Personal Housing Server Limitations and the Future of FFXIV Development

[Genz]

https://i.imgur.com/g1Zcr2L.png

"more than 2 millions" is the number of people owning an account (very roughly : people who have bought the game)
We have no official information about the numbers of subscribers (they are intentionally ambiguous announcing "2.5 millions players"), but it's probably below the million.

[Yukiko]

"more than 2 millions" is the number of people owning an account (very roughly : people who have bought the game)
We have no official information about the numbers of subscribers (they are intentionally ambiguous announcing "2.5 millions players"), but it's probably below the million.

Its in the first 2 lines of the picture...
source of data is on the botom of the picture...

[Meier]

Maybe they should take some of the revenue from their 2.3 million players and invest in some server infrastructure instead of funneling all their money to developing mobile games.

Which is why unsubbing is important. Money speaks a LOT louder then all of us on this forum. The housing situation enough proves that. How about coil?

When they said the question they've been asked since launch is if they can remove the lock out system....but they feel other things are important. People have been asking FOR A YEAR NOW and its still not enough.

They won't do polls either...because that would actually show hard evidence, instead of a buncha forum posts....what players REALLY want. They said they did polls cuz they didn't have a forum. Excuse me...that is a lie too. This forum damn well existed at the time of player polls..LOL. A quick google search can show anyone that.

[Kayo]

Thats why instanced personal housing is best. For some reason Yoshi is being incredibly stubborn about these big neighborhoods like its going to ever simulate a real one. Like we're all going to walk out every morning to get the paper and chat it up with our neighbor who was mowing the lawn or walking his chocobo. No ... we go there to farm, modify the place, or log out... thats it. There is no point in having things the way they are.

They shouldve just made us buy or quest for some special aetheryte crystal that ports us to our own special instanced land plot. From there we can buy any and all the architecture we please, set up farms, crafting stalls, etc. If this sounds familiar, its because its from Wildstar (which probably got much of it from other games as well).

Instead hes stuck on some virtual neighborhood no one really cares about that only takes up extra hardware resources on their part.

[YuriRamona]

I have never played an MMO that had a hard cap on housing availability like this.

The entire POINT of instanced wards as we have now is that the server just creates more of them as the others fill up. I've played several MMOs that use the same housing system as we have here and new wards were created automatically as older wards filled up. There was never a limit on capacity.

It's deeply troubling that this game has such severe server capacity limitations when every other MMO on the market has no such problems.

Yes, I agree.

I don't always think it's fair to compare FFXIV to other MMOs, since FFXIV is much newer and graphics/server-intense, but we all have to discuss what we're willing to sacrifice in terms of breadth/openness for the sake of deeper/intenser world.

The real issue: same mistake they had with retainers back in 1.x, way too much cosmetic junk, and not enough real meaningful items with in a zone.

Remember, a zone is limited to a few thousand items, therefore, 30 plots per ward, each house with 20~40 items, each item with many details, your build details. So even let's say it is an avg of 50 "items" per plot, you are already looking at 1500 items per ward, plus other "accessories".

Yeah, no way we will see much more unless they serious expand the "housing" servers that will sit empty most of the time due to item limits per zone.

I think that's fine. Many MMOs have instanced housing because of the unwieldy hardware difficulties of a large "neighborhood"/ward of houses.

My question is why the INTERIOR of houses are limited in the number of objects.

Yes, it's possible that SE made a design decision limiting object clutter because they thought players would ruin their own homes by having too much stuff.

However, I think it's much more likely that there are hard limitations on the number of objects the servers (or PS3) can handle.

There are games over a decade old that feature areas with hundreds of dynamic, moving objects that calculate physics as they collide.

FFXIV's houses are filled with static objects that only have to calculate shadows and lighting.

This is my personal theorizing, but I suspect that we are being throttled very harshly either by console (PS3) or server limitations. I don't see any other reason to have such a low cap on objects inside houses and personal rooms.

it's amazing how the OP's main point has been overlooked...



The idea here isn't that they need to add more servers, it's that they can't simply add more servers because the way the game was coded/ the game's infrastructure does not support this.

The idea is that the game has reached (or is nearing) it's infrastructure limit, and in order to expand it further, a complete re-structuring/ re-coding of the entire/majority game would be required.

This is a much more crippling, worrisome issue that just lack of servers. It's a complete roadblock for future expansion.

Instead of yelling at SE to "Get Moar Servers!!!!", you should be yelling at them to be up front about the root of the problem and their plan to solve it. As the updates go on, I grow more and more convinced that the OP's hypothesis is fact, and grow more worried that there is a serious issue looming over the horizon for us Eorzeans.

I already lived through the incompetency that was 1.0, and I do not want to relive that.

Thanks. I think people understand the point, but I also think it's valid to demand more servers.

I truly don't want to believe that this game is being handicapped by SE executives or developers, or worse, limited by the PS3.

I want to believe that it's just a matter of getting more servers. Still, I am extremely skeptical that will solve our problems. That way, we can know once and for all whether the game will have long-term survivability.

It's just worrying that I can count the number of housing wards with two hands, and the number of open plots is a tiny fraction of the total subscribed population.

Let's not forget that personal housing has been pushed back many months. They never made any promises for a release date, but it's clear they've been working on this since before release.

They know that personal housing is one of the most anticipated/desired content for this game, and their best effort was 2 new wards in one to two months' time for a grand total of a whopping 60 new plots?

This is arguably SE's hottest game with the most reliable source of future income, and the best they could pull is SIXTY new plots by next patch?

If this isn't extremely distressing, I don't know what is. We should be alarmed that SE is trying this hard and this is the best they could do.

[Lazearus]

Sadly, I've resigned to the fact that SE will never implement such nice stuff. Even though the individual teams are all working their asses off to produce awesome content and to fix bugs quickly (esp Minagawa-san), there seems to be something wrong with their planning/overseeing of the whole game. For Hunts, how would you be unable to predict that the whole server would want to zerg the mobs for juicy loot? And SE had 9 months to plan for server infrastructure upgrading but they chose to wait till the glaring problems explode in their face (and probably still not upgrade anything).

Seriously SE, you need to reevaluate your roadmap. I highly doubt your potentially amazing future content (Gold Saucer, Forbidden Land Eureka, Chocobo Forest, FC airship) will be able to be implemented nicely on your potato of a server infrastructure. Imagine all the zerg from Hunts crowding in Gold Saucer. Or the 1,467 FC airships (assuming all of them are active and have FC housing to build their airships) in Masamune flying around in one zone. The whole server WILL CRASH.

[Magis]

This has nothing to do with "server expandability" (as in you can't just throw more servers at it) and is most likely an architecture problem. To be honest, it's an easy fix that was already done in 2003 with FFXI.... a game designed to run on much slower computers. Instances.


I posted in another thread, but it's better here:

I don't understand why instancing is such a difficult concept to understand. Unlike static zones (ie: Eastern Thanalan), an instance doesn't exist all the time. An instance only exists as long as there are players to occupy that zone. When a player enters, a copy of the zone template is created... when everyone leaves, it is destroyed. This already happens with various story line zones (and is how SE makes the game seem to progress like when all the dead bodies were in the Waking Sands), the inn, and FC houses (not wards). The server limitations at the moment are most likely a ward problem not a house problem. If creating instances was a limitation, then NO instance would be possible because at launch, huge populations of people were generating more instances doing the main storyline quest (Waking Sands) or going into the inn (back when sanctuary was not applied in the cities, only in the inn). The issue is most likely a hard cap on the maximum zone ids available for SE to use. If you look at a certain open source FFXI server (not linking), you'd see the game had a max cap of 256 zone ids available (due to the size of the parameter in the packet). This means the game could not reference more zones unless a rework of the underlining network code was changed. This is most likely the case with FFXIV... adding more wards lowers the amount of zones available, restricting how many SE can use later on for expansions and stuff. I'd hope that they used a large data type (say a short or long instead of a byte) so they are not restricted, but they may have to save bandwidth.

Course, I don't know anything about how FFXIV ARR's network code is setup and it could be totally different, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the ideas got lifted from previous MMOs SE made.

The dungeons are slightly different. The concept is the same, however they run on a separate server.

PS: I think this is why the server kicks you out of the house when you log off. The instance may not exist when you log back in, so it puts you in the ward which WILL exist. Also, since there will be 1440 zones for housing, if the above is true, it's obviously not capped at 256 (1 byte, 8bits). Depending on how large their data type is... it could be anywhere from 65536 (2 bytes, 16bit) to 1.8446744e+19 (8bytes, 64-bit). Edit: Sorry, there will be 48 wards (1440 houses), so this may still be the case... a limit of 256.

[Vaer]

Or the 1,467 FC airships (assuming all of them are active and have FC housing to build their airships) in Masamune flying around in one zone. The whole server WILL CRASH.

It's okay, they'll just charge us 150 mil to buy the landing strip and the hangar. Better start saving.

[Lazearus]

It's okay, they'll just charge us 150 mil to buy the landing strip and the hangar. Better start saving.

When Yoshi's avatar pops up again in next year's anniversary event, I'll crash my airship into him, reverse, and crash into him again.

[Jorge6029]

Housing is something I really think they shouldn't be to focus on, I want adventures not houses, I'm not playing this game to go to my virtual house c'mon people, lets focus on important things! Quests, fights, new classes and jobs, more items, gears...