New info on housing plots, PVP, squadron changes

[Kaethra]

And hey, give me some perspective, what experience do you have in game design, production and online data management?

Trained in Tactical and Strategic networks for Satellite Communications for the Army Signal Corps, as well as data, networking, and tunneling protocols (a little beyond simple VPNs). As well as working as part of a development team for a video game as well as other creative works after military service.

My credentials check out. The only difference is I have a bit more faith in SE's devs than you do. While its definitely possible that they have used a mess of code to work out housing (and the rest of the world). I don't believe that is the case. In coding, there is a multiple ways to approach a problem. But at the end of the day, the code that works the best is the code that works simply and efficiently. And even coming from different people that end result is going to be roughly the same.

Don't take this as a dig personally. But I find it a bit funny that you call the other games well written. Everquest 2 is anything but (well its alot better now), but they did get the housing right. And I'm pretty sure ESO nearly copied the method. And from my experience in housing in FFXIV in the apartment, it feels like SE decided to do the same (well.. SE did it before ESO).

[Krotoan]

Trained in Tactical and Strategic networks for Satellite Communications for the Army Signal Corps, as well as data...

Don't take this as a dig personally. But I find it a bit funny that you call the other games well written. Everquest 2 is anything but (well its alot better now), but they did get the housing right. And I'm pretty sure ESO nearly copied the method. And from my experience in housing in FFXIV in the apartment, it feels like SE decided to do the same (well.. SE did it before ESO).

Never played EQ 2. But compared to FFXIV the original, anything is well written. I have very little faith that the original mess was anything other than recycled code slapped together till it did what they wanted at the bare minimums. Pieces of other games crammed together till they looked like a bigger game. I dunno if you played 1.0 and before but it was bad. Just experience wise it was bad. You'd click and ............... OK now something happens. I had whole groups of friends quit just after 2 days of having to deal with it. Non-responsive, crashy and buggy. The original didn't come from SE's devs, it came from some subcontracted company. I have all the faith in the world that the current dev team is doing everything in their power to get things done efficiently and quickly (2.0 is a whole nother game than 1.0 was) , but I also understand their foundation is shaky as hell.
I'll defer to your own experience in that hey, I've never actually written a game. But given what I've discussed with my own sibling and my experience with my own states network, if you start with a bunch of hashed together junk it does nothing but get worse and worse as you try to tack on more.

[Kaethra]

-snip

I get where you're coming from. I didn't get to see 1.0 personally, but just watching videos of it was cringey. Like peeps paid for that.

As for tacking on code. What I'm about to say, is going to make you and everyone else who has worked with group projects laugh, but you have to use a sort of discipline and standard. But of course bureaucracies and 'leadership' make that an impossibility. But it helps so damn much as you can imagine. That's the hard part. Taking the amalgamation of crap and convincing the people above you to go to something simpler.

I'm HOPING they started simple with housing. But if you're right.. well its hosed. Its hosed bad. That is until someone high up gets greedy enough to tell them to make something happen. Which is why I said (in this thread or another about this) that they're sitting on a goldmine. They'll come through. It might take time. But greed is a little more powerful than complacency. I make that sound worse than it really is, but you get the idea.

[Claviusnex]

As for tacking on code. What I'm about to say, is going to make you and everyone else who has worked with group projects laugh, but you have to use a sort of discipline and standard. But of course bureaucracies and 'leadership' make that an impossibility. But it helps so damn much as you can imagine. That's the hard part. Taking the amalgamation of crap and convincing the people above you to go to something simpler.

That's not always the case. Throughout my career whenever I was putting together a group for a new project I always had the folks decide what the worst chunk of code was at that time. It could be due to to many bugs, structure that made it hard/impossible to extend function, written by an intern, etc. I would then build the business case to include that as a line item in the plan. It is very straight forward if you can go to management with the costs of not doing something. The key is the technical people have to be willing to take some initiative and not let management stifle the best technical solutions.

I think, though I may be wrong, that Square Enix bought the company that owns the datacenter, and that the savings from having the servers under their own umbrella were why that location in particular was picked. Hence, they'd pay in one way or another all the same.

Even if they do own the datacenter company a dynamic server pool should be less cost as the servers in the pool could be used by other customers who are covering part of the cost. The key is the servers just don't sit there idle when one customer doesn't need them.