Dear SE, please unlock Balmung

[Archadius]

people are concerned about being hit with a long login queue, so they go afk rather than logging off

If people honestly believe this then that explains the issue. I play on Balmung primarily during NA prime times and have never experienced a login queue that lasted longer than say... 2 minutes. Most often it's under 30 seconds, if there is even a queue at all. Sounds like people are AFKing out of fear over nothing. This "long login queue" does not exist. Hopefully some of my fellow Balmung residents realize this and it helps others get in.

[odie]

If people honestly believe this then that explains the issue. I play on Balmung primarily during NA prime times and have never experienced a login queue that lasted longer than say... 2 minutes. Most often it's under 30 seconds, if there is even a queue at all. Sounds like people are AFKing out of fear over nothing. This "long login queue" does not exist. Hopefully some of my fellow Balmung residents realize this and it helps others get in.

it does exist depending on the content. there are some and i'll even queue as a healer or tank to speed things up and end up waiting 30 minutes to an hour. And I'm also on Balmung.

[Archadius]

it does exist depending on the content. there are some and i'll even queue as a healer or tank to speed things up and end up waiting 30 minutes to an hour. And I'm also on Balmung.

The subject is login queues, not DF queues.

[odie]

The subject is login queues, not DF queues.

my bad. lol been reading a lot of rants today about duties and such. guess my mind got tunneled....login queues, it seems anytime I log in i'll get "players in queue = x" once, then i'll reattempt to enter the server and i'll get right in. So logging in doesn't bother me too much

[Catwho]

There have been times where we had a fully formed party and were queued for an instance. I timed it once - we waited almost three minutes. We thought that Duty Finder was broken.

But yeah, login queues. They hit Lamia server at primetime (4PM-10PM EST) but they're usually only 7-15 or so people long and end in 30 seconds.

[Raist]

Login queues don't happen because of people sitting AFK... they happen because of an overload of concurrent connections passing through the lobby servers to the world servers. Go back and read the lodestone posts I linked in my last post. They are talking about issues with a mass influx of simultaneous logins, as in large numbers of people logging in at the same time. Once you are logged in, you have your two persistent connections and you are done (bear in mind that many servers have default connection limits on the order of tens of thousands--MS-SQL defaults to just over 32k, IIS has a theoretic combined pool of up to 16 MILLION). But during the login process, there is a flood of multiple connections pulling up all the character and environment data in one big pull (also comes into play when you zone as well). That consumes the resources that ultimately trigger the queuing---pulling all that data up during the login process, which is where they've had to put the harsh restrictions on concurrent connections. It's not that much of an issue managing all those that are already logged in, as they are running on their own separate pool from what the lobby/login process has to work with.

Keep in mind that at launch, there wasn't a division between servers for the login like we have now. You logged in on say, .25, and played on .25 as well--and were dealing with a hard limit of 5000. Have to remember also that each lobby server is managing the logins to an assigned group of worlds (each of which is actually spread out across a cluster of servers as well). But, those front end servers are dedicated to managing that process entirely up front, and then we get handed off to the world service server for our chosen world--and those worlds are now spread out across more servers and able to handle much more active players than before. Previously, it was all being done by the one server but now it is a distributed load. In the case of Balmung, it's lobby server is potentially bearing the greatest load of all of them though, as it is the only one managing access to 13 world services. The others are managing 11 or less:

http://www.arrstatus.com/

[Rahzel]

There have been times where we had a fully formed party and were queued for an instance. I timed it once - we waited almost three minutes. We thought that Duty Finder was broken.

But yeah, login queues. They hit Lamia server at primetime (4PM-10PM EST) but they're usually only 7-15 or so people long and end in 30 seconds.

I'd presume that happened because the instance servers were full, and so your group had to wait for space on the instance server to become available. That's also why dungeons have timers.

[Blackweaver]

Well my final post in this thread. I just got my alt made. I am happy now to have the char. So tomorrow morning I will be crafting the character gear and leveling. Later everyone.

[Tiggy]

Login queues don't happen because of people sitting AFK... they happen because of an overload of concurrent connections passing through the lobby servers to the world servers.

You're wrong if you think that's the only criteria. Even your previous post didn't prove that people currently connected don't count. If anything all they proved was that concurrent connections are used AND simultaneous logins are counted. Meaning AFK people count in the concurrent connection category which makes sense since both metrics count as server congestion as they both consume server resources and network data.

Consider the AFK player.
Player A AFKs at the Toll. Due to the crazy amount of players around him the server must render him in a populated area for every player, and send to that AFK player all the character data for every player walking near by. This uses a considerable amount of data for one afk player.
Player B AFKs in his person room. Those are instanced meaning he is forcing the game to render an instance taking up resources for someone who isn't even online.
Player C AFKs in a quite corner of the world where people rarely travel. Doesn't force instances open and doesn't transfer more data than himself.

AFK players are not created equal in their impact on the server. To ignore them is to ignore the realities of server and network hardware.

You're just flat out wrong. AFK players absolutely use server resources and fit squares own statement about using "congestion" as their metric. Your quotes don't prove that AFK players as concurrent users don't count. Not one bit. Both logged in players AND simultaneous logins are measures of congestion and this is used out in the real world in other cases and not just in this game. Your posts grasps at straws that don't actually prove logged in players don't count.

Kiroh, this is why I was confused about your original post. The argument above is pretty common.

[Yutsimaki]

I fear what goes on in that server with the large amounts of RP alts going there....