Quote Originally Posted by Rueby View Post
I'm curious, is it wrong to assume that let's say (bogus hypothetical number)
100,000 capacity for native players
5,000 travellers

Could this be how this is handled?
It's something like that, yes. Except it's world-specific. I believe it's more like:

5,000 native players per world (according to Lucky Bancho, worlds have up to 20,000 active non-trial players but they don't necessarily all login at the same time).

Which would make the capacity for travelers a lot lower than that.

They actually wrote a lodestone announcement explaining it at https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...4ade7369b03003

It does make sense that a restriction is in place either to make sure that the servers aren't overloaded beyond their capacity but also allow players to spread out abit...
I can see both reasons being part of their decision.

Hopefully if they can make a regional DF data center it will solve everything, it'll just require making DC travel more seemless (so you don't have to logout). That will be very complicated but it's all about the magic of the game client - making it look normal to the player (such as by playing a cutscene of you moving through the stars).

The reason DC travel is complicated of course is because it's actually copying all your data and moving it to another physical row of machines, potentially on the other side of the world in the case of region travel. So being actively logged in risks you trying to modify that data while it's being copy+pasted. Then the client needs to be made aware of the change of IP address of the server you're on. Being on the new server will require an entirely new session, temporary character number, etc.

It's just a lot simpler from the technical side to log out and login to the new data center, but if we are to join a "duty data center" it would be ideal if this was more seemless and happened within the game itself, despite the complexities involved in achieving it.