I hope SE learns a few lessons from this.

[Lambdafish]

First and foremost, upgrade your god forsaken servers. This is 2017

They did, the issue is that we are experiencing an extreme (and very temporary) load, extra servers would be a waste of resources.

Many MMOs have smooth launches now, thanks to mega capacity servers. We are tired of hearing congestion and bandwidth issues.

WoW is literally the only one I can think of, and this game doesn't have the resources that WoW has. Even then, every WoW expansion except legion experienced problems.

Second, please get rid of solo instances. Clearly you can't afford to run them

See the first point.


This is standard for MMO expansions, anyone who thinks that they are entitled to anything, or that this is extreme is woefully naive/uninformed. I didn't take the day off because I anticipated some sort of server stability issue (because that makes sense).

[Catwho]

They did, the issue is that we are experiencing an extreme (and very temporary load), extra servers would be a waste of resources..

It's 2017 and there are virtual on demand servers from at least a dozen companies in California alone. You don't need to buy or even rent physical hardware for a short term burst.

[OmegaFlare]

It's 2017 and there are virtual on demand servers from at least a dozen companies in California alone. You don't need to buy or even rent physical hardware for a short term burst.

SE is being cheap. That's all. They're making so much money from FFXIV that they're turning greedy and greed is what will be their downfall. They would rather have smaller servers and endure this than overspend for big servers. The thing is they will lose money from people who are turned off by this and unsub.

[Pfil]

They did, the issue is that we are experiencing an extreme (and very temporary) load, extra servers would be a waste of resources.



WoW is literally the only one I can think of, and this game doesn't have the resources that WoW has. Even then, every WoW expansion except legion experienced problems.



See the first point.


This is standard for MMO expansions, anyone who thinks that they are entitled to anything, or that this is extreme is woefully naive/uninformed. I didn't take the day off because I anticipated some sort of server stability issue (because that makes sense).

Actually Sir, neither world of tanks nor world or warships, nor armored warfare have had this problem in years. Mond you, we're taling about only perhaps four million people per game, but, there you go.. Adding to the list is Mabinogi which hasnt had these types of issues in at least seven years, and that game is managed by Nexon..

[nethodd]

FFXIV uses old architecture, plain and simple.

For FFXIV, each server is a physical machine running one copy of the game's server software. You login to a server, and all of your interactions occur on that server. There may be some sharding for instances/duty finder, but if so there's apparently finite resources allocated to those.

GW2 and ESO do not have these problems because of their modern architecture. Every map is an instance, and when one instance is full, they spin up another one. They can probably run 20-30 such instances on one host, and can dynamically provision new hosts automatically when demand is high.

That's how pretty much all modern online services are built whether they're games, social media networks, live streaming services, etc. In FFXIV's case, SE didn't build it that way and it's probably not worth the cost of overhauling the backend to handle a few days every 2 years of heavy load.

[Daralii]

GW2 and ESO do not have these problems because of their modern architecture. Every map is an instance, and when one instance is full, they spin up another one. They can probably run 20-30 such instances on one host, and can dynamically provision new hosts automatically when demand is high.

That's how pretty much all modern online services are built whether they're games, social media networks, live streaming services, etc. In FFXIV's case, SE didn't build it that way and it's probably not worth the cost of overhauling the backend to handle a few days every 2 years of heavy load.

The infrastructure's been bad from the very start, so bad that anyone changing zones in 1.X could cause the entire server to hitch. I pity the newer people that have to work with framework that awful.