Quote Originally Posted by Dante131 View Post
Sorry if I misunderstood or wronged you, it wasn’t intentional.
You didn't wrong me, it's ok.

But it’s strange how I always hear, “That’s too expensive.” If it’s just for something as simple as this, you don’t need a hyper-powerful server. I work with hosting servers in my company, and I can tell you that our entry-level server, with a bunch of GB of RAM and several TBs of storage, costs about €50 a month. Are you telling me they can’t work out a contract with a hardware provider (as they’ve done in the past) to handle a system like this, maybe even with one or two smaller auxiliary systems?

The issue with FFXIV is that, for years, the management’s attitude has been, “FFXIV isn’t allowed to spend money.” But milking one project without reinvesting will inevitably lead to problems and now we’re facing a really big one.
For something like this blacklist feature, I don't imagine they would want a dedicated server with an API.

I can only speculate but I imagine what we're talking about is this. Say you're standing at Limsa Lominsa aetherite plaza. For every player at that plaza, the server would have to do a check for every other player at the plaza to see if they've been blacklisted. This has to happen extremely regularly, every second or every five seconds max, to account for the chance that you added someone present to your blacklist since the last check. Remember that each later can have 200 blacklisted players. That's a lot of checks every second. If "the server" needs to poll another dedicated server to perform those checks, that's large overhead for every call. It's probably more likely you would put the check into the same central process where "nearby players are generated", reducing the expense of it, but that means you need to upgrade each server representing a world within each data center. Effectively, upgrading existing architecture, rather than another node on the periphery.

Caveat - completely speculating as to how the servers are currently architected so all of this could be wrong. But given how often the devs cite software difficulties as an obstacle for new features, I wouldn't be surprised if the internals aren't "properly" distributed.