Servers in Danger of Crashing RIGHT NOW!

[Merryl]

This game must be held together with duct tape then.

[papichulo123]

When they release the new eu data center will there be less stress on the U.S./ na data center server?

[Ferocious]

It's the same reason why they are refusing to fix the laggy servers, limited housing space, etc. Their servers are still as bad as launch even after they have made tons of profits by now. There are MMO's which have upgraded their servers to mega servers and some added cross-server functionalities like cross-parties, whispers, etc. But in the world of SE, expect none of this. Just keep giving them $20 monthly with extra retainers and expect no improvements in return. Neither to servers, nor endgame.

[Sylve]

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Except you're forgetting that there is more than one server in a Datacenter.
Datcenters do not have unlimited bandwidth in which to cram all the tiny packets into, nor unlimited resources for receiving them.
You have to consider internet infrastructure and the fact that each server blade does not have a dedicated internet connection.

To use the car analogy again, you're trying to get 500 Suzuki Swifts down the on-ramp of a Freeway into bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The internet is, after all, a data freeway. It doesn't matter how tiny you make the packets if the route is congested. With the amount of free inventory space we DO have, the prices on the extra retainers isn't a profiteering move, its to limit the number of people who HAVE those extra retainers to people who genuinely need that extra space.

Ask yourself, would you just have 2 Retainers if you could have 8 free ones?
For the majority, the answer is no. Everyone and their dog would have 8 Retainers, geared up and doing ventures while also storing all manner of useless stuff.

Oh, and before i forget again: The Armoire.
Oh look, even MORE free item storage space!

[Gamer3427]

So thats all an inventory stored in a database should be - the item id of each item in each slot, and a number signifying it's quantity.

In addition to obvious arguments about how it's not about data storage, but transfer, you're also not accounting for the many tiny variations between one item and the next. Items that are stored retain quite a few flags such as whether it's HQ vs NQ on any non gear items, and the person who crafted it, and on gear items there are additional flags such as the spiritbond rate, the repair level, and the many variations to color, as well as the glamour placed over it, and any materia placed in it including what type of materia, if it was a good match for the gear, how many points of what stats said piece of materia offers, ect. While it's true that they could put a simple item number in for every possible variation, that would be a huge waste of resources to do. Even if it's not likely that someone will bond a piece of level 2 craftsmanship materia to a red bunny ear glamoured, level 60 dark knight helmet, that's at exactly 53% spirit bond, and has a repair level of 74%, they'd still have to make a seperate item ID for it if they were to do it as you are suggesting.......

By allowing even slight variations to be retained, they are increasing the data that has to be stored significantly. This is likely why the items that are allowed to be stored in the armory chest are only unique gear that can't be crafted, and that have to be at 100% repair level, as well as why they lose their spiritbond, (and dyes as well I suspect), when you store them. Just claiming that you could "theoretically" make it as low of data consumption as you claim, doesn't mean it would be cost or time efficient to do so for every instance of storage......

So compared to other MMOs, either our servers are crap (which is ridiculous when we have so many players paying monthly mind you) or our inventory is so horribly innefficient that even flavor of the month korean F2P games do it better than FFXIV.

Also, I don't know what games you've been playing, but compared to most MMORPGs and even most single player offline RPGs, we have quite a lot of inventory space, as pointed out in the post I'm quoting below.....

Edit, I'd like to also point out the rather extreme amount of free inventory space XIV has given us compared to other MMOs.
450 free inventory spaces between 2 Retainers and our player 'bags'. Not counting the 300 slots in our Armory.
Thats a rather significant number.

EDIT: I would like to correct myself. When I made mention of the armory chest, I was actually talking about the Armoir contained within inn rooms. My apologies for the confusion......

[Phenidate]

The inventory example I gave was a simple example.
Flags such as NQ, HQ etc do NOT need to be stored on the item, they could be looked up using the item ID. Why would you duplicate information like that for every single item when you have it in one central lookup table?

Things like Spiritbond, Repair Level: 8 bits. More than sufficient to represent 0-100
Players name associated with item: Just a string up to what, 32 characters? Not included on the vast majority of items mind you.

You haven't listed anything that couldn't be referenced by item ID or a tiny variable added to the item itself. The change isn't significant and could easily fit within the 64 bits of space I used in my example. Do you know how big a variable you need to store whether an item is Unique? A boolean value. 1 bit.

I gave an example in another post how to save on frequent inventory calls by caching and using a hash to check for changes to the inventory, so this information is not being passed constantly between server and client.
The first example was merely to show how small an inventory can be data wise - which by the way represents how little information needs to be transmitted.

Size of data is everything, even in transmission. You can't talk about one without the other, and in that example I wanted to stress how small a kilobyte of data is.

If the server was chugging along at 50MB/s (which most assuredly, it is not) You could process 50,000 SIMULTANEOUS inventory requests using the model I gave.
Servers store and access from petabytes of data, and serve on the order of gigabytes per second. When we're talking about a world server, we're not talking about "one computer". We're talking about multiple load balanced server blades working in tandem per world.

Also, I don't know what games you've been playing, but compared to most MMORPGs and even most single player offline RPGs, we have quite a lot of inventory space, as pointed out in the post I'm quoting below.....

Well lets see with the two I know well enough to quote:
TERA: 104 slots, 72 more with the pet. Open the bank? 360 slots.
WOW: The biggest bag you can have is 30 slots. They support 136 slots of inventory with the backpack.
Open the bank? 210 slots max.

FFXIV: 1 character, 100 slots. 2 retainers 175 slots.

Giving us all an extra retainer shouldn't kill the server when older MMOs like these can support so much more.

I would also like to point out that for FFXIV to run, it would need about the same quality of servers that WoW or TERA uses. I don't give a rats *** if FFXIV "is not the same MMO as X", they still have similar hardware requirements - anything less and I seriously doubt the servers could manage what SE is doing with the game. I suspect the issue SE is having is the same they're having with netcode in general - a problem Korean and Japanese online game companies seem to struggle with: they don't optimize because they don't have to with such excellent internet and short distances to servers. Only in this case they're probably hitting a bandwith limit trying to send something ridiculous like 512KB of data for bags instead of 1KB.

And if 100 inventory slots is pushing it, why do retainers have 175 slots anyways?

[Archulak]

Well lets see with the two I know well enough to quote:
TERA: 88? slots on 6 characters (max without maxing gathering), 104 on 3 (max with maxed gathering and hand ins). I have a bank with 360 slots. I have 4 pets with 72 slots each.
1488 slots.
WOW: 96 slots on average (that would be the 20 slot bags plus 16 slot backpack). I had 11 alts.
So about. 1056. (This doesn't count bank slots.)
Practically double what we're allotted in FFXIV.

FFXIV: 1 character, 100 slots. 2 retainers 175 slots.
450 slots available to my account.

Giving us all an extra retainer shouldn't kill the server. We're not even close to the amount of inventory space of other MMOs.

If you're going to count alts as inventory space then try doing it for ffxiv:

8 chars x (450 inventory slots + 300 armory slots) = possible 6000 slots per account per server.

math is fun aint it.
(also before the obvious "It's not convenient to move items around between alts in this game", that dosn't mean that it can't be done)

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

You can have a max of 40 chars on the standard/legacy type accounts, so 450* 40 if we go by your logic. Thats a LOT of inventory space.

Or 450* 8 if you go by per server.

So yeah, almost double what WoW lets you have.

[DkDerek]

I don't even understand why this is up for debate. I've come to the conclusion that the engineers working at SE are like, first years. Literally everything that is implemented into this game, is horrible. It's 2015, and I still can't send tells to people inside a duty. Other games are bringing people on different servers together, while I can't even communicate with someone in a duty Lol.

And really, 4 bosses for the end game. Even WoW gives at least 10 per raid tier.

We get 4.

[Thyranne]

I don't even understand why this is up for debate. I've come to the conclusion that the engineers working at SE are like, first years. Literally everything that is implemented into this game, is horrible. It's 2015, and I still can't send tells to people inside a duty. Other games are bringing people on different servers together, while I can't even communicate with someone in a duty Lol.

And really, 4 bosses for the end game. Even WoW gives at least 10 per raid tier.

We get 4.

Yes and they get 0 dungeons, twitter integration and garrison s***.