Response to Congestion (as of Dec. 15)

[Moonlite]

A few things. I think this addressed a huge chunk of problems. But it also shows the constant pressure and who knows how many cancelled subs are making them act.



Finally for the chip shortage people. July is when he said they started plans for more. That means zero growth planned for EU/NA over two years. They literally waited till WoW imploded. You don't get a cookie for doing the right thing after you should have done it. We should have had a couple new worlds. Which would mean nothing with WoW imploding. But would show so much more trust and basic commitment to QoL for players. Now it sounds like whole new data centres.

[Kes13a]

A few things. I think this addressed a huge chunk of problems. But it also shows the constant pressure and who knows how many cancelled subs are making them act.



Finally for the chip shortage people. July is when he said they started plans for more. That means zero growth planned for EU/NA over two years. They literally waited till WoW imploded. You don't get a cookie for doing the right thing after you should have done it. We should have had a couple new worlds. Which would mean nothing with WoW imploding. But would show so much more trust and basic commitment to QoL for players. Now it sounds like whole new data centres.

as always, someones going to complain... even if they offered you free sub for life, you would find a way to turn that into a negative.

how exactly, do you imagine they should have known WoW was going to implode? they had been planning the OCE data center first, and expansions on others may have been on a roadmap, but in JULY they had to accelerate that because of the growth. if they had been as uncommited as you seem to believe, they wouldnt bother... period.. because the trend is for populations to go down.. they could have said yup.. there's a queue, but I can log in from Japan just fine, so, why do we need any servers?

[Nothv13]

A few things. I think this addressed a huge chunk of problems. But it also shows the constant pressure and who knows how many cancelled subs are making them act.



Finally for the chip shortage people. July is when he said they started plans for more. That means zero growth planned for EU/NA over two years. They literally waited till WoW imploded. You don't get a cookie for doing the right thing after you should have done it. We should have had a couple new worlds. Which would mean nothing with WoW imploding. But would show so much more trust and basic commitment to QoL for players. Now it sounds like whole new data centres.

Plans for OCE started before that are were still pushed back due to product shortages. Plans for a more immediate solution (they apparently had plans for some of this for 7.0 or post 7.0) to the rest of the data centers started the moment the un predictable influx of players came. Until that point, what they had was sufficient to handle the slow and rather predictable growth of players. You cannot expect a company to predict the unpredictable and purchase outside of need or planned upgrade.

[Moonlite]

as always, someones going to complain...

as always someone will jump through hoops to defend them.

Plans for OCE started before that are were still pushed back due to product shortages. Plans for a more immediate solution (they apparently had plans for some of this for 7.0 or post 7.0) to the rest of the data centers started the moment the un predictable influx of players came. Until that point, what they had was sufficient to handle the slow and rather predictable growth of players. You cannot expect a company to predict the unpredictable and purchase outside of need or planned upgrade.

Let's agree 7.0 was the plan. You know how many years of growth that is? Let us not include WoW. The game has shown growth after the player dip in stormblood. Next let us say the JPN world numbers are the acceptable stable amount of players per world since they have never reduced the amount of worlds there. Is EU/NA anywhere close to that per world pre WoW? No one is saying that they should have ordered enough for new data centres. They should have had a new world or two going live.



Also unless the server team are not Japanese, they have lied about travel if OCE is in Australia. Both countries for most of the year have allowed travel for business needs. Again that was never gong to make a real dent in NA/EU anyways. SE is/was being cheap as they are in the money making business. They were waiting half a decade (7.0) to see how bad players experience would be before spending money. This isn't about WoW or chip shortage. It is about the player base supporting greed over QoL.

[Nothv13]

as always someone will jump through hoops to defend them.





Let's agree 7.0 was the plan. You know how many years of growth that is? Let us not include WoW. The game has shown growth after the player dip in stormblood. Next let us say the JPN world numbers are the acceptable stable amount of players per world since they have never reduced the amount of worlds there. Is EU/NA anywhere close to that per world pre WoW? No one is saying that they should have ordered enough for new data centres. They should have had a new world or two going live.



Also unless the server team are not Japanese, they have lied about travel if OCE is in Australia. Both countries for most of the year have allowed travel for business needs. Again that was never gong to make a real dent in NA/EU anyways. SE is/was being cheap as they are in the money making business. They were waiting half a decade (7.0) to see how bad players experience would be before spending money. This isn't about WoW or chip shortage. It is about the player base supporting greed over QoL.

Even on the most active servers in NA, after the initial rush in SHB, longest queue I saw before the WoW influx was 100 and never lasted very long. The servers were still sufficient for the growth they were seeing. That is the point, they had plans based on the slow steady growth pre WoW exodus. OCE data center would alleviate some, giving more time. No WoW exodus means this expansion launch would have been no where near as bad as it is now. OCE issue is largely hardware related, not travel related at this point.

[Packetdancer]

Finally for the chip shortage people. July is when he said they started plans for more. That means zero growth planned for EU/NA over two years.

My understanding from all their past notices about stuff is that July is when they started needing to plan for more. They did have additional capacity set aside for the Endwalker launch at that time already -- basically, they had planned for player growth as you suggest -- but that additional capacity got eaten by the influx of new players, forcing them to adjust plans.

When the huge influx happened, there was a day or two of bad login times and lag and such (and they closed character creation on several data centers and pulled the game from the store for a little while), and then they brought all that already-prepared extra capacity online early. Which was great, now the game could handle all the new players who had showed up!

But it also meant they no longer had extra capacity set aside to handle expected player growth, because it'd been used way ahead of time to handle a sudden unexpected player growth. Hence why back in July they started needing to come up with plans for how to handle additional player growth in the future; their existing plan got functionally torpedo'd rather unexpectedly.

And the chip shortage comes into play because the lack of available hardware means you can't just shrug it off and go "well, let's just go get more servers."