Datacenters: A Plea For Community Building, Not Fracturing

[Rosa_Frandlia]

Your ping time is a result of many different things, only one of which are the servers themselves; by far the vast majority of what affects your ping is the ISP networks your data travels across and how they chose to route your data which SE has no control over. Using a VPN is a player choice to bypass that and hopefully get a better ping, its not something SE forces them to do.

The only burden on the playerbase is the sub fee, everything else is optional for the players. You don't have to transfer servers at any point nor do you have to use a VPN. Those are personal choices for personal gains but they are not mandatory to play the game.

SE has a proper server infrastructure. They're leasing rackspace from the ISP to host their games and ISPs typically have a 3 to 5 year refresh cycle for internal hardware which means FF14 is not running on antiquated hardware or poor infrastructure. If you wanted to blame SE for how inefficient their game engine is and how it handles network traffic or their decisions for back up times or character updates, that would be fair but none of that is server infrastructure.

This new DC is new physical rackspace and server blades to host the game. Its balancing the load across more hardware leaving more room for overhead and growth which means the servers are more stable and have less issues with bottlenecks and server slowdowns. Each DC will have more room for instances preventing things like Raubahn EX at the beginning of SB, more room for housing wards, more room for dungeon/trial instances, more room for inventory, etc. This move sucks for statics, and people that try to play with others who will no longer be on the same DC but ultimately this is a huge benefit to everyone in the game and for the game in and of itself. Your request to merge the DCs would only exacerbate every issue people have had with the servers for literally no benefit to the game or players.

I should mention I feared the new data center causing a split between West and East Coast North America, meaning an even worse split on worlds. When the servers were in Montreal, I had bad pings. Now that thy are in California, I have good pings. Why? Because I'm on the West Coast. You look at other games and they have East and West Coast data centers, something Final Fantasy XIV does not. A split with Crystal being on the East Coast and Primal being on the West Coast would have meant for logistics I'd need to leave my world as we are being moved too.

And if anyone is saying that all the Primal worlds coming are dead, I had a que (be it 7 people) of world full yesterday. I wouldn't exactly say that is a dead server and we are known on Primal as being the one for crafters and gatherers. I welcome people coming to visit and buying the 380 gear I make as that is a larger market.