On House Relocations...

[InkstainedGwyn]

I'm going to get roasted for this analogy, but I don't really care. I'm not writing it because I think, miraculously, someone is going to read it and go, "oh my god! You're so right!" I'm writing it to explain why most non-Balmung players don't care about Balmung.

There is a chain of grocery stores in a city. There is absolutely nothing that differentiates these stores. However, there is one particular store on the second floor of a highrise downtown that is far and away the most popular - not because of the store, but because that's the popular place. Some people go because they like the crowds. Some because they like to say that they go to the popular one. Some because their friends shop there too, and they like to see their friends. However, the safe occupancy number on this store routinely gets overlooked, and there's often many more people in this store than there should be.

This store also sells amazing bread. Like, people will kill for this bread. It's kept limited, though, and every store gets the same allotment every day to sell. At the One Store, it always sells out within seconds. Everywhere else, it usually sells out, but sometimes there are leftovers. But they don't send extras to the One Store.

Why? Because the One Store shouldn't have that many people in it. Every time the occupancy exceeds by 50, 100, 200, there's a chance that the floors will actually give way and also end up wrecking the other stores in the highrise. They don't want to encourage any more people to go there. Especially when there are plenty other stores within the same distance.

Nobody feels sorry for the people who can't get bread, because they decided that shopping at this store was more important than getting bread. But as much as you want to say "this is dumb, physical limitations don't apply to digital," you're wrong. Your "but nothing's going wrong so clearly it's fine" means that the people who are watching the servers and desperately reallocating resources so that you don't crash the datacentre are doing their jobs. I work for an online homework assessment company - at peak times we have hundreds of thousands of individuals accessing our servers at any one time, and I've seen the dev slack channels. They sometimes have to take some pretty crazy steps to keep the servers running at high loads. Just because you don't see it stutter (or you see the stutter but not the crash) doesn't mean it's not in danger, it means they've put on enough Band-Aids.

Does it suck that they have these limitations? Yep, but they exist and you can't just demand that they change it, especially when only 1-2 servers, picked arbitrarily, suffer. Do I blame you guys for having picked friends over bread? Nah - but I don't want to hear "but I should get bread *too*". You picked a server that exceeds its finite resource, so my sympathies are zilch. (Should they be finite? That's SE's decision. And when it comes to the implementation vs space issue, it makes sense why they are. Was it the best choice? No, but they didn't ask me.) And the fact that most of you don't care if you crash the other servers in your datacentre puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Oh, and the safe load occupancy? Yeah, it can be enforced. People can be kicked out. Servers can be forcefully split. It wouldn't surprise me if they actually do that some day.

Yeah, I know there are differences between my analogy and the real situation, but for the most part I think it describes how a lot of us view your complaints. Like I said, I don't expect anybody to change their mind over this... but I do hope you understand that most of us don't care.