion" rendering many servers, and an entire data center (aether (the only place you can really raid in FP)) inaccessible for most of the day (so fuck you if you have a job or something and play at normal hours)

do you guys think the devs will ever address how the game blatantly has less players than in Endwalker (where you could freely go anywhere with 0 congestion issues) and fix it or is this garbage they've done arbitrarily just the new norm going forward?

It not the game server being congested, it's just the login servers being very slow.

30+ just means that around 30 people are trying to login at that moment. It processes them 1-by-1, rather than all at once. There tends to be a sort of frequency limit that they adjust as well. For example, I've seen the queue go down by 50 per 2 minutes, and other times by 100 per 2 minutes. The closer I am to being first in the queue, the quicker it lets me in. So if, say, I was 49 it takes me longer than if I'm 2 in the queue.

It will be a safety feature. Just to make sure there are no issues with player data due to trying to process multiple players at the same moment.

Sudden server congestion is probably particularly happening due to people trying to Data Center Travel to Aether from 3 different data centers. They have limited slots for travelers now. My guess is this is partially meant to make it hard for DC travel to be viable for raiding purposes. Once people get a feeling that they can't rely on traveling for that purpose, they might decide to setup a PF on their own DC instead.

As for congestion in a character creation sense, while the game might be at a lower population, that does not mean that individual servers cannot be experiencing congestion. Certain servers tend to get congested at raid patches or when certain streamers play.

Small Indie Company ™

I have a theory that I'm sure the white knights are going to laugh at and defend SE's honor.

The "server congestion" is completely artificial. The servers are being labeled as congested for two reasons:

1: To continue to try and push the absolute failure that is Dynamis. Dynamis is too little, far too late. It needed to happen during the big endwalker surge. It didnt. They released it several months too late for it to make an impact. It might have been successful back when people had 2-3 hour login queue times. But they did absolutely nothing for months and months, and by the time it came out, the queue times were gone and no one had any reason to go to dynamis.

2: They are trying to hide the fact that the playerbase is in freefall. Disguising a rapidly diminishing playerbase by pretending that servers are so crowded they are ready to burst over with the unimaginable horde of players they have on them. This is incredibly disingenuous when you can quite literally visually see the diminishing playerbase with how empty the towns look now, with how empty your friends list has become, and how many fcs are struggling to get literally anything going at all because there just isnt anyone left outside of "mega-fcs" now.

It feels like they are pushing this narrative for optics, because otherwise they would have to swallow their pride for 5 minutes and admit that the game is in full on stagnation mode which means having to actually do more than just copy+paste content over and over.
This is the lowest playerbase since SB, and it's well on it's way to going right back to HW/ARR numbers.

But hey, keep those servers locked and pretend nothing is wrong.

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Originally Posted by CapaxInfiniti

To continue to try and push the absolute failure that is Dynamis.

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I don't disagree that this is a reason, but so are the other reasons I mentioned. Also, there may be a security element since if their servers crash because of everyone congregating on one DC and they want to prevent that being possible, that can be achieved with arbitrary limits. There were quite an unusually high number of server crashes in the last year or two so I don't know what they exactly pinpointed the causes as.

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They are trying to hide the fact that the playerbase is in freefall.

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It's not even possible to hide that, so this is just a redundant point.

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Originally Posted by CapaxInfiniti

I have a theory that I'm sure the white knights are going to laugh at and defend SE's honor.

The "server congestion" is completely artificial. The servers are being labeled as congested for two reasons:

1: To continue to try and push the absolute failure that is Dynamis. Dynamis is too little, far too late. It needed to happen during the big endwalker surge. It didnt. They released it several months too late for it to make an impact. It might have been successful back when people had 2-3 hour login queue times. But they did absolutely nothing for months and months, and by the time it came out, the queue times were gone and no one had any reason to go to dynamis.

2: They are trying to hide the fact that the playerbase is in freefall. Disguising a rapidly diminishing playerbase by pretending that servers are so crowded they are ready to burst over with the unimaginable horde of players they have on them. This is incredibly disingenuous when you can quite literally visually see the diminishing playerbase with how empty the towns look now, with how empty your friends list has become, and how many fcs are struggling to get literally anything going at all because there just isnt anyone left outside of "mega-fcs" now.

It feels like they are pushing this narrative for optics, because otherwise they would have to swallow their pride for 5 minutes and admit that the game is in full on stagnation mode which means having to actually do more than just copy+paste content over and over.
This is the lowest playerbase since SB, and it's well on it's way to going right back to HW/ARR numbers.

But hey, keep those servers locked and pretend nothing is wrong.

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Ngl, 2 made me laugh.

The game is oh so full ! There's no space to go anywhere anymore because its just bursting with players this much ! /s

Real talk, I have no idea why they even try this congestion stuff, it's obviously false and a blatant lie to pretend that the game is booming with players while it's very much in freefall since the beginning of this expansion, Aether being closed is nothing but a bad look at the raiding scene of this game since because of server choice you are barred from going there except if you park your character there in very early hours, and it's pretty much the only worth it DC for raiding, venues on Aether have completely dried out because they cant have people coming over from other dc's amongst multiple other issues related to congestion.

All in all it's very ridiculous, but up to par with SE's behavior about keeping face and acting as if everything is fine on a sinking ship.

Those were not always there. They were added after the EW launch fiasco.

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Originally Posted by CNitsah

Those were not always there. They were added after the EW launch fiasco.

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Doesnt change the fact the so called congestion doesnt exist.

My point was more that it never was supposed to be a marker of congestion, but a marker of the new connection method.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

It not the game server being congested, it's just the login servers being very slow.

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This was not a thing before Shadowbringers' release. I think they changed it to introduce a trickle down in the lobby server logins because it was too unstable before.

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Originally Posted by Valence

This was not a thing before Shadowbringers' release. I think they changed it to introduce a trickle down in the lobby server logins because it was too unstable before.

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It's hard to remember something like that so far back, but I feel like it would have to have been given how congested Stormblood's release was.

A common argument people make is that it's bots logging in as a combined batch, but it varies because sometimes it can simply be due to DDoS and the instability on certain routes at times.

They just throttle logins. The system logs in something like 50 or 100 players every 30 seconds or something. I don't know exact numbers but it's done in small burst like that.

I think this is because the queue works on a buffer...

It's not literal congestion on the world, but rather an anti-congestion mechanism where it just buffers logins, and I don't think it applies to just that single world, but rather DC-wide, e.g., 30 people are trying to login across that DC at any given time, before eventually allocating you to a server IP to connect to.

"Congested worlds" does not imply they are filled up with online players. It implies that the number of player characters who are associated with the world is high. Congested worlds may have a low active population and a massive number of paying players who only log on once a season.

The login queue may indicate a "congested world" with an active online population of 200 or 10,000 (or whatever SE has decided "congested" means for purposes of creating new characters or transferring from one world to the next).

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Originally Posted by SophiaDL

Doesnt change the fact the so called congestion doesnt exist.

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Have they ever said why its like this?

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Originally Posted by localareanetwork

Have they ever said why its like this?

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No they have actually not, they just started using the term congestion and slapped it everywhere to block Aether and make it an off limit DC for non residents, same for Balmung.

I doubt it will ever go away though since it'd basically mean they are admitting the game population is going down.

sigh.....

When will people learn that an MMO is not "dead" until the day they shut the servers down? I have a better question: Why are we still perpetuating the "this MMO is totes the dedz bc I say so, ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary" meme that existed far, far before Final Fantasy XIV ver. 1.0 was even an idea in Square Enix' head?

well it might be to spread the player base but kinda failed doing that sadly

When did they start marking servers as unavailable all the time? I could swear around the start of Endwalker, you could make a character on any server, provided it wasn't too busy at the time you logged in.
It's really inconvenient to have to wait months for servers to be randomly marked as congested or not.

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Originally Posted by SalamanderIX

When did they start marking servers as unavailable all the time? I could swear around the start of Endwalker, you could make a character on any server, provided it wasn't too busy at the time you logged in.
It's really inconvenient to have to wait months for servers to be randomly marked as congested or not.

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TBF Aether has only been fully closed since 7.2 patch as it had 2 worlds open for transfer and new characters before that time.

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Originally Posted by SalamanderIX

When did they start marking servers as unavailable all the time? I could swear around the start of Endwalker, you could make a character on any server, provided it wasn't too busy at the time you logged in.
It's really inconvenient to have to wait months for servers to be randomly marked as congested or not.

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I think it started in Stormblood. Because there was a time in late Heavensward when it was getting out of hand. Balmung was so congested you couldn't make a character on it except for a few minute window at a certain time of the week. As a result, people did paid transfers and it was bursting an already congested bubble.

They created the Congested status to prevent people joining Balmung. That later led to the Data Center Split, or the sundering, that split Aether and Primal into a new data center called Crystal, and the addition of World Visit, all of which helped balance out Balmung's population.

But as the game grew, it ceased to just be Balmung in this spot. A lot of other worlds got into this spot. Crystal actually grew so much that it now often exceeds Aether's population (but we can't account for Data Center Travel in these stats, which obviously alters things).

Now, people will say "but the population dropped since Dawntrail release", but the thing is that the population was still higher than in Stormblood last I checked and we had congested worlds like Balmung then as I mentioned. We also have to consider that Lucky Bancho doesn't even consider free trials (or those with no clear evidence of a subscription even if they have one) in the stats.

In my experience, the worlds getting set as congested make sense based on the situations ie. certain ones end up congested at raid patches, others end up congested purely because they've allowed new players for an extended period of time and those new players have become regular players and this is visible when you travel to them.

The fact i get put in a queue to get onto Golem is laughable when there is at most 5 people in limsa. (30+ people queues sometimes)
Congestion? Where?

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Originally Posted by NoFaceNobody

The fact i get put in a queue to get onto Golem is laughable when there is at most 5 people in limsa. (30+ people queues sometimes)
Congestion? Where?

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That doesn't represent congestion. The queue is just 1-by-1 processing of logins. There are 30 people trying to login at that moment in time. They could be players or they could be bots.

Either way, not everyone spends their time at Limsa. After all, new players would be doing MSQ and many players transferred to Dynamis for a house.

According to Lucky Bancho, Golem has around 4461 active players (of course, they won't all be logged in at once). As a contrast, healthy worlds seem to have 10,000 to 16,000. Mateus is currently the most congested with over 18,000.

Source: https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckyban...0/80ace487.png

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Originally Posted by NoFaceNobody

The fact i get put in a queue to get onto Golem is laughable when there is at most 5 people in limsa. (30+ people queues sometimes)
Congestion? Where?

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It doesn't mean anything is congested. Players are in a batched queue.

The active hardcore players I'd say is just as high, or higher now than ever. I think the issue is, people are looking at data and drawing the wrong conclusion. Since it shows the number people playing at all on steam, on a given day. What's missing is at least half the playercount is made up for people who login for 10 minutes to try a free trial, or are in some ARR dungeon with their trusts. -- players we don't normally interact with or take up much space in peak hours. With Stream reviews being negative, we aren't getting nearly as many of these anymore, and they'd almost certainly be on Dynamis, because the client directed them there.

I don't know whether or not the congestion thing is true, but I do hope that Aether can open again soon (specifically Gilgamesh) so that more friends of mine can come on over!! tyty