Island Sanctuary: Separate Instance Servers

[Bukachu]

I've had 0 issues with getting in my house at any day/time so idk

[Gyson]

I usually take most FFXIV issues in stride. However, the problems that have come with the release of Island Sanctuary are really starting to frustrate me because I haven't been able to enter my house since the patch released.

I'm sure Island Sanctuary is great, and I even look forward to trying it one day whenever everyone can actually access to it. But the fact of the matter is the developers willingly released a system into the game that essentially broke housing on my server. Either they failed to test for these congestion issues under a simulated scenario on par with Balmung's traffic, or they did test it and released Island Sanctuary knowing it would create these problems. Either scenario is bad.

I was pleased when they said they were looking into potential solutions. I am not pleased with their remaining solution for players to "try again later" once those potential solutions didn't pan out. I doubt many players in FFXIV are thinking "I need to access my house a moment.. or I could wait and do it in a month or so per the advice I was given, that's fine too..". The developers waiting for a problem they created to sort itself out via a lack of player interest is is not an acceptable solution.

[Packetdancer]

I mean it's kinda proving the "what Instance Housing congestion feels like" thing

Me in previous threads:
*posts long, detailed analysis of why instanced housing and what we can deduce about this game's server architecture go together about as well as peanut butter and rancid fish—and the tricks that inn rooms and Grand Company barracks use to get around this (and why, as a result, you cannot visit someone else's inn room or GC barracks)*

Also me, looking at description of Island Sanctuary before the patch:
Huh... fully instanced, and you can visit them? Maybe they found some clever way to make it work, or maybe my analysis was wrong...

Me now, looking at the results of Island Sanctuary's introduction on already-congested servers:
*pained wince* ...ah. So, the answer is "no, they didn't find some clever way to make it work that avoids the problems", and also "no, my analysis was evidently not wrong".

[Packetdancer]

Somewhat belated addition to this: I can see a way that they could make this work... sort of.

If the island did not allow visitors -- a'la the inn rooms and GC barracks -- you could use the same trick, of the instance being run (almost) entirely client-side. You could allow visitors by speaking to the Felicitous Furball mammet and asking them to "open the docks", which would try to instanciate your island on the server -- allowing people to come visit -- but you'd have to manually open it up. Which would be annoying, but from what I've seen, 95% of the time no one has a visitor on their island anyway, so it would make Island Sanctuary have a much lesser impact on server resources.

There are, of course, issues with this. (There are always issues.) The biggest one is that the Island Sanctuary has more sensitive state to maintain; when designing for online play, you have to treat a client -- even the one you write -- as inherently untrustworthy, because someone can always modify the client and send back information they've altered.

For inn rooms, the only inherent "state" for the inn room itself is the orchestrion roll playing; if you modify the game state to say "no, really, I have this orchestrion roll so I can put it on the orchestrion while I'm here"... no one really cares, as it affects nothing. For the Grand Company barracks, the only environmental state is "which of my squadron are out on a mission" and "what have I glamoured the squadron into" -- again, nothing that affects gameplay overall. In both cases, any interactions with actual game systems -- glamour dresser, retainer bell, squadron missions, etc. -- are all self-contained systems which you can still make a call to the server side for; you interact with an object (retainer bell, glamour dresser) or NPC, and it makes the call to the server-side.

The island, however, has a lot of state that actually affects gameplay. Some of the systems (workshops, foraging expeditions, and upgrading/building things) are nicely self-contained and only interacted with via NPCs or objects like the logboards; they could work entirely client-side with a call to the server-side system, hypothetically, like retainer bells and glamour dressers and whatnot. However, there is a lot of state just inherent to the island itself -- which rare animals are currently available (not just the weather/time conditions, but "have I tried to catch them and had them run away during this window"), which resources are up, which tools you have unlocked and so which resources you can get, etc. -- which directly affects your island gameplay and progression, and trusting the client as the authority on that information is a path to someone writing a tool that just... immediately gives you whatever resources you want, or something else cheaty.

(It doesn't matter if the cheating gives an actual material advantage; someone will do it just to show they can. A lot of people who write cheating tools do it not because they actually intend to use the tools themselves, but because they derive enjoyment from figuring out how the game works.)

If I had to guess, I'd say that the reason Island Sanctuary does get instanciated server-side is not "so people can visit each other's islands" but because that way the server is the source of authority on island environmental state. That lets you avoid the possibility of modified clients being used to cheat; the ability to visit a friend's island is merely a fringe benefit made possible by the fact that you're now running the island on the server anyway.

[Fawkes]

Update: FC member has been trying to get into the house for an hour now. No dice.

Server: Balmung

Seems like maybe rare animals that don't always spawn were a bad idea, since it leads to people coming up with "strategies" to make them spawn like leaving the zone and entering at certain times.

[Lunalepsy]

When Island Sanctuaries were first announced, I was amazed that Square Enix found cheap enough hardware with the semiconductor shortage to do it.

Now I realize that they didn't put Island Sanctuaries on their own little cluster of instance servers: They slapped it onto the housing servers.

I haven't been able to get into my house, let alone my Workshop to check airships unless I set an alarm and I log in at 3am in the morning.

No one can roleplay inside of their FC houses because you can't get in. We can't decorate our rooms or apartments because you can't get in: Let alone being able to freely zone in and out to go buy things from vendors or the marketboard (Or go craft items).

Can't get in to water our house plants. I sat there clicking non-stop for 15 minutes earlier, until my wrist hurt, and never could get into my house let alone my workshop. I gave up.

Island Sanctuary NEEDS to be moved to its own cluster of instanced servers and taken off of the same servers that our housing utilizes. Not being able to get into an optional island is one thing: Not being able to get into housing to repair, workshops, or access private rooms is another thing.

P.S. I haven't seen any bots out in the world since Island Sanctuaries dropped.

That's because they're all in the Island sanctuaries, farming materia 24/7 and never get booted out or log out. Bots got their own private island where they can farm without being reported: Endlessly. #Yikes

Housing is such a deterrent sometimes. I remember when ppl used to RP everywhere, but ever since housing came out, some spots became dead or people just stick to one spot.

[Thaciscokidd]

There are so many problems with this argument, first and foremost that the instance server pool that Balmung dips from aren't just for Balmung, but all of Crystal. So everyone on Crystal is having problems.

This was one of the pillars for Gilgamesh's hate for Balmung before the DC split. Its almost like history's repeating itself.

[Tlamila]

Housing is such a deterrent sometimes. I remember when ppl used to RP everywhere, but ever since housing came out, some spots became dead or people just stick to one spot.

I know right, I used to RP before housing was a thing and people would just RP through all Eorzea. And we only had the ARR areas, now there's just SO many open world areas to possibly RP in, why be limited by housing?