I hope SE learns a few lessons from this.

[Daralii]

GW2 and ESO do not have these problems because of their modern architecture. Every map is an instance, and when one instance is full, they spin up another one. They can probably run 20-30 such instances on one host, and can dynamically provision new hosts automatically when demand is high.

That's how pretty much all modern online services are built whether they're games, social media networks, live streaming services, etc. In FFXIV's case, SE didn't build it that way and it's probably not worth the cost of overhauling the backend to handle a few days every 2 years of heavy load.

The infrastructure's been bad from the very start, so bad that anyone changing zones in 1.X could cause the entire server to hitch. I pity the newer people that have to work with framework that awful.