Physical/regional servers FINALLY confirmed ??! (Y)

[morpheus]

Am I the only one that read this as they might possibly host server in other locations instead of just japan? Why are people making this jump that these new servers hosted in NA or EU would not allow people from other regions to play on them? This forum makes my head hurt.

[Delsus]

Calling a reduction from 250ms ping to around 120 ms or less "a few milliseconds" is kind of funny. Network latency could be halved for european players and reduced by over 70% for most of the american players by putting up servers on the east coast of the US for all of us outside of Asia. In addition, it would probably keep network latencies more stable.

With the quick leveling we have in this game (at least for now), it wouldn't be problematic for one person to have characters on multiple regional servers anyway. As far as I can see for the suggested pricing models for v2, the "basic service" will include one character per server, up to a maximum of 8 characters. That leaves plenty of space for characters on European servers, American servers and even Japanese servers.

With regional servers, we can all both have our cake, and eat it too!.

Except SE's American office is in LA which is on the west coast, so if they put some servers in US and not Europe we would still suffer, and buying a new office in New York just for FFXIV servers is not viable, if they did this they would need servers in US, JP and EU, then the ones in EU would be 1/3rd English, 1/3rd German and 1/3 French (numbers pulled out my ass for that) so we would not only have lower population, but less people that speak fluent enough of the same language to do harder fights with, not to mention the insomniacs that play at night would have no one to play with.

I know your reply will be "sort them by language then" but that would throw in the old UK players get messed over with servers in LA (similar latency as Japan) or dead servers.

International servers only for me, if I'm forced onto a dead European server or worse a European English only server I will be quitting, I have too many friends in America and other places (we even have a Japanese person in my ls, so yes they will play with us.)

Also your comment about how fast leveling is, who even said it will remain the same come 2.0? Post me to the interview because I must have missed that one.

[Madrox]

They said they might add regional servers, and they did.

Ragnarok

Now if you are talking about regional servers located in Europe, or the US. He never said that, and the quote in the OP doesn't imply that at all. It just means an announcement about lag or latency, most likely about how 2.0's server will improve this.

Ragnarok is a regional server? I just liked the name and not overcrowded population so I picked it to start over on coming back.

[viion]

i find it kinda funny that everyone was basically soiling their pants when the server merge came with the original method of "ok brand new servers, everyone can choose where to go"
screams of "oh noes community's and friends ripped apart" (even thou everyone could choose freely)
it was the biggest shitstorm we had on the forum so far and that says something

and now we have this thread and suddenly it is A-OK to do the same thing as long as it gives people the illusion they will suddenly play like gods just because of some milliseconds...
FFXIV is not a "spam skills every second till your fingers bleed MMO", with the improved client and server structure im sure it wont matter at all

i really don't understand all this hype about latency and milliseconds, i can do any endgame just fine and im from Europe...
if you always get hit by ifrits cracks now, that wont really change on a regional server
just my 2 cents here

But last time it was forced, this would be optional.

I want to be on a faster server, if it means i can sell items in 1 minute rather than 5 minutes then yes i will go to local server.

You might not understand this, and feel everything is fine and that the lag between putting an item in retainer that takes like 5 seconds is "Natural" but i dont, i dont like it at all, its like hitting a traffic light every 5 seconds.

Dont ruin it for other people when in reality it wouldnt even affect you, you'd stay on your server, that is global and play with the people you've been playing with for ages, and if someone "close" like an LS friend says hes leaving ya'll for a better server, was that guy really a friend if hes just going to ditch you?

Just like Ragnarok is optional, has it affected you? I dont think so.

Ragnarok is recommended to EU,
Ragnarok was optional to join,
Ragnarok should be based in the EU,
Thus Ragnarok = an Optional Recommended Server based in the EU.

I agree not making all servers like this, but there should at least be some.

[Yumi_Hibiki]

Dont ruin it for other people when in reality it wouldnt even affect you, you'd stay on your server, that is global and play with the people you've been playing with for ages, and if someone "close" like an LS friend says hes leaving ya'll for a better server, was that guy really a friend if hes just going to ditch you?

sorry but a mayor exodus of people following the sirens call of "you will perform muuuuch better, for realz" would pretty much kill any server community and economy and by that very much affect me

[Mirage]

Except SE's American office is in LA which is on the west coast, so if they put some servers in US and not Europe we would still suffer, and buying a new office in New York just for FFXIV servers is not viable, if they did this they would need servers in US, JP and EU, then the ones in EU would be 1/3rd English, 1/3rd German and 1/3 French (numbers pulled out my ass for that) so we would not only have lower population, but less people that speak fluent enough of the same language to do harder fights with, not to mention the insomniacs that play at night would have no one to play with.

I know your reply will be "sort them by language then" but that would throw in the old UK players get messed over with servers in LA (similar latency as Japan) or dead servers.

International servers only for me, if I'm forced onto a dead European server or worse a European English only server I will be quitting, I have too many friends in America and other places (we even have a Japanese person in my ls, so yes they will play with us.)

Also your comment about how fast leveling is, who even said it will remain the same come 2.0? Post me to the interview because I must have missed that one.

You probably wouldn't have a lower population on EU servers, because the total number of operative EU servers would most likely scale with the total number of European players. If you have 50000 US players and 20000 EU players, you don't give both regions 10 servers, you give one region 10 and the other region 4, leading to approximately the same number of players per server.

I didn't even think of suggesting to sort them by language. In fact, I wouldn't suggest to enforce regions at all, and I've said that several times already. My suggestion is that there will be set up servers in more than one geographical location, and that people would be able to freely choose which servers they wanted to play on, based on what's more important for them.

If you're a british person who is playing from midnight and into the morning hours, the choice should be simple. Join an american server. If you're a German guy playing during normal European primetime hours, and consider lag to be an issue, you would choose an European server with or without a high population of other german players, depending on how good you are at English. Most germans I know of are good enough at it to have normal conversations with.

As for SEs offices being on the west coast, that could be an issue, but it is possible that this would be solvable by having an east coast based company sort out the hardware part of this problem. Outsorcing isn't an issue if you outsource your stuff to competent people, and you can do a lot with remote management today when it comes to software configuration.

The way I see it, worst case scenario: You get the same lag as you would get with international servers, and can still play with your friends. Best case scenario: You get less lag and can play with your friends who also might be in the same time zone as you, making it easier to organize events for most players.

As for leveling speed in v2, you might have a point. No one knows exactly how fast or slow leveling will be in v2. It might be slower than it currently is, but I really doubt it will be anywhere near as slow as it was in FF11 (well, old-school FF11. Today, it is ridiculously fast).

[Jinko]

Just like Ragnarok is optional, has it affected you? I dont think so.

Ragnarok is recommended to EU,
Ragnarok was optional to join,
Ragnarok should be based in the EU,
Thus Ragnarok = an Optional Recommended Server based in the EU.

I agree not making all servers like this, but there should at least be some.

This 100%.

[Delsus]

You probably wouldn't have a lower population on EU servers, because the total number of operative EU servers would most likely scale with the total number of European players. If you have 50000 US players and 20000 EU players, you don't give both regions 10 servers, you give one region 10 and the other region 4, leading to approximately the same number of players per server.

I didn't even think of suggesting to sort them by language. In fact, I wouldn't suggest to enforce regions at all, and I've said that several times already. My suggestion is that there will be set up servers in more than one geographical location, and that people would be able to freely choose which servers they wanted to play on, based on what's more important for them.

If you're a british person who is playing from midnight and into the morning hours, the choice should be simple. Join an american server. If you're a German guy playing during normal European primetime hours, and consider lag to be an issue, you would choose an European server with or without a high population of other german players, depending on how good you are at English. Most germans I know of are good enough at it to have normal conversations with.

As for SEs offices being on the west coast, that could be an issue, but it is possible that this would be solvable by having an east coast based company sort out the hardware part of this problem. Outsorcing isn't an issue if you outsource your stuff to competent people, and you can do a lot with remote management today when it comes to software configuration.

The way I see it, worst case scenario: You get the same lag as you would get with international servers, and can still play with your friends. Best case scenario: You get less lag and can play with your friends who also might be in the same time zone as you, making it easier to organize events for most players.

As for leveling speed in v2, you might have a point. No one knows exactly how fast or slow leveling will be in v2. It might be slower than it currently is, but I really doubt it will be anywhere near as slow as it was in FF11 (well, old-school FF11. Today, it is ridiculously fast).

The thing is alot of people say "give us regional servers" and alot agree, it takes awhile to get people to say to make them optional, I am just saying, if SE did force us onto regional servers I know alot would quit and the majority seem to think its regional or gtfo.

I have nothing wrong with making it optional, I just don't want SE to force us, also what if someone makes a character on a European server, then moves to America, and lets say (because there has been no set in stone confirmation) there are no server transfers, to play with people you would have to reroll which is a bad thing.

[indira]

server out side japan would only need to be there to load balance the connections and thats it.

[Preypacer]

You cannot compare a game made back in 2002 with one from 2012, the technology jump is just too big.
Also, Sqaure Soft developed the new engine AND server structure only for 2.0. I'm sure they learned from their past mistakes.

I don't care if the technology is 2024. When things are done client-side, it opens a huge opportunity for programs to be written that read incoming data that playes aren't supposed to see, as well as manipulate outgoing data to exploit the game. This happens in any case where such data is handled client-side.

The lesson to be learned is that you never leave gameplay critical functions or data on the client machine, because there are people who can and will exploit and abuse it to their own advantage.