New Servers?

[Reyll]

Honestly if they changed housing completely to be an instance based thing, similar to Black Desert Online, it'd probably help quite a bit with the lag issues. One ward, you can buy any one house (everyone is able to) and when you enter it's your house or u can choose a different option (like apartments) to visit someone else's on the door.

I'm in favor for instanced housing, as well. I haven't played Black Desert Online but Wildstar had an amazing housing system when it came to visiting other people's plots and things like that. I get where they are coming from with the neighborhood feel and everything, but there are much, much better ways of doing it than how they are now. Three years is long enough keep crying wolf when it comes to server related things.

[Reyll]

They can also cash in on returning players when they come back with the retainers and pay double the sub amount. Retainers are a worse cash grab then anything in the cash shop. "oh we have itemizing/inventory issues, pay for it suckers.

Retainers are also probably the thing that set me off the most. With a very limited inventory system, they only give you TWO retainers to store all of your older stuff and crafting things for how many classes? Your sub can reach over TWENTY dollars a month paying for what should already be included in the game at no charge.

[Reyll]

WoW has a vastly bigger budget because it has a vastly bigger subscription base. WoW will also go for a year an a half without a content update except for cash shop items. Lets not pretend WoW doesn't nickel and dime less than SE.

Yes, WoW did go for a year and a half without a content update at the end of Warlords, a mistake which they learned from and swiftly corrected with Legion. I don't know why people are choosing to latch onto that when that is not the case anymore. Pre-Legion, would you have been happy to pay an extra dollar a month on your sub to pay for those individual bank tabs in your bank and your sub reach into the twenty dollar range? No, because that's not something you should be charging a customer on TOP of the sub fee. That is the epitome of nickel and diming, especially when you blame your OWN server infrastructure for the problem and only do minor upgrades to them every expansion.

[Jadub2k]

Agreed the retainer thing should be on top of the sub because seems like your 15$ is just a key to get through the front door & you got to paying for everything else lol For one thing, I just hope they fix this finally. If were going to deal with the before and after release of every expansion for this game (We dealt with it during beta, before/after ARR release, before/after HW release, now before Stormblood release), then we need to hold them to task & start calling them out on it instead of just excepting it. Also I'm not saying that it is, but it FEELS like for the past (about to be) 4 years now. The player base has been pumping so much money into this game for so long, only to get mediocre in return. And it hurts to say something like that for a game that is legitimately fun to play. I mean like.. I've been subbed to this game for this long, so there obviously doing something right. Right??

[Khalithar]

They should offer free world transfers off certain excessively popular worlds; no problems on mine even with my ping since it's not bursting full of half the population of the entire game all in one place.

They would have to:

1. Remove the Gil limit on transfer.
2. Provide a voucher for a free house the same size and identical to the one they leave behind for both the FC one and the personal one with every furnishing accounted for.
3. Allow people to transfer their entire guild to a new server with exactly the same GC reputation and amount of FC credits.
4. Allow the people that transfer to a new server to have their FC already made and still be a part of it as soon as they login to the new server.

I'm sure there's more but that's all I can think of offhand.

[Khalithar]

Next post since I can't edit on mobile. I'd love it if we could have a more populated server on Mateus. As is, our server is one of the smallest, I can't imagine servers that lack for housing especially when more than half of the houses on my server are empty and no one wants them.

[Belhi]

Do you think World of Warcraft doesn't have massively overpopulated servers? Several times larger than Gilgamesh and Balmung, even? Do you think they crash several times on a weekly basis?

SE has the resources to make this game operate smoothly. They choose not to allocate them here.

I never said that poorly performing servers was ok. I said that upgrading servers and having working servers are two different things. Again the server issues seem generally localised to one datacentre. The rest seem to be working rather well.

They can also cash in on returning players when they come back with the retainers and pay double the sub amount. Retainers are a worse cash grab then anything in the cash shop. "oh we have itemizing/inventory issues, pay for it suckers.

You would need to have the full 8 retainers to double your sub cost. I don't even know more than 1 current player who has that many and that guy burns money on things like fantasia's like there is no tomorrow. Concerns over server stability with a major server overhaul are perfectly valid. Expansion launches themselves can often be technically messy as any bugs missed by the QA or any issues generated by the large number of player activity start showing up. It makes sense to deal with one set of potential fires at a time.

Yes, WoW did go for a year and a half without a content update at the end of Warlords, a mistake which they learned from and swiftly corrected with Legion. I don't know why people are choosing to latch onto that when that is not the case anymore. Pre-Legion, would you have been happy to pay an extra dollar a month on your sub to pay for those individual bank tabs in your bank and your sub reach into the twenty dollar range? No, because that's not something you should be charging a customer on TOP of the sub fee. That is the epitome of nickel and diming, especially when you blame your OWN server infrastructure for the problem and only do minor upgrades to them every expansion.

That content drought has been the same for every expansion WoW has had for ages. MoP had just as long a drought. So did Cata. It's nothing new. All they have corrected so far in Legion is to release a steady set of patches. They are yet to show if they can actually keep on releasing content while working on an expansion.

Also, I would point out that the actual available inventory you have in FF14 is quite competitive with WoW. Even now your personal inventory in WoW is a maximum of round 136 slots and many players don't have that. They also have no Armoury equivalent so that bag space requires you to hold your gear as well. Just with Personal bag space that's 136 in WoW verses 100 + 25 for every gear slot you have in FF14. Then you compare retainers to WoW's bank. Until void storage which only will hold limited things WoW had 8 bag slots so maybe 240 plus about another 80 I think. They have expanded this over the last couple of years but that is still rather recent. FF14 started by giving the player 350 slots with no additional cost.

Now I am not saying I agree with them dealing with peoples inventory complaint by just giving us more retainers we can hire but the argument that FF14 is way more stingy than say WoW with its inventory space is pretty incorrect. The main advantage WoW has had is the Wardrobe feature making keeping gear for glamour unnecessary.

Server upgrades are not small things, particularly in MMOs. They are costly and complicated and the Developers need to be able to justify the expense to the executives and investors even if they want to do it.

[Reyll]

I'm not gonna' further this with more WoW vs. FFXIV debating but inventory wouldn't be an issue if they released the same kind of system. Yoshi-P specifically said in one of the live letters or at fanfest (I don't remember which one), that a wardrobe system like that in this game would cost "significant server resources so we probably won't see it." The issue I am pointing out is that that shouldn't even be a valid excuse for them not to try, because *having* the server resources to be able to do that would solve a lot of the inventory problem in the first place but they're not even considering it. They constantly make excuses of why we won't see things or why we can't have certain features because of server this or server that. You are right, server upgrades are not small things but for the one of the most popular MMOs on the market, I am expecting them to be a bit better than what we are given.

[Felis]

Balmung only need a hard cap of players who can be online at the same time (not only locked character creation) and activated afk kick on Balmung

[Belhi]

I'm not gonna' further this with more WoW vs. FFXIV debating but inventory wouldn't be an issue if they released the same kind of system. Yoshi-P specifically said in one of the live letters or at fanfest (I don't remember which one), that a wardrobe system like that in this game would cost "significant server resources so we probably won't see it." The issue I am pointing out is that that shouldn't even be a valid excuse for them not to try, because *having* the server resources to be able to do that would solve a lot of the inventory problem in the first place but they're not even considering it. They constantly make excuses of why we won't see things or why we can't have certain features because of server this or server that. You are right, server upgrades are not small things but for the one of the most popular MMOs on the market, I am expecting them to be a bit better than what we are given.

Did you miss the bit about the fact we are getting server upgrades? They are putting money into this very thing. They announced it at Las Vegas.

As for the Wardrobe system I totally agree that it would help a lot. The only time I remember him talking about it was him saying that they weren't working on it at the moment and if they were going to do something like that they would probably put the resources to expanding the existing inventory. I don't totally agree with that but that's that.

When Yoshi-P says that they cant do something at the moment I suspect it probably means that either A) the engine cant handle it, B) the servers can't handle it, C) the client hardware can't handle it, or D) the cost of introducing such a feature would make it extremely unlikely for management to give it the go ahead. All of those are very valid reasons. Do remember any such changes are on top of existing development costs for the content we get every 3.5 months and the player base has a very large field of features they want added to the game.