Quote Originally Posted by Lynart View Post



It doesn't help that I'm a software developer; I know about load testing and scaling servers. I don't know what reason Square-Enix decided to skip the load testing part and not find a way to recruit a service for, say expansion release month or two, increasing the server load...but FFXIV is not exactly a dying game so there is obviously $$$ to go around.
Full stack engineer here, I work in fact to develop technology for streaming mass scale content online. I write the video streaming tech used by the companies that send you things like movies, TV, major conventions (inc gaming), nation wide annual sporting events, continent wide celibrity events, etc.

Code that scales up and down with demand.

This is 2017, the internet has been around since the 1960s. These are known issues with known solutions. I have personally overseen a major game company that usually streams to a few hundred people an hour scale for a few day event to 150,000 simultaneously.

At the most basic level: you rent some temporary server capacity. At a long term planning level, you partner with cloud servers to dynamicly spin up or down resources with demand and you build internal structures so you can take resources from ine thing and put them on anaother automatically based on where the load is hitting.

The moment Cold Steel happened, we should have had something like the server that handles... changing hair styles... inn rooms... or even animation cycles for level 1 squirrel-rats... cycled over (or you know... whatever was not being used in that moment. Those examples were just random silly to make the point).