6.18 Cross DC travel should have come out BEFORE summer not after

[ZeraSkiratea]

Besides the whole argument of when "summer" or any other season actually occurs...

I think after summer is a good time for it. I'm assuming it's not just going to be visiting other DCs but doing content with other DCs too(maybe a queue merge?). To me, after summer when people start focusing on work more or go back to school is the perfect time for it.

I don't know if anyone remembers queueing for alliance raids or frontlines during the fall/spring during the patches in between expansions, but usually, there'd only be about 8-10 hours worth of time where you could queue into those(at least on Crystal). When I first started it took me three days to get into the three alliance raids required for MSQ because I was logging in too late in the evening(basically had to wait for the weekend). If Cross DC also merges the queue, maybe it won't be so bad.

from what was said it will be very similiar to the current world visit system, just more restrictive, you WILL be actually phsicaly going to the other DC to do content there, This will remove you from your FC chat and CWLS(you can join other datacenters CWLS tho it seems) and must be initiated from the Character select screen. it is, 100% not a "merge of ques" it also realisticly cant be without some changes in how they handel things.


The problem really is that, while the datacenter in each Region are on the same physical Server(or at least on the same cluster of physical servers) they are divided do to the logical datacenter structure they are using. For all intense and purpose the Chaos DC and the Light DC, while booth on the same physical DC/Server, are basically 2 seperate "Servers" structure wise.


imagine it like a virtual machine on your PC, (or well 2 in case of Chaos and light) Booth VMs run on the same hardware, act however as indipendent machines that, for better or worse, do not interact with each other nativly anymore then 2 random PCs in the same LAN(if even that depending on settings)



What is likely happening is that they simply copy your characters "important" data over to the new datacenter you are traveling to, and set some flags to restrict actions that could cause problems.
That also explains why FC chat is unavailable for example, because they would need to route the trafic trough booth logical datacenters and so forth.


after your done, they simply copy the data they need back over, and remove the flags

[gotaname1]

It's all a ploy!

If you think about it, most people start working after summer vacations. That means less people playing. Less people playing = Less people overloading the servers. Which means they can better control\gauge the server load of the data center travel system!

/tinfoil hat

Oi! I'm supposed to be the one with tinfoil hat around here!

I need tinfoil hat glam...

[hagare]

you're supposed to go outside for summer!

[TheMightyMollusk]

Outside? Under the accursed day star? Not a chance!

[KuroMaboroshi]

[...]Less people playing = Less people overloading the servers. Which means they can better control\gauge the server load of the data center travel system!

/tinfoil hat

While as people have already shown it will release in summer and to claim otherwise is nonsense (though not in line with every country's usual summer vacation times since down that road lies only madness anyway with how many countries there are where these things vary), this is by no means tinfoil. The developers have publically stated that the reason for not releasing DC travel as originally planned alongside 6.0 was the high influx of players. If anything were to go wrong with it during 6.0, it would have affected a huge amount of people, on top of the server congestion issues they had around expansion launch. So you can be 100% certain the lower load around 6.18 is the reason they release it there.
However, this is due to the usual patch cycle and I doubt has anything to do with which country does its usual summer vacation at what time. There are just too many countries in XIV's area of operations to plan around that.

As for actual speculation, I doubt it'll be a problem of server load, since the system will have waiting times associated with switching DCs during times of high server load.
However, back when world travel was first introduced, they ran into a bug pretty quickly, that left some of us stranded on worlds other than our home worlds for a few days. While they will no doubt try to bug-proof the feature as much as they can, there is no such thing as 100% certainty no bugs will occur. If fewer people are using the feature when it is released due to it being at the end of a patch when no other content comes out except for that feature, they can minimise the people affected by potential issues during the first few days.

As someone who was stuck on a different world with no access to retainers for a few days back then, I will also be *very* cautious about using DC travel the first few days.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Outside? Under the accursed day star? Not a chance!

But the Vitamin D is good for you!
Sure it can cause Debuffs at the same time but...

[NekoMataMata]

from what was said it will be very similiar to the current world visit system, just more restrictive, you WILL be actually phsicaly going to the other DC to do content there, This will remove you from your FC chat and CWLS(you can join other datacenters CWLS tho it seems) and must be initiated from the Character select screen. it is, 100% not a "merge of ques" it also realisticly cant be without some changes in how they handel things.


The problem really is that, while the datacenter in each Region are on the same physical Server(or at least on the same cluster of physical servers) they are divided do to the logical datacenter structure they are using. For all intense and purpose the Chaos DC and the Light DC, while booth on the same physical DC/Server, are basically 2 seperate "Servers" structure wise.


imagine it like a virtual machine on your PC, (or well 2 in case of Chaos and light) Booth VMs run on the same hardware, act however as indipendent machines that, for better or worse, do not interact with each other nativly anymore then 2 random PCs in the same LAN(if even that depending on settings)



What is likely happening is that they simply copy your characters "important" data over to the new datacenter you are traveling to, and set some flags to restrict actions that could cause problems.
That also explains why FC chat is unavailable for example, because they would need to route the trafic trough booth logical datacenters and so forth.


after your done, they simply copy the data they need back over, and remove the flags

Thank you for explaining. Made me really disappointed.

I have another question though. The way you described it makes it seem as if we can visit any DC. Is that true? When someone else explained it to me last they stated that the DC visit would be limited to geographical locations(so Crystal can only visit Aether and Primal, or JP DCs can only visit between each other and so forth).

[Liam_Harper]

Hum... I may have missed the calendar for the expected release date of 6.18 but I thought it would released before end of June... Since 6.2 should come mid august with the 4 months delay between two major updates, no?

I would have expected so, patch 5.18 came out exactly 2 weeks after 5.15 according to the Lodestone. So following the same schedule it would have been June 21st. But apparently they're scheduling 6.18 for July instead.

[dapperfaffer]

What are these "friends" you speak of?

Devilish fiends from far away. They are called friends.

[Evergrey]

Bah, who plays MMOs with others these days anyways?
MMOs are just the new Single Player games that require online connection for regular updates since nothing is ever finished.