Will deleting old, unused characters help free up server space?

[Kes13a]

Yeah, I hear that.

Kind of figured if everyone subscribed deleted one unused alt, it could help, it certainly couldn't hurt right? But I can't seem to confirm whether or not it would help anything so. XD

but not everyone has an alt. one of the joys of here instead of being on WoW where I had like 22 alts for different classes or situations, here, you can be everything on one. I can see people still being in the habit of that, buuut, there is not the same need to do so

[Jeeqbit]

Concurrent, actively logged in players. Logging out allows someone else to login. The only way you can help it is to logout when you aren't really playing, especially during the evening when most people play and the active player limit is being reached.

Deleting your character will make no difference. There are well over 22 million characters, most of which are low level characters that will never login again.

[KarstenS]

You said the servers are capped, but what caps a server? Logins, characters created, or both?

This article contains the answer in detail: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...0acb6c23ccd07f

[Imora]

Yeah, I hear that.

Kind of figured if everyone subscribed deleted one unused alt, it could help, it certainly couldn't hurt right? But I can't seem to confirm whether or not it would help anything so. XD

People have alts?

[Caitlinzulu]

i got like 12 or so alts on shiva alone. so yes people have alts

[Sebazy]

On a side note, FFXI used to do this and to say it was massively unpopular would be an understatement. It didn't matter if it was a level 1 mule or a multi 75 with 10s of thousands of hours logged. If you didn't pay your sub and let it lapse for a modest period (9 months if I'm remembering it right), your character got deleted from the live servers and it wasn't until much later in the game's lifecycle that you could even apply to get it back.

[VirusOnline]

Hehe, if I had to wager a comical guess we're operating on the back of hadoop nodes.
Maybe this is why we can slide cast.
Blessed be thy slide.

[AngelCheese77]

If so, I'm definitely going to do it. I'd just rather not delete them if it actually wouldn't help at all..

Only ask because I understand Legacy players get more characters to create, so by that logic I imagine that "number of characters created" is a factor for server congestion.

But I'm not a tech wizard. lol Anyone know?

Nope.

Server space, from what my knowledge is, counts for active players ON the server ... logged in.

So if they aren't being used, it's in another place entirely.

[TheMightyMollusk]

This would be somewhat like scrapping a car in your driveway to free up space on the freeway.

[Catwho]

From what I understand: Offline character data is stored in a different place (the database) than the online character data (the Random Access Memory or RAM.) The world server loads the character data from the database into the world server's RAM, where it exists in real time along with the rest of the actual game world itself. It syncs your character's data back to the database about every 15 seconds, but the "you" that is logged into the server is live and active in the world instance only when you are actually logged in.

Log off, and it saves your character data to the database and removes the character from the RAM of the server, freeing up another login slot.

Database storage doesn't seem to be an issue; the issue is how many active character sessions can live in the server's RAM at any given time. So deleting offline characters will not help.

Source: I work in software development. Our software is capped at about 1000 concurrent sessions, but we have tables with millions of rows in the database that exist without any interference to the system servers.