Server Lockouts are limiting the growth of this game.

[KisaiTenshi]

A better alternative is to do away with the archaic way of dividing the population by server and instance zones. Create more instances for each zone for more and more players. Why a modern game doesn't allow for every player in the same region to play with each other is beyond me. Some players are even divided by data center even if they are technically in the same region.

"Mega-Server" technology is not a new thing. Other games have used it. It is about time FInal Fantasy XIV does as well in my opinion

Area codes and Zip codes predate the Internet.

While I don't expect FFXIV to take this route, and I'd shun games that try to do the "lets create a stupid amount of servers, populated by 3 people and a cat" a la Minecraft.

The "correct" solution, albeit difficult to pull off would be to be a combination of "cellular" networks and overlay instances.

For example. Take Rowena's building in Mor Dhona. As soon as you enter the front door, all the "cells" outside would stop transmitting except the one immediately outside the door. For things like NPC shops, you'd get your own personal instance so that it isn't crowded by player collisions. For Player housing "shops" and field shops they would "crowd control" creating an "invisible" barrier so that the "player shop" can be seen and interacted with, and player collisions turned off in that immediate cell.

Player collisions would be turned on only for cells outside of "town" cells, thus allowing strategic use of mounts, vehicles and obstacles for FATE type events

Player Name collisions, are also easily dealt with. The underlying cells would have a "home" cell (that the player can change) so only that player gets the "unique" name in that cell. In the event that two players have the same name, the "visiting" player would get20"from (cell plain name)" affixed to their name. If two players with the same name want to have the same home cell, they will always get a prefix name reflecting their "job" in the cell. eg "(Blacksmith) Jill Wayne" and both players can't be the same job in the same cell at the same time. So it would only become an issue if everyone wanted to be called "Ninja Naruto Animekid"

So the instance solves the population problem at the cell level, while the cell'ing solves how to put everyone into the same world without creating so much fragmentation.


But I digress, the problem with FFXIV is that the servers were made "smaller", like they cut all the previous zones up into 5 or so pieces, in what used to be one zone. So this also limits the number of players that can play per server so there is more headroom for SE to add more content that comes back to these places. I'm sure everyone has seen plenty of the "no entry" doors to buildings all over the place.

[Superskull85]

[..]

Well the thing is they already have the instancing technology and have actively used it in the Sea of Clouds/Churning Mists on some servers. Why this can't be made a permanent feature is well...a mystery. Personally I do think you should be able to "phase" with another player by simply selecting their name in the various UI's but that really shouldn't be that hard.

Heck instancing could easily allow for more housing spots too. For example player A having a house on Rowena Avenue (completely made up) in instance 1 and player B also having that plot but in phase 2.

You don't even need to have private anything just open up more instances for populated zones. That's the beauty of the system and why a Mega-Server is used in the first place; to allow everyone play and interact with each other in the same region.

[KisaiTenshi]

Well the thing is they already have the instancing technology and have actively used it in the Sea of Clouds/Churning Mists on some servers. Why this can't be made a permanent feature is well...a mystery. Personally I do think you should be able to "phase" with another player by simply selecting their name in the various UI's but that really shouldn't be that hard.

Heck instancing could easily allow for more housing spots too. For example player A having a house on Rowena Avenue (completely made up) in instance 1 and player B also having that plot but in phase 2.

You don't even need to have private anything just open up more instances for populated zones. That's the beauty of the system and why a Mega-Server is used in the first place; to allow everyone play and interact with each other in the same region.

The problem with instances is limited resources. You need to be able to "spin up" and "spin down" instances. When you stick stuff like that in the context of housing, you are creating permanent resource losses, because now you can't spin down the map when nobody is in it, it has to run in perpetuity. The correct thing to do in a different game would be to "stretch" the map, eg adding new cells between point A and point B. Throw in a convenient excuse like a Volcano or Earthquake, and you're done.

But to go back a bit, this is something that only works when there isn't a "minecraft" like of component. To overcome that in such a game actually requires overlapping protection cells.

EG the cells occupied by A housing and B housing overlap at point C which is a protection buffer. To build anything in the protection buffer cells, requires an agreement between A and B cells. Should A or B be permanently removed, the protection cell will still exist unless both are removed, if both are spun back up at a later date (say a single person walks into A, through point C to B) it would be seamless as if they had never been spun down.

At any rate, real-world technology has existed for decades for solving "how do you put everyone in the world on the same network", because that's exactly how the GSM system works, albeit much more complicated than I'm describing, and also how the current LTE cellular system works. Everyone gets a unique ISMI (that's your "client device") and a IMEI (That's the subscriber identity module) and your permission to use any cell in the world is determined by your ISMI connecting to the network and the IMEI connecting to your carrier for permission to be charged. Your "home" registar is where your phone number is unique (eg NPA-NXX) and you're registered as a "visitor" whenever you go somewhere else. They also do "instancing" by having multiple frequencies, and CDMA works by everyone speaking at the same time but different languages. So capacity only declines by simply not having enough smaller cells instead of trying to build large cells.

Therefor, you get better use of hardware by having the ability to spin up and spin down small cells than large ones. A cell could be as small as a room, or as large as a cow pasture, it just depends how many many people are going to be consistantly present. This is where "virtualization" actually would work as promised. In practice, game companies have been making awful use of virtualization, choosing to instead put MORE instances on the same equipment to save costs rather than spinning up smaller instances on-demand.

Anyway, to go back to the OP's question. FFXIV's V1.0 had super-large cells (basically all of Ul'dah was one.) While V2.0's maps were all cut up into about 5 pieces each. Consider how copy-pasta the V1.0's landscape was, this was actually for the better, as it removed a bunch of nonsense from the Shroud and from Limsa. It also allowed them to actually create unique towns where once was just two tents and a Crystal.