Quote Originally Posted by Tiggy View Post
The only time the servers actually have genuine trouble is when too many people congregate in one place. Specifically Odin/Behemoth/A and S rank hunts. That's not even a lag problem. That's the servers crapping themselves since they can't handle the sheer volume of people that showed up. Some games solve this problem with a person per zone limit, and others such as Eve solve it by doing time dilation. Every game is going to suffer when too many people are in once place. Square has surprisingly loose restrictions on people per zone considering how bad it can get at overcrowded S ranks. Thankfully this is one of those things that tends to get better as the game ages. All those tiny performance tweaks really add up over time as well as improved hardware.
I don't know if you are familiar with GW2's "overflow" system (before they implemented the mega server system) but in the live letter previous to TGS they talked about implementing a system like that here in order to deal with congestion issues, and perhaps open a path for open world dungeons.

1:30:04
Q: Do you have plans to implement open-world dungeons like there were in 1.0?
A: Kasuga: If Yoshida would like to do this then we'll think about it. However, after patch 2.35 North Shroud has been congested, and there are concerns that the same conditions would occur in other areas as well if we implemented open-world dungeons.

Yoshida: Right now, due to the fact that North Shroud serves as the entrance point for the Second Coil of Bahamut as well as the location of the Ixali base it's extremely crowded. When it comes to field areas, we need to consider congestion when creating content. It wouldn't be impossible to design such a dungeon, but the really difficult part is reward balancing. Also, it would very likely be content you couldn't complete with a small amount of people, and conversely, it would be completed quite easily if more than the necessary amount of people were to attempt it. If we were to implement this, just one wouldn't be enough and we would have to implement multiple dungeons at the same time. This kind of content would turn into a massive raid with even more participants than the Crystal Tower, and, similar to the 80-player raids of first generation MMORPGs, it would be easy to find people when it's implemented, but after a while it would be really tough to get the right amount of people together.

When we started developing FFXIV: ARR, there was the question of whether or not we would make dungeons using open-world areas, but we decided to consider it at a later date since that kind of content wouldn't last two seconds if we implemented it without balanced rewards and participation.

Additionally, the congestion in North Shroud is quite rough, so we're currently looking into whether we should implement a system that has been adopted by other MMORPGs for making multiple instances of the same open-world area. The preparations have already been made and we've implemented this into the Chinese version of the game, so we do have some operative results. We'll be testing things up until the last minute to be sure that the concept of multiple open-world instances is clear for players who aren't used to this kind of system.