Ever getting server merge?

[Hanayumi]

Well with the already low population in Mateus, many people are just transferring out for the larger servers, and unfortunately not everyone wants to do such and rather not have people left behind to such conditions, so yeah that why I asked about merging or something of the sort and its been like this well before even 3.0 came out. >.<

[MilesSaintboroguh]

As long as housing exists, it's not going to happen unless the devs magically make more wards. No matter how dead some severs appear to be, there's bound to be players using houses and last thing we need is more poo fan storms over housing again.

[Catwho]

Since the population for the game is theoretically growing, what SE does instead is lock the over-full servers to new character creation, and encourage people to plop onto the lowest population server instead.

It will be a few years before SE considers server merges. As Sove said, they're far more likely to to encourage people to transfer off the over populated servers than they are to merged two lower population servers.

It wasn't until most of the XI servers had a prime time population under 1000 that they merged them.

[Twilite]

Since the population for the game is theoretically growing, what SE does instead is lock the over-full servers to new character creation, and encourage people to plop onto the lowest population server instead.

It will be a few years before SE considers server merges. As Sove said, they're far more likely to to encourage people to transfer off the over populated servers than they are to merged two lower population servers.

It wasn't until most of the XI servers had a prime time population under 1000 that they merged them.

Remora went much sooner than that.

[Gilraen]

It's not data limitations, it's not server limitations. It's not even limitations. It's been said already, the only reason Square would merge servers is to reduce costs by merging the lowest population servers. The only reason to reduce costs is if the game is on it's way out. We're only a couple months into first expansion with the second expansion already being worked on, we're far from 'on it's way out'. I foresee server merges happening in a few years, but that's a few years from now.

[Kosmos992k]

I think the reason low population servers are feeling to some, empty, is not that they are actually empty or in decline, it is that Duty Finder is universally light on players right nos,because so many are gorging on Diadem. I'm on Behemoth, not a low population by any means, but I tend to play at off peak hours, and the current state of the Qs reminds me of when the Hunts were first implemented. So many people were doing little to nothing else for weeks, Qs were long, and PF was near empty. After a few more weeks things will return to normal. Another factor is the spread of players throught the content, so players are less likely to congregate in the same area because their individual goals differ.

Think if there will never be server merge, then they should at least add some kind of data center wide Party Finder and maybe even market boards, or at least with a few servers in one. I think that would help things a lot, the only other thing I can think of would be to start restricting transfers or character creations like how they did when FFXIV ARR 1st started but that would prolly piss a lot of people off, >.<

Something something data limitations, something something server limitations.

LOL I'm sure that the default answer for requests is something along those lines these days. That said, if they can handle cross server Qs and matching in DF then data center wide MB would be relatively easy. A cross server/data center wide party finder would be harder since you'd really want cross server friend lists and blacklists to go with it.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

7kiukiu7kiu7

You're asking the devs to change the DF so that it can access servers outside of its own data center. The servers would explode trying to connect with each other like that in large chunks.

[Kosmos992k]

You're asking the devs to change the DF so that it can access servers outside of its own data center. The servers would explode trying to connect with each other like that in large chunks.

Something I want to clarify before I reply; the language SE uses to describe their server groups as data centers creates semantic problems when you talk about the JP data center, NA data center and EU data center. Both the JP and NA data centers (physical locations) host multiple server groups that SE refers to as data centers. I'll stick to 'server group' to refer to the 'data centers' such as Primal, Aether, Gaia, Elemental, etc., and I'll use data center for the physical data center location that hosts the server groups.

I wasn't suggesting that DF should access anything outside it's own sever group. Let me clarify as my post may not have been clear. I was agreeing with the idea that someone suggested for cross sever MB & PF (within the same server group - for example 'Primal'), not across multiple server groups. I was here during Beta 3 & 4 and when they changed DF to only span server groups (what SE terms data centers). I know they can't simply span all servers, especially now that the EU servers have physically moved to the EU, resulting in 3 physical data center locations separated by 1000's of miles and many milliseconds of network latency.

Given that the server groups (SE calls them data centers) are co located in physical data centers and share the same networking infrastructure, some might ask why things like DF cannot span all server groups within the physical data center; for example a DF spanning the Elemental, Gaia and Mana server groups at the JPN data center. As you said, that would likely not work because the increased load on the servers responsible for Qing and matching, along with the extra communication across all servers would cause problems.

I was saying was that since we already have DF/DR that operates across all severs within a server group (which we do) then implementing a cross server (within the same server group) market board should be feasible. I also said that a cross server Party Finder (within a server group) might not be as easy since PF across multiple servers would seem to require cross server (again within a server group) friends lists and black lists which would be new functionality and hard to maintain.

I hope I was clear enough. I wasn't suggesting that we should bridge everything together, not only do we already know that doesn't work well, but the geographic separation of servers between JPN, NA and EU creates even more issues of latency and bandwidth between the locations.

[Gilraen]

Actually, the Duty servers used to pool from all servers. The problem from that was lag. Players from Japan, Europe and the Americas routinely played together inciting lag the likes of which hasn't been seen since. They instituted data centers to reduce the lag. There's leftovers of this old integration in the Duty with the language selection. Reintegrating the Duty servers would hasten queues but also bring back the old lag. Good luck dodging AoEs.

[Hanayumi]

Yeah, I really think cross server Party Finder and possibly Market board would be the next best thing, if server merging would be too difficult to have happen. Heard mention of a cross server PF in the works but only for Raids, so guess its a start but still a ways from a good solution to things.