every time someone says "a chip shortage, or they can't find more servers".

[Lenivy]

God forbid they rent servers from 3rd party. That would force their techincians to work once they would have to migrate people from rented machines to their own in 2025+. But hey we have like 15 servers on europe and 2x that for japan, big logistics.

[kejakalope]

God forbid they rent servers from 3rd party. That would force their techincians to work once they would have to migrate people from rented machines to their own in 2025+. But hey we have like 15 servers on europe and 2x that for japan, big logistics.

Getting a machine to work as a FFXIV server is not like setting up a minecraft server on a random Dell Inspiron. It takes extremely specific hardware.

[Krotoan]

God forbid they rent servers from 3rd party. That would force their techincians to work once they would have to migrate people from rented machines to their own in 2025+. But hey we have like 15 servers on europe and 2x that for japan, big logistics.

The continued smug insistence at the idea that people who do this for a living and work in one of the most tech-forward countries in the world would simply overlook or dismiss temporarily renting server space if it was feasible is maddening.

If it was as easy as "just rent some server space" I'm reasonably sure this would have been implemented months ago in preperation.

[Theodric]

The continued smug insistence at the idea that people who do this for a living and work in one of the most tech-forward countries in the world would simply overlook or dismiss temporarily renting server space if it was feasible is maddening.

If it was as easy as "just rent some server space" I'm reasonably sure this would have been implemented months ago in preperation.

It's a mitigation method.

It also isn't unusual for businesses to seek profit even at the cost of sustainability. It's been an issue for a while, now, where the game has sought to pursuit bigger and bigger gains despite not properly being able to handle the amount of players it has already.

Housing is one of the biggest examples of that. Other MMO's manage to provide player housing for each and every player. Some of them are even older than FFXIV itself, or launched around the same time period.

...and before anyone accuses me of being salty due to lacking a house? I have one. Yet I know many people who don't and likely never will manage to get their hands on one through no fault of their own.

[Packetdancer]

If it was as easy as "just rent some server space" I'm reasonably sure this would have been implemented months ago in preperation.

The problem -- at least with the MMO architectures I have been inside of, and presumably with FFXIV's -- is that your logical "server" is not a single physical server. There's a cluster of database servers that handle all your items and character data, there are instance servers for zones and duties, etc. "Leviathan" or "Lamia" or whatnot aren't a single machine, but a whole cluster of many different servers working together. And those physical servers all talk to each other. They talk a lot. That is not traffic you want going outside a physical datacenter and traveling across internet infrastructure, because it will absolutely destroy the game's ability to function.

Or at least, to function without so many weird performance problems that we all want to burn everything down.

Leasing servers would, of necessity, require doing that; when you lease server space from some cloud computing company, even if you go with bare-metal servers -- and even assuming that company has servers that meet the specific performance requirements that FFXIV has -- those servers will still be in that provider's data center, not Square-Enix's.

(Though, I mean, I guess if people couldn't play even after logging in, it would mean less people logging in. So I suppose it could still indirectly solve the queue problem...)

[Krotoan]

The problem -- at least with the MMO architectures I have been inside of, and presumably with FFXIV's -- is that your logical "server" is not a single physical server. There's a cluster of database servers that handle all your items and character data, there are instance servers for zones and duties, etc. "Leviathan" or "Lamia" or whatnot aren't a single machine, but a whole cluster of many different servers working together. And those physical servers all talk to each other. They talk a lot. That is not traffic you want going outside a physical datacenter and traveling across internet infrastructure, because it will absolutely destroy the game's ability to function.

Or at least, to function without so many weird performance problems that we all want to burn everything down.

Leasing servers would, of necessity, require doing that; when you lease server space from some cloud computing company, even if you go with bare-metal servers -- and even assuming that company has servers that meet the specific performance requirements that FFXIV has -- those servers will still be in that provider's data center, not Square-Enix's.

(Though, I mean, I guess if people couldn't play even after logging in, it would mean less people logging in. So I suppose it could still indirectly solve the queue problem...)

I've tried to explain all of that before.. it's just maddening that people continue to google "server" on a hardware site or hosting provider and go "LOOK! YOU CAN GET SOME. SE LIED OR IS DUMB!". Like they have any sort of insight into what is necessary or what the challenges are. We had this happen on the "why don't they use AWS" threads.