About these new worlds...

[Nova_Dresden]

I understand your point. I totally agree that the current servers need to be upgraded in capacity and stability. However, those new servers are needed immediately. It is essential for NA/EU to have new servers because of the exact point you made. It was absolutely ridiculous of Square Enix to limit NA/EU servers to about the same amount as Japan, which is a much smaller country. I don't mind NA/EU sharing servers but it is not rocket science to see the difference in population between Japan and the rest of the world.

Even still, capacity should take priority. You can't even play on Japanese servers anymore because they're filling up with players who can't play their characters on NA/EU. Once those new ones are on they'll just fill up like the JP servers and you fall back to the same issue we're having now: every server has a max capacity of 5000 players and there are WAY more than 5000 players trying to get on each server at the same time.

[Fengor]

Even still, capacity should take priority. You can't even play on Japanese servers anymore because they're filling up with players who can't play their characters on NA/EU. Once those new ones are on they'll just fill up like the JP servers and you fall back to the same issue we're having now: every server has a max capacity of 5000 players and there are WAY more than 5000 players trying to get on each server at the same time.

This got me a little interested in the math behind this debacle, so I pulled up the most recent letter. I'd also like to point out that this is not aimed at you, Nova, I'm just spitballing numbers here.

On the night following the announcement of our plans to temporarily limit sales of the download version, A Realm Reborn recorded upwards of 218,000 concurrent connections. This is in spite of the fact that the peak login times for separate regions around the world arrive at differing intervals. We estimate that without time zone differences, the total number of concurrent connections would number anywhere from 300,000 to 350,000.

I then pulled up the server list and counted out 50 servers in total between the two data centers (25 NA/EU servers with 4 being legacy and 6 being EU designated; 25 for JP with 4 legacy as well) the number was more even from what I'd heard, but perhaps the new servers are being listed prematurely; we're concerned with the current max player capacity in total not the discrepancy between JP and NA.

Each server has a max capacity of 5k connections (players), simple math tells us they currently can support a max of 250k players. As Yoshi has said, the number of people trying to play is around 50k-100k more than that. Supposedly, these numbers could not be predicted.

According to Gamasutra, as of November 4, 2010, FF14 1.0 had sold 640k copies; 120k in Japan, 210k in North America, and 230,000 in Europe. Now if you're following along at home you'll notice that not only is that total number more than double their current capacity, but NA and EU combined clock in at 440k, much higher than Yoshi's ballpark estimate of concurrent connections from earlier this week.

Now while I admire Yoshi's conservative business decision in estimating that they most certainly wouldn't see the numbers they saw at the game's initial launch after it turned out to be such a steaming turd. It shows that he understands the game needs to be nursed back to health if it has any hope of surviving. However, I think he may have been too conservative in estimating that the game would only see at maximum 39% of its player base returning.

Now keep in mind that's 39% of its original install base, and we'd be fools to think that Yoshi based his estimate on only legacy players returning. Further, he also stated in that letter that the number of characters which can be created on a server far exceeds the max connections it can handle.

So what's the point of all this, or the tl;dr as I'm sure some of you were skimming for. The point is that I don't have enough data to continue making conjectures and assumptions with basic math, but hopefully reading all of that forced you (yes you, you very angry and frustrated person reading my post.) to breath long enough for some of your rage to subside.