EU Data Center (Chaos)

[Director_Zero]

To add on to the subject, just some general information on characters on each server:

Chaos Data Center: (http://xivsoul.com/)

Cerberus 115468
Lich 141643
Moogle 131887
Odin 131995
Phoenix 136377
Ragnarok 116069
Shiva 131737
Zodiark 107511

Now if you compare it with the NA data center its hilarious how the EU servers are way way way way way more filled up with people. Lets not even compare it to the JP data center, because even NA beats it.
This only concludes that the EU servers are the most populated servers. No argument against it here.

So EU data center has the most players, yet it has the least servers? Makes any sense? I dont think so.
Therefore EU needs more servers.

[worldofneil]

If you compare work vs profit, profit will come on top.

Extra income would only come from new players, but each server (which is actually probably made up of multiple servers) requires upfront cost and ongoing monthly maintenance costs. Unless there are new players to actually fill the new server, then you're just spreading the existing income around, so it's not profit, it's loss.

Plenty of dead NA and JP servers, just fuse some of them together

Which thanks to housing, isn't an option. How do you propose they merge the housing? They can't just keep all the wards because they're already working with constraints apparently because when they released the subdivision wards we all complained it wasn't enough, but it was all they were able to do for then, so a server merge (which hasn't happened since 2.0 launch) would require something very tricky with housing.

because lets face it, European servers are pretty much at their limit in terms of population.

Are they? Are there constant login queues to get in? Is there constantly a period where no European servers are available for new characters? If the answer to both of those is yes, then yes I agree a new server is needed, but I don't think that's the case or the General Discussion forum would be exploding with posts (where this post should be btw if you want to get more comments as this isn't really a technical problem)

There is plenty of people to fill up 1 new server, if we were talking about 16 new servers I'd obviasly agree with you.

And where are these people coming from? Even if SE deemed the servers overpopulated and setup a new one and offered free transfers, the majority of players won't want to switch. They'll lose housing, Free Companies, friends who don't want to transfer, it'll break up statics, the economy will be completely different/not even established (not a good thing!), not to mention if changing data centre there's a risk the queue times will drastically increase too if people play at different times.[/QUOTE]

To add on to the subject, just some general information on characters on each server:

Now if you compare it with the NA data center its hilarious how the EU servers are way way way way way more filled up with people.

Well aside from the fact you're assuming the 3rd party site is correct in the figures, those figures are just characters on the server. It doesn't tell us:

A) If those characters are alts and not really used
B) If the person who created the character even plays the game any more
C) How many people are actually connecting/playing at the same time (this is the really important bit that determines if a server is over capacity!)

This only concludes that the EU servers are the most populated servers. No argument against it here.

No, it concludes that EU servers (based on 3rd party data) have the most characters created. It doesn't mean that when you login they're all actually logged in, the might be from 2013 when ARR came out. Or maybe even 2010 when 1.0 launched and never played since.

We don't know how many connections there are to the servers at any one time and we don't know how many active accounts there are (in total or per server).

All we do know is that if a new player wants to start on an EU server, there is at least 1 server available for them to do so and therefore they can select that and play. As long as there is at least ONE server for a new player to play on, then it's not full.

You keep saying it's not good enough for there to be only one, why? The new player can only pick one server, what does it matter if they have a choice of 1 or a choice of 2?

[Director_Zero]

I get it, you have ur own opinion and it doesnt really matter what I say or what argument I come up with, you'll always disagree.
It's fine I respect ur opinion, but I disagree with you just as much as you disagree with me. In the end I do sincerely hope EU gets more servers and thats all.

[Director_Zero]

2 more weeks till we get our answer !

[Raist]

Everyone keeps referring to the worlds as servers. It is not one server per world. Each world service runs across a group of servers,,and we only see the IP address if the front end we are assigned through the lobby service. Note that this can provide multiple addresses for each world service. It is a complicated cluster configuration.

It isn't just 8 servers, but 8 world services and a dedicated lobby service as well.

[Yaichiro]

To add on to the subject, just some general information on characters on each server:

Chaos Data Center: (http://xivsoul.com/)

Cerberus 115468
Lich 141643
Moogle 131887
Odin 131995
Phoenix 136377
Ragnarok 116069
Shiva 131737
Zodiark 107511

Now if you compare it with the NA data center its hilarious how the EU servers are way way way way way more filled up with people. Lets not even compare it to the JP data center, because even NA beats it.
This only concludes that the EU servers are the most populated servers. No argument against it here.

So EU data center has the most players, yet it has the least servers? Makes any sense? I dont think so.
Therefore EU needs more servers.

This is way too misleading. You're mixing between created characters and characters that are active. I usually search for people to join my FC (Yes I check all lvls) and during the prime time in Odin I can give you a rough estimation of 5 to 7 thousands players online and I am quite generous with this estimation.

[Raist]

This is way too misleading. You're mixing between created characters and characters that are active. I usually search for people to join my FC (Yes I check all lvls) and during the prime time in Odin I can give you a rough estimation of 5 to 7 thousands players online and I am quite generous with this estimation.

+100 if I could. Our FC just purged a boatload of accounts that had been idle for something like 14+ months.

Without statistics on active accounts, the data is trivial at best. Database servers can manage hundreds of thousands of connections...the hardware is quite robust at the end point. The issues come from networking problems moreso then at the server level. As in routing and throughput constraints between the client and server. There will likely be much tweaking to get the concurrent connections where they need to be, and if a lot of people transfer away from Chaos because of the added latency from crossing the pond, it will free up more resources for the EU region as well.

How about waiting to see just how things pan out first?

[Atoli]

EU needs more servers.

Why?
I mean, hey, if they create a new world, fine, let them do it. But I don't exactly see the need for it (and I'm from Chaos so don't brush me of like you did with worldofneil just because he plays on Sargatanas).
Every world on our data center is open at some point during the day, so if you want to join some friends who already are on a certain world, just try until you succeed.
Other than that....I don't see how it is a problem to have "only" 2-3 open worlds to choose from? If there was just one unified world to begin with, you'd have to choose that one anyway. So where's the problem with our current situation?

A new world is needed at one point of time only, and that's when the existing worlds become too congested to the point where they have to be closed off for good (not just character creation but logging in, too) to not have any drops in performance or actual crashes.
Seeing as all EU worlds can still take new players and never have queues longer than a few seconds (which is the case for world on other datacenters, too!), I don't see the need for a new world at all.

So EU data center has the most players, yet it has the least servers? Makes any sense? I dont think so.

Maybe the most per world, but not the most in general. NA/JP both have WAY more people playing than all of EU together, so of course they need more servers than Chaos datacenter.

[Director_Zero]

Hey all,

I originally made this post to try and help the future new players. I've been playing FFXIV for over 400 days, and I can tell you, when I started playing i'd very much like the opportunity to join a server(world) that is new or at least more recent than 1 and a half years(Zodiark).

Sure it is cool to join an already built community, but just as joining a new one has its down points, joining an existing one has its down points as well. I dont need to name none of them as Im quite sure all of you can figure them out by urself.

I just believe that European players deserve the opportunity to choose from an OLD world and a NEW world, that's all. If you don't agree with this, so be it. I hope at least SQenix does.

Have fun !

[Raist]

Have to keep in mind that a considerable portion of the players may not actually be in the EU region. Players create characters across different regions all the time. Unless SE has put forth a concerted effort to determine exactly where logins come from (which can be misleading because of VPN usage), the languages actually used, the version of the client, etc.---they may not have an accurate enough picture to tell exactly how many people to expect on the EU servers. They likely have a better understanding then we ever will though, since we don't have access to any of the actual live data.

If there was a need to create a new world, they would have ponied up the money to build a new cluster of servers to support one (or reserved the virtual resources to create a new world(s) within an existing cluster). If they have to build new clusters to support new worlds, those setups do NOT come cheap. Even setting up a new virtual space may not be a trivial expense either (more drive/RAM, licenses, man-hours, etc.), and unless there will be an extreme overload on the existing servers (which there doesn't appear to be as is with the mix of regions on them currently), there should be no need for the extra expense.

We may find a lot of people jump ship and move to NA/JP servers once all this shakes out. We simply don't know. Just like they simply didn't know for a fact how things would work out at ARR's launch. But...we survived that just fine with all the "old" worlds in place at that time. In fact, don't know if you could really say any of the worlds were actually "new". The name may have been new, but there was enough of an experienced population to go around that I doubt there was a world full of newbies out there that were running around completely clueless. Regardless, if a player is new to the game/franchise, it will be new to them regardless if there are 1000 or 10,000 players active at launch. Unless they are willing to step up and communicate with other players, it won't matter much if the players are still wet behind the ears or seasoned veterans if they aren't interacting with them.

The point is, there may be plenty of resources available to support the EU community at launch. If not, then SE will regroup and make adjustments just like they have in the past.