Against "Simultaneous Logout Measures"

[Chrallmal]

I could essentially write a white paper on why this is a dumb idea, so the short version is that this is only going to eliminate exploiting players that are logged in at the time of the mass-logout. Within an hour or two, new players will funnel in an take their place, and you're back to square one. Unless you're doing this every two hours or so, it's not even a band-aid of a fix. It's just a random outage for virtually no benefit compared to the outages it creates.

Also, I'd hate to be the guy on Balmung who waits two hours to get in, gets randomly logged out 20 minutes later, then has to wait two hours to get back in because everyone is funneling back into the server.

[KisaiTenshi]

Wonder if is possible to code a pop up where you have to type a confirmation that you are not afk. Therefore people who are afk can't type it and they are the only ones logged out

Those don't work. That's why most captchas are just "click if you're not a robot" boxes now. What it does is send a challenge-respond thing so that bots can't simply use the API to activate it, it has to actually do some calculation before it says OK. Though most machine-on-machine virtualization makes this not meaningful either.

The most direct approach is to just boot players that are exploiting anti-AFK measures (eg walking into walls, or running in circles, in instances like the inn, apartment, undersized dungeons, GC recruits room, etc) It's easy enough to see that they haven't left the instance in a reasonable amount of time.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

This is becoming insulting quite frankly.

Videogame or not, this is an online service and people are paying a subscription along with all the extras from the cash shop.
Some scheduled vacations for the launch of Stormblood only to be greeted by a mess and endless queues.
Then a majority of players who gets home from work and can only play during prime time are also greeted with queues, laggy housing districts, malfunctioning dungeon finders along other issues.

And now to further add to it, SE wants to punish paying subscribers further by implementing FORCED boot out of the game for all players(ironically now that queues are slowly stabilizing...).
I am expecting the log in servers to be flooded after the 10 minute sit out and a new queue problem making the experience for everyone considerably worse. I really hope that I am wrong about this though.

In any other online service subscribers would have been COMPENSATED by now.

Those issues you're complaing about?

Then a majority of players who gets home from work and can only play during prime time are also greeted with queues, laggy housing districts, malfunctioning dungeon finders along other issues.

That's what happens with all the afk players hogging up the server resources...
All those people trying to hide from other players so they don't get reported?
In their housing/apartment...


This is a step towards trying to rectify those issues.
It's an easy step to take, requiring no...

Or they could do the logical thing and, ya know, patch the exploit so that the afk timer kicks them out properly.

Development time and testing time, which would likely put a fix too late to make any difference for the current issue.


Still needs to be done though...
Manage the symptoms, while working on curing the problem.

[Japtor]

-snip-

Agreed. Even my little sister could have come up with the idea to just pull the plug and stick it back in, ala "first come, first serve" login, so everyone gets to play once a day. Looking at it long-term, this measure is obviously doomed to fail - the only explanation for coming up with something like this is to buy time for a proper fix, otherwise I'll fail to understand their decision making I'm afraid. You could of course make the argument that people are logging out and in all the time and it'll even out somewhat, but as long as the SB hype is strong this will be just wishful thinking.

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones to fill up those instead. They obviously know the reasons by now, hence why they have said that they were planning on implementing plot compensation and to help with moving whole FCs to new servers, but I haven't heard anything new about that lately.

Those 10 Gold Chocobo feathers are not going to cut it for everyone obviously (apart from the fast login on lower pop, but too many people on the congested servers have too much to leave behind), so I really hope that they think of something better with the time they are trying to buy here.

Upgrading the servers comes to mind of course, but let's be honest for a second - from a business standpoint, this would be a risky (in terms of server maintenances and stability issues which always come hand-in-hand with physical upgrades), expensive and time consuming investment while they don't even know for how long the SB hype will continue and inevitably die down. I can guarantee though that they won't spend one single thought on a server upgrade idea until at least a couple months after expansion release. Instead they will try to deal with this issue with what they have available at the moment.

I am however somehow looking forward to how this measure is going to affect our gameplay.

[MistakeNot]

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones to fill up those instead. They obviously know the reasons by now, hence why they have said that they were planning on implementing plot compensation and to help with moving whole FCs to new servers, but I haven't heard anything new about that lately.

That only covers one reason why people play on the big servers. There are also a significant number of people who want to play there just because they like seeing lots of other people around.

[Snapdragyn]

This is a horrible idea. Punish everyone because 1 or 2 servers have issues? Mind-boggling in its short-sightedness!

Pony up & force split the server(s) causing the issue. Comp some time to the people affected by the split(s) & angry. Don't wreck things for everyone on every server. [Disclosure: I'm on Gilgamesh, so could end up one of the people 'affected & angry' - I still favor forced split over messing up everyone else!]

Heck, even if you're dead set on mandatory log outs, don't do it like this & flood the log-in server. Set a maximum x hours played before mandatory log out per character instead - maybe 8 hours. Most folks wouldn't even be affected by that on weekdays, & probably only once on weekends. Pop-up reminder at 7 hours so people could decide 'do I want to just do this now & log voluntarily, or am I in the middle of something & need to push close to the limit?'. The re-logs will be spread out throughout the day that way, but you'll still be knocking out the perma-AFKers.

[Sylvina]

If their goal is to discourage people from logging on in the first place to reduce strain on servers they've succeeded. already thinking of what other games I could be playing today. I have no desire to be logged out mid dungeon.

[Japtor]

That only covers one reason why people play on the big servers. There are also a significant number of people who want to play there just because they like seeing lots of other people around.

True, that is definitely one of them. The big variety of issues players have with moving to new/lower pop servers is why SE has trouble to find a solution that works for everyone, I imagine. The challenge SE is facing right now (or should be facing) is to clear all of these problems in one shot and make a server transfer into something people understand as a positive thing for them. As long as this is not the case, everyone will want to stay packed on servers like Balmung and Gilgamesh like a can of sardines and always look for a way to bypass the login queue. I can already see people figuring out the server restart times and start afking as soon as they are up.

[Warlyx]

put balmung with low pop servers on a new data center shrug :/

[DPZ2]

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones ...

They remain where they are because, aside from a two-week period this summer (so far), they've enjoyed every bit of play time on that congested server. That enjoyment does not come from the Fantastic Storyline alone. It comes from playing with friends and, as time goes on, family. No one wants to lose that.

No one wants to lose that house they've had in the Goblet for the past X years, with all of its contents and memories, either.

At some point, there will need to be a way to encourage entire Free Companies to move as a unit. Cost will need to be zero for each member, and housing will need to be one-for-one between the current and target worlds. The logistics behind such a thing are not going to be resolved easily.



In the meantime, a judicious unscheduled "maintenance window" of 10 minutes duration, scheduled at a time when most AFK folks are not going to immediately log back on, will relieve some of the pressures. I suspect SE already knows when it would be best to perform that downtime, and, no, it won't be during prime time in the evenings.