Forcing us to the entire story quest to unlock the new classes is just bad business

[Vicus]

And another thing....I keep seeing people state how it will hurt the game, run players off, etc. Then explain why there are sooo many threads complaining about the congestion? Lobby servers clogging? Too many people sitting AFK? If this is hurting the game so much, then why are there so many more people joining/returning? There are notices left and right telling people they must progress main story to access the new content...yet people bought it up like chocolate, swarmed the forums for a week in a panic because they hadn't gotten their codes, swarmed again in EA because of congestion issues (which for the most part weren't there during 2.5x).

This game does not have that many servers and there are a couple servers that are congested but the majority of them are not full or max. I havent had any trouble getting in or que times during peek hours but other servers are worse. While FF population is healthy now (an expansion dropped ofcourse) I don't see multiple servers opening up because people wanting to play are busting down the door. I would hope that dropping a new expansion would mean a new server opened because the demand was so great...but that didnt happen. So like I said Im always fearful of the future in MMO because 95% of them fade and fail fast...and while FFXIV will have some longetivity it seems ..I still would love to keep the population long term. This expansion gate is bareable but if they continue the trend new people will have to go thru multiple expansion to catch up...and you can't think thats a good idea..you just cant

[DreameR7g]

Snip

Actually, they have 6 data clusters filled with approximately 11 servers each. If they weren't being used to SE's satisfaction, SE would server merge and start taking servers offline. See: www.arrstatus.com

The primary mistake new players and some returning players are making at the moment is assuming this expansion was choosing them as the target audience. If they were, it would be an expansion without any prerequisites. However, since they warned for 3 months+ about how you needed to complete the up-to-date story to access Ishgard and thus the new content, it comes down to personal responsibility.

New and returning players, however, were thrown a bone due to the fact that leveling is exponentially faster, old story quests which never gave you experience now so does and they even implemented Undersized parties in which case a veteran player who is geared enough can run newer/turning players through dungeons they need a clear on almost effortlessly.

At the end of the day, this is what SE chose to do and so far, from the testimonials of players here, you are in the supreme minority of players who say this wasn't a good thing to do.

[Gallus]

If you despised the game to the point you weren't even able to finish the main quest, what makes you think you'll even remotely have some fun with HW?

[nuyu11]

Snip.

Yes, this is what I'm trying to say.

Snip.

I suggest you can make another mmo, with your vast experience I think you can do it.

[Ramath]

Oh, you're one of THOSE people...

[Whiteroom]

Yeah but lets fast forward to 3-4 years from now.

No ultima wouldn't work, the point is, you have to earn the Ishgardians trust to be able to enter their city. Ultima has nothing to do with Ishgard. Stop thinking of it in gated terms and in story terms. No, it doesn't take long to do. And yes it makes sense for a story driven game to make you play the story. As for 3-4 years, it has already been mentioned that as time goes on they will streamline the story in various ways to make it quicker. But "I WANT IT NOW!"

btw, the 2.55 and on story is more than worth the dumb fetch quests from before it.

[Chiramu]

If you despised the game to the point you weren't even able to finish the main quest, what makes you think you'll even remotely have some fun with HW?

OP, ask yourself this question.

[Whiteroom]

This game does not have that many servers and there are a couple servers that are congested but the majority of them are not full or max. I havent had any trouble getting in or que times during peek hours but other servers are worse. While FF population is healthy now (an expansion dropped ofcourse) I don't see multiple servers opening up because people wanting to play are busting down the door. I would hope that dropping a new expansion would mean a new server opened because the demand was so great...but that didnt happen. So like I said Im always fearful of the future in MMO because 95% of them fade and fail fast...and while FFXIV will have some longetivity it seems ..I still would love to keep the population long term. This expansion gate is bareable but if they continue the trend new people will have to go thru multiple expansion to catch up...and you can't think thats a good idea..you just cant

queues pick from multiple servers, not just yours.

[Raist]

This game does not have that many servers and there are a couple servers that are congested but the majority of them are not full or max. I havent had any trouble getting in or que times during peek hours but other servers are worse. While FF population is healthy now (an expansion dropped ofcourse) I don't see multiple servers opening up because people wanting to play are busting down the door. I would hope that dropping a new expansion would mean a new server opened because the demand was so great...but that didnt happen. So like I said Im always fearful of the future in MMO because 95% of them fade and fail fast...and while FFXIV will have some longetivity it seems ..I still would love to keep the population long term. This expansion gate is bareable but if they continue the trend new people will have to go thru multiple expansion to catch up...and you can't think thats a good idea..you just cant

There are 64 worlds (not servers...each world is spread across multiple servers--it's a massive data farm with clusters). This was after they ADDED like 12 worlds in their last world list expansion. Initially we had like 40 worlds or something, and they added a few here and a few there, then did a big expansion in one shot with right around a dozen. There was once a list of "reserved" names for potential expansion floating about somewhere on the web a while back too, so they've been prepared for expansion for a long time. They have already announced they will be adding a new data center in Europe also...so there is in fact planned expansion already in the works.

Something you need to understand about how the system now works. We don't log directly into the world like we did initially. We hit one of 6 lobby servers, each one serving between 8 and 13 worlds. The lobby service has a login queue. We login to the lobby server, then our data is synchronized and queued for transfer to our respective worlds. Once we are handed off, the slot is freed in the queue to manage the next login.

This dramatically reduces the impact of a world's population---the world service doesn't deal with all that back-end communication to the authentication server in Japan and such--it just grabs the player data and rolls with it, fetching/posting to the backend and the client as needed. Databases can come with a default connection pool of up to 32,000--that's just for an individual database connection (which you can have multiple connections to different databases at once), that's not the global pool for the server itself--which is dramatically higher. For example, Windows 2008 server has a concurrent connection limit of just over 16 million---out of the box. Each of our clients takes up 2 concurrent connections to our world service.

Basically, the point is that in theory there should be plenty of headroom within the scope of the world services connection limits for far more people to be on those worlds....even if the populations were to double overnight we may still be OK in that regard. Although, data storage might become a problem depending on how big their arrays are. Our issues come from the concurrent connection limits that SE has to keep on the 6 lobby services. They have been continually tweaking it over time trying to keep things in check with the network capacity and such (which Ormuco has had several rounds of infrastructure maintenance in the last year trying to compensate, and in that process they picked up new peers for us to use).

There is an issue at the ISP level in North America where the exchanges are frequently buckling under the load. SE can't manage that--they can work with Ormuco on their side of the equation, but they can't negotiate with all the other peers out there--the numbers are in the thousands that make up the internet. SE has to be mindful of both their ISP's limits as well as the real world of the internet. If they open the gates too wide, people start timing out before they even get to the servers...they HAVE to put limits in place to keep us from creating our own mini DDoS-style events at various exchange points along the way (effectively what we were doing during Early Access because everyone was immediately trying to log right back in on disconnect). Keep in mind that everyone from both Canada AND Japan are hitting ONE authentication service on ONE IP address in Tokyo during login. The infrastructure there can handle it better. North America has issues with such a high level of concentration in route to Montreal. That is a large part of why they are putting up a data center in Europe---to deal with latency and stability problems due to the EU being on servers in North America.

So it is less of an issue with the number of servers, and more an issue with networking capacity--some of which is out of SE's control to increase.

[Estheim]

They have increased the exp and streamlined the main story quests up until level 50 to help newer players get to a point where they can do the end game storyline. I did the story quests in a weekened a month ago and had zero issues with the instances or veteran players and so forth. At the end of the day it's different strokes for different folks. You may not like it, but I do. Everyone here has their own opinions but it just seems that you have opened this thread to say "this is the worst" and refuse to listen to anyone else's opinion. Also news flash: having played so many other mmorpgs for so many years does not make your opinion more valid than anyone else's.