Feedback for SQX: The game is healthy (enough) but Spriggan world/Chaos DC is dead

[VoidsentStatus]

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1) I don't know what you mean by no it doesn't. You are adding to the login queue of the world you traveled to, and you are an extra body to load in open world. Not overburdening certain worlds with stress was one reason they stated they didn't want to incentivize travel to certain worlds to motivate people to spread out.

2) So, to explain things a little more. The travel system doesn't already work. The restrictions we have are because the of the limitations I mentioned. To visualize it, imagine it as Character A is on Data Center A, we'll just say House A. Character B is on Data Center B aka House B. Only people in House A can send data to people in House A. House B people cannot contact House A people. That means tells, party invites, free company/linkshell messages, search info/adventure plate information, etc. If someone is in a different House, you can't have those interactions because they are not physically in the same space as you. You would have to leave your house, to enter their house, before you can interact. This extreme condition is even more apparent in the fact that we don't even have updated friend lists across Data Centers. That's why the zig zag line pokeball exists to request updated information for the server. That is the same as asking a drone to hop over to the other house and tell you who's there because you can't do it yourself. There is not a steady stream of information being shared between House A and House B. And even when they do share information, guess what? I can't even see that person's search info or adventure plate or job levels if they're on another data center even if they're on my friend list. I can see that information for friends on another world in the same House as me, but friends on a different House, I don't have that information. that type of information is what you need for the PF process and doesn't currently exist.

3) "If you apply to a place, your going to take it when you get there." -> So you're potentially going to have people going through the data center travel process just to fail to join the group and have to return back home before trying again if 1) there's no other PF's on that data center because you have to return home to go to another non-home DC first or 2) they were talking or doing something else in the background while waiting on a PF they were interested in. I mean, it works, but, you will have a lot of complaints probably because you're at 2-3 minute delay loading time wise minimum so for certain PF's/roles, you're going to get beaten repeatedly by someone on that home data center. Not a problem for dead time periods in patch, but launch wise, that's an issue. Maybe not for EU, but NA and JP would have 4 data centers of raiders as an example, fighting over 1 healer slot in a raid PF because you don't have updated info and only 1 person is gonna get in, and the others will have to double back.

[Gurgeh]

1) I don't know what you mean by no it doesn't. You are adding to the login queue of the world you traveled to...

'Travel 'transactions' increase yes... 'but' (and this is everything) under the changes you will now have a session where instead of 96 people on Light and 0 on Chaos, it starts to move back to 48 on Light and 48 on Chaos. The load is able to balance, as all those Chaos players travelling to Light... they stop doing that, and can start advertising and hosting PFs on Chaos. It is nigh 'certain' that load on Light will actually decrease.
Expect load on the 'Travel' infrastructure to go up though.

2) So, to explain things a little more. The travel system doesn't already work. The restrictions we have are because the of the limitations I mentioned. To visualize it, imagine it as Character A is on Da...

Now we are into semantics I think. (And contrary to popular belief semantics is EVEYTHING. I've never understood the suggestion that arguing such is pointless for all those who aspire to use a common language for communication)
You and I can travel. In that sense Travel works.

...That's why the zig zag line pokeball exists to request updated information for the server. ... There is not a steady stream of information being shared between House A and House B

Indeed. However I am not suggesting that 'no' dev work is needed. However the data we are talking about is as follows

<Instance><Objective><DescriptionMessage><R1>..<R8><AvgILvl><OptionFlags><Recruiter>

That is it. There will be some bloat of hidden stuff not used.. but it will not be significant.
Then on demand only the full PF info can be obtained. However, it is likely to be more efficient to provide this from the get go.

<expansion><Instance><Location><TimeLimit><AvItemLevel><Status><J1>..<J24><Filled1>..<Filled24><LanguageFlags><DescriptionMessage>

That is a 'tiny' amount of data.
I exagerate not at all when I say I can go down PC World and buy a laptop for your gran, X2, go and buy an MS SQL Datacentre licence, and I would have more than enough DB grunt to handle a clustered resilient database for the whole of EU Light and Chaos. This is such a trivial task it really is. You will probably have created more demanding Excel spreadsheets for your school homework.
Someone has already pointed out there are already websites doing this. No dev work required.https://xivpf.com/listings
You point out yourself that already you can 'request' login status on members in your friends list cross world and even cross DC now. Significant Proof of Concept right there. The scaling we are talking about to transfer data needed to signal joining a PF doesn't even deserve to be called scaling.

... I've run out of space for now...

[Gurgeh]

3) "If you apply to a place, your going to take it when you get there." -> So you're potentially going to have people going through the data center travel process just to fail to join the group and have to return back home before trying again

No. I haven't detailed it but that would be... wasteful and unnecessary. I am not proposing a perfect system. When I say "applying to a place just auto travels you to the server and reserves your PF place while that happens" I mean that. When you arrive you are then travelled to that server. If you want to travel back... you need to do that the old fashioned way. The goal of this is better than we've got and that's all. Its not perfect. (But you could make it easier for people to request a transfer back than the log out, reconnect to same DC you were just connected to and travel back BS.)

1) there's no other PF's on that data center because you have to return home to go to another non-home DC first

That's a 1/how-many-DCs-in-your-region chance. Its still better than being Chaos which is a 1in1 100% chance of needing to travel for every PF. Never having your retainers, etc.
Once upon a time before travel you had to 'try' and find a PF on what ever DC you are on. If you look closely... nothing has changed if you now find your self searching PF on another DC after and aborted PF travel. The only difference here is it not 100% Chaos suffering the whole time. Sometimes if might be light who decided they wanted to travel to Chaos.

2) they were talking or doing something else in the background while waiting on a PF they were interested in.

No, this is not relevant if I understand situation for 2. if at that moment you would not be able to log off you would not be able to DC PF apply. However, if you would be able to log off (includes non-sanctuary logoff) then you are fine to PF apply. These are logical equivalents. If you can log of and transfer... the game can macro style do the exact same. That's all we are talking about here (+ the reservation signalling).
If you mean once you've arrived at the destination world... well that's no different to now. If you manage to be in a cut when your PF is ready to go they may not be happy, and your home world has bog all to do with that.
Remember you do not wait until instance queue to transfer, you transfer upon application. Your then on PF DC while waiting for host to queue.

out of space again...

[VoidsentStatus]

No, this is not relevant if I understand situation for 2. if at that moment you would not be able to log off you would not be able to DC PF apply. However, if you would be able to log off (includes non-sanctuary logoff) then you are fine to PF apply. These are logical equivalents. If you can log of and transfer... the game can macro style do the exact same. That's all we are talking about here (+ the reservation signalling).
If you mean once you've arrived at the destination world... well that's no different to now. If you manage to be in a cut when your PF is ready to go they may not be happy, and your home world has bog all to do with that.
Remember you do not wait until instance queue to transfer, you transfer upon application. Your then on PF DC while waiting for host to queue.

out of space again...

Oh, no no no. I'm referring to like in-game activities. Most people that I know talk to friends, do crafting, maybe open world stuff, fc management, chill in their house, etc. while waiting on a PF to fill. All those passive activities are gone if they're on another Data Center while waiting for the PF. It's something that exists in the current system, but people would complain about for Cross DC stuff. They'd want it to work like normal so that's a feature to figure out otherwise I see people just home world transfering to the Data Center that hosts the most PF's normally or even avoiding other data centers potentially so they don't have to break their tradition while PF waiting.

[Gurgeh]

Oh, no no no. I'm referring to like in-game activities. Most people that I know talk to friends, do crafting, maybe open world stuff, fc management, chill in their house, etc. while waiting on a PF to fill. All those passive activities are gone if they're on another Data Center while waiting for the PF. It's something that exists in the current system, but people would complain about for Cross DC stuff. They'd want it to work like normal so that's a feature to figure out otherwise I see people just home world transfering to the Data Center that hosts the most PF's normally or even avoiding other data centers potentially so they don't have to break their tradition while PF waiting.

Indeed.
Its not perfect.
But it means its 50%Ligtht 50%Chaos inconvenienced that way, rather than 100% Chaos.
And hopefully that will be good enough keep a significant number of people from deserting Chaos.
As things are, people come home from work, check their retainers at 17:30, and then they spend 17:45-22:00 on light. Chaos doesn't even get a lookin for people to say 'hi how was your day'
'And actually' once we have more people hosting PF's on Chaos again, hopefully we will get more all Chaos groups again, and more all Light groups again, and that can start to drop to something more like 20%:20% (of all PF places)
Offer free transfers to Chaos to grease the wheels.

Your scenario.... is what he have now. There is no argument for saying 50% improvement is like 0% improvement. No 50% improvement is still improvement for that 50%.

[Gurgeh]

I mean, it works, but, you will have a lot of complaints probably because you're at 2-3 minute delay loading time wise minimum so for certain PF's/roles,

I argue next to waiting for a PF to fill on deserted server that is insignificant. I also argue its 2mins 'worst' case if the bandwidth problem can be solved. Light have it too good at the moment. And ultimately either everyone agrees this needs to be done, or the reality those people are left with is that Chaos needs to be turned off (or just wilfully fck newplayers on Chaos "sucks to be you") There is no other reality on the table.

you're going to get beaten repeatedly by someone on that home data center.

No. There is not much excuse for signalling not to be reasonably fast, and once the signal is exchanged, you position is reserved until you are travelled and 'in' the PF.
Your client communicates with the server in 40-160ms. ITs ping. Its latency.
There is no excuse for the signalling taking any significantly longer.

Not a problem for dead time periods in patch, but launch wise, that's an issue. Maybe not for EU, but NA and JP would have 4 data centers of raiders as an example, fighting over 1 healer slot in a raid PF because you don't have updated info and only 1 person is gonna get in, and the others will have to double back.

You have an abstract solution to this in the games very own battle engine.
'snapshots'
No doubt there is a better more apt solution.
There is no excuse for speed/performance being an issue. (this is a trivial database problem)
If you can login to the game and interact in time your can code and agent to do the same.
Also... isn't this basically what Aether is experiencing now? The whole goddamn NA region all using the same DC?
As are the constraint/locking issues your talking about. (I mean they are not trivial, but the CompSci is very long established. The giants on who's shoulders to stand are widely available.)
(as long as your not determined to write everything from scratch in assembly. I exaggerate, but if your determined to do the whole damned thing in C with nothing to go on but standard libraries then you are a bad dev frankly. I would not be happy about spending my sub for some dev to indulge themselves by reinventing the wheel.)

[VoidsentStatus]

now -> you position is reserved until you are travelled and 'in' the PF.

before -> If you apply to a place, your going to take it when you get there.

Which system are we using? What you said before sounded like:
- character applies for dc travel
- dc travel completes
- character loads into the game
- pf slot is saved
- character can join pf now

or is it:
- character applies for dc travel
- pf slot is saved
- dc travel is completes
- character loads in game and can join pf now

at what exact step is the slot saved, and when does it disappear?

the wording is confusing me.

Semantic response: The reason for semantics is to avoid misleading statements. To say traveling works, implies that it is in an acceptable state and has things that we can use. To say traveling works is the same as saying a car works, while it can only go 30mph instead of 100+, the air conditioning is broke, the brakes are trash, the windows don't roll down, the radio requires a manual button to refresh the signal to keep playing songs properly. Does it serve the purpose of a car? Sure. But that doesn't mean we have a lot that we should we taking from it to create something else since the majority of it is a failure. When it comes to travel, the majority of it is a failure. We don't have messaging across DC's, we don't have updated friend info, we don't have passive buffs, we don't have retainer use, we can't look at plot information, we can't do ranked pvp, while hosting PF you can't tell people on the same data center consistently and can get forced to use /reply instead of direct messaging, There's a stupid amount of jank to where I don't even consider it a finished product.

as for this:
"<TimeLimit><AvItemLevel><Status><J1>..<J24><Filled1>..<Filled24>"

The problem is that the Filled1-24 is information that we don't even know can be sent as of right now because it doesn't exist in the current system. That Filled is a job description (PLD/SGE/RPR etc.) inside of the character data. And we have 0 character data that has shared across data centers other than name, currently world, and offline/online which is as surface level as you can possibly get. We don't even get current job equipped information for people on the same data center and a small single .png that shows on my friend list doesn't sound really hard to do, but it doesn't exist.

"Then on demand only the full PF info can be obtained. However, it is likely to be more efficient to provide this from the get go."
Yes, because you don't want people to have to click a pokeball on every single raid PF every few minutes for updated information to see where they want to join.

[Gurgeh]

or is it:
- character applies for dc travel
- pf slot is saved and reserved. (Host cannot change that slot, host cannot disband PF. tough)
- dc travel is completes
- character loads in game and can join pf now is already joined now

This (both times, my wording in second was confusing but I meant, from the moment you apply, your joining becomes inevitable)

as for this:
"<TimeLimit><AvItemLevel><Status><J1>..<J24><Filled1>..<Filled24>"

The problem is that the Filled1-24 is information that we don't even know can be sent as of right now because it doesn't exist in the current system. That Filled is a job description (PLD/SGE/RPR etc.) inside of the character data. And we have 0 character data that has shared across data centers other than name, currently world, and offline/online which is as surface level as you can possibly get. We don't even get current job equipped information for people on the same data center and a small single .png that shows on my friend list doesn't sound really hard to do, but it doesn't exist.

"Then on demand only the full PF info can be obtained. However, it is likely to be more efficient to provide this from the get go."
Yes, because you don't want people to have to click a pokeball on every single raid PF every few minutes for updated information to see where they want to join.

It does exist. When I look at a PF, a I can see 1PLD filled, 1SGE FILLED, remaining 1 Tank 1 Healer 4 DPS
You don't get to know 'who is in a PF until you join, except for the host. Well you don't get that now and its irrelevant, if you wanted to you could. Its data on server on Frankfurt, you can send that data to a server in Berlin (or wherever the heck the DCs are physically housed)

https://xivpf.com/listings

All the stuff people are saying cant possibly be transferred from one SQX server to another SQX server by SQX themselves... its all already here on that site. People are already doing it with nothing but character bots ducktaped to a backend.
Yes the currency of that data is going to suck a bit but I suspect that SQX would be able to improve on that. Them being able to actually access the data directly.

[VoidsentStatus]

https://xivpf.com/listings

I just checked. This is a snapshot and not a live update. It took 3 minutes before my party finder got added to the list. I removed my party finder, and it's been 5 minutes and it still hasn't taken me off the list. It's hella delayed.

Edit: 10 minutes now, still showing on the PF list despite it being deleted. I don't know if it's connected to the server if it's not registering the PF being gone yet.

[VoidsentStatus]

https://xivpf.com/listings
.

I just checked. This is a snapshot and not a live update. It took 3 minutes before my party finder got added to the list. I removed my party finder, and it's been 5 minutes and it still hasn't taken me off the list. It's hella delayed.

Edit: 10 minutes now, still showing on the PF list despite it being deleted. I don't know if it's connected to the server if it's not registering the PF being gone yet.

Site is flat out bugged/not practically functional. This PF was made at 9:38PM EST, deleted 9:41PM EST and it's 10:01PM EST and it's giving an updated timer like my PF is still active.