So has Aether crashed again?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Oh, that may have been an actual issue, but it may not be the root cause.
They have lots of sustainable servers, people just transferred off for "greener pastures." In reality, they need to lock down Balmung and Greg, and LEAVE them locked, to EVERYTHING. No world transfers to either, and free transfers off, along with the removal of the gil restriction specifically for people leaving them. Add housing wards to the other servers and make it so you can transfer housing between servers.

They won't because it has a far higher chance of backfiring. Plenty of people who play were invited by friends. I likely wouldn't be playing had a friend of mine not mentioned FFXIV and the roleplay aspect of Balmung. Yes, they could transfer to a smaller server with their friends, but if you've already established roots, are you really going to leave, especially knowing you cannot ever transfer that character? At this point, they have to wait for Stormblood to hopefully funnel people into less populated servers.

[Jetstream_Fox]

Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect this issue to occur in other datacenters that contain high-population servers, then? Perhaps something to check into...

It's hard to say, Balmung and Gilgamesh combined as of the August 2016 census had 36,114 people, over on the JP side it took Chocobo, Shinryu, and Bahamut to just equal the combined player base of Bal and Gig, which totalled out to 35,750. It could be the JP datacenters have better optimized hardware, or whatever company runs those respected centers is more on top of things verses Level 3.

That's of course assuming the issue isn't on SEs side in regards to using Lv3.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

So let us review. I make a complaint and respond to those who detract from my complaint, and that makes you think I am seething with hostility? Did I ask them to respond to my complaint? Did I attack anything beyond their counterargument? Did I attack them personally beyond possibly upsetting their stance? Am I not allowed to respond to their detraction? Interesting. I'd like to hear more about this very strange outlook of your perception of my stress through text.

Actually, I get that impression based on your refusal to accept any other narrative except "the devs and/or Sqaure Enix are drooling idiots." Your subsequent cries of white knighting only had credence you just want something to scream at. Maybe servers do need to be better structured, but that isn't something you do in patch cycles. On the other hand, it could very well be constant updates put strain on the code and they need to test limits. Those are only two possibilities of many, but forgive me. I'm just white knighting the big bad corporation. Far be it letting critical thinking to get in the way of shouting "the devs are morons!!!!!!"

[RaijinSupreme]

its back up

[Nightscar]

Yay its back up!
Now you all can stop bitching at one another like a bunch of 13 yr olds ...
O wait ..

[Domeric]

Free falls? And using the official forums as a measure of player confidence? I'd wager less than 10% visit the official forums regularly, and of them around 1% even bother posting. That is not even a decent enough sample size to make that claim. The amount of hyperbole in some threads these days is staggering. But such is the internet, I guess...

I was waiting for this.

It literally doesn't matter who comes to the forums and who doesn't. I didn't comment on forum patronage, I commented on player faith.

It's true that a marginal number comes to the forums (you have no idea what percentage and neither do I) but your suggestion is that the only people who care are the ones voicing it. There are a plethora of people who care right now but don't visit the forums but do care about being able to play the game during their prime time. I'd be curious to see how tumblr and twitter fair re: continuous lapses in paid service.

[AmalonStar]

As I've posted in another thread about the server crashes these issues happen every time there is new content. Every major patch we get we also get what I like to call the 'temp players' that come back to playing the game for the new content. The temp players are a large portion to why the servers crash like they do after we get the new content, then there are other issues that contribute to the crash problem like bugs that need to get ironed out. With this patch and the new cross world party finder that is another feature that would contribute to the data center crashes, give it some time for them to iron out the bugs. Another thing they could do is put the brackets back in like they did when he was released until things smooth out again and the temp players get their full of the new content and disappear again.