Lets talk about: something actually important -> INSTABLE SERVERS

[Dark_Frosti]

Where does all the Sub and Mogry-shop money go to
Certainly not into the actual important stuff.

Its really sad that one month after the release of SB we still have to talk about mass DCs, map crashes, and a general laggy appearance.

With the only actions taken against those topics being:
-Removing Map channels.
-Locking maps to a certain amount of people

If someone has a propper explanation for this, i will shut up.
But right now it feels like a rip off

[Enla]

The game has been almost continuously DDoS'd since the launch and the groups who are doing it show no sign of stopping either. Yes, the servers are as far from stable as they should be on a good day due to the shoddy way they backwrote over 1.0's coding to get ARR pushed out - but this time it's not really SE's fault.

[Anzaman]

The game has been almost continuously DDoS'd since the launch and the groups who are doing it show no sign of stopping either. Yes, the servers are as far from stable as they should be on a good day due to the shoddy way they backwrote over 1.0's coding to get ARR pushed out - but this time it's not really SE's fault.

As far as I know, it has been NA servers being targeted by DDoS.

Trying to do big stuff like Ixion, results in insane amount of lag, disconnects and bad FATE ratings.

[reiichi]

Let's also not forget that the money from FFXIV goes to Square Enix first. Then a small portion of it gets funneled back to FFXIV's departments and staff. THey don't magically get to keep everything they earn.

There are multiple factors at play that can affect someone's gaming experience at any time. (And often, the experience degrades when multiple things are happening, so pinpointing it can be more difficult.)

Let's go over a few things that have happened before/after 4.0 with some basic facts.

These are things to take into consideration.

- FFXIV Worlds are designed to accomodate about 5000-7000 players.
- Many of the overpopulated worlds (like Balmung in particular) had over double that number.
- The amount of data your client needs is dependant on how many players are on that zone (battle actions, positions, etc) and how many players are there in all (linkshells, free companies, retainers, etc).

For some of the worlds, they were over the 7500 logged-in session limited before the NA datacenter move. Before 4.0 released. Possibly before 3.0 had even released (although SE took action a bit too late there).

A map/zone NEEDS to get locked when its population hits a threshold or it affects every single entity on it. SE balances the game for a response time of up to 200ms. If it can't hit that in a best-case due to sheer population, it prevents the zone from becoming further congested. This is why we got zone instances for many of the SB maps. When the average population of characters trying to access a zone stablized, they removed the instancing. (Which turns out, they did it too soon. They acknowledged this in the recent Live Letter and will be putting some back).

They've also been getting DDoS attacks, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service attacks. In generally, this means there's an extremely large amount of computers (likely a virus-infected botnet) that are endlessly spamming connections to the servers. It doesn't matter if the traffic is legitimate (like a player connection) or just a connection attempt (which is wht a DDoS usually is). The amount of bandwidth and processing needed to send back a connection failure is plenty enough to cause severe congestion and undue stress on the servers, the datacenter hardware (like their routers and firewalls) and their ISPs. According to a recent Lodestone post, the DDoS attacks on the server/datacenter side have either stopped or be blocked. New attacks are targetting the ISPs that connect people to the datacenter. This means not only FFXIV is affected, but any other server in that datacenter. Typically when this happens, the only option is to contact that provider and see if they're doing anything about it. (Some can and do. Others shut down those networks until the attacks stop. Some provide alternate routes, which may not be able to accomodate as many connections and bandwidth). The internet really does work a lot like many interconnected freeways. Sure, a 5 or 7 lane freeway is great! But it can slow down with traffic. Taking a street might work, but there are more stop lights and they can't handle the same number of cars.

While it looks like the basic server architecture/layout stayed about the same from 1.0 to 2.0 (Login, Lobby, World, Zone, etc), most MMOs use something similar. They could try to process more information client-side, but that opens up more hacks and cheating methods. If they went back to processing more server-side, we'd see lag like 1.0 had. There's a delicate balance and how it scales is ultimately dependent on more than just a single player's connection to the servers.

[Lexia]

I have not had that many problems playing the game and as for below.

-Locking maps to a certain amount of people

SE already doing this to a extent with the "area congested please try again later" someone was here on the forums complaining about it with the Ixion mob.

[Airget]

As far as I know, it has been NA servers being targeted by DDoS.

Trying to do big stuff like Ixion, results in insane amount of lag, disconnects and bad FATE ratings.

Which I feel can also be explained. Inventory increase. They said they don't have plans to increase the inventory yet or for a while because the addition they did add put a much bigger strain on the server.

Think of it like this. So before if 300 people were in a zone with a 100 inventory and 25X12 so 300X350=105,000

However now the data is +40 to inventory and +10 to each armoury chest so you have 300X560=168,000

The data in essence has gone up 50% in terms of what needs to be saved on the server however often they do it. This means that in 3.0 if there were 300 people in a zone they would only be sending out 105,000 information to the server, now in 4.0 they are sending 168,000 so it definitely does alter the capacity a server can withstand at a given time.

And this is pretty much for people who wonder why Odin or Behemoth didn't have this issue but ixion does and may believe is because the inventory changes have increased the amount of data each person has on them which in essence makes them each worth 1.5 people instead of 1 from 3.X series. So where 3.0 might have 300 people and the servers can handle it, in 4.0 you kinda have 450 people in the zone in terms of information on hand on top of other little things like the ability to keep your chocobo out.

[Dark_Frosti]

Pointing out inventories as a problem might be foundated but yet asks for a whole different solution than "please dont have so much stuff in your inventory".
If you would just make crafting materials like shards and start deleting Legacy crap and other pointless/useless trash

the other things is, that i as a customer (who obviously pays for a service) demands to take use of that service, beeing it solely for my entertainment. In other words: selling 100 entry tickets but only have room for 50 people is NOT ok

Im also very chill on those things(believe it or not!)just those shitty excuses and solution suggestions drive me MAD. Instead of just saying:"We are currently investigating BS and sorry bro, here have 10 Aetherite tickets o/"

It gives the feeling that they completely ignore reddit or anything else other than the OF, in case those posts havent been banned or got flooded away by other complete nonsense"PLEASE DONT NERF THIS JOB OMG PLEASE"

cheers for all the replies<3

[reiichi]

Pointing out inventories as a problem might be foundated but yet asks for a whole different solution than "please dont have so much stuff in your inventory".
If you would just make crafting materials like shards and start deleting Legacy crap and other pointless/useless trash

Empty slots still have to be passed to the client too, although that generally doesn't take as much bandwidth speaking from experience. There are different tiers of memory where data is stored to make a server like this work. Things that can stay in the server's working memory (or RAM) are fast. Things that the server has to contact a database server to retrieve like your inventory, gearsets, retainer inventories, armoire, etc, is a much bigger hit. There comes a point where you hit the physical limits of network communication. ...usually much before you overload a server's CPU or RAM unless there's a memory leak or some really complex code is being run.

the other things is, that i as a customer (who obviously pays for a service) demands to take use of that service, beeing it solely for my entertainment. In other words: selling 100 entry tickets but only have room for 50 people is NOT ok

Im also very chill on those things(believe it or not!)just those shitty excuses and solution suggestions drive me MAD. Instead of just saying:"We are currently investigating BS and sorry bro, here have 10 Aetherite tickets o/"

The same thing happens at a theme park. You get sold entry into the park. Not entry to the particular attractions that can only hold so many people in them. Lines form. You wouldn't unsafely put people onto a ferris wheel or something, would you? Or let too many people into a public pool? Or bathroom? Generally the solution provided is "try another one." If one server's horribly congested, SE isn't forcing you to play on it. They'd probably recommend choosing a less-congested one for a better experience. Naturally, that isn't always the best solution in a game where we need to level up, progress through the story quests, and when we want to interact with friends. But that's not the server's fault.

It gives the feeling that they completely ignore reddit or anything else other than the OF, in case those posts havent been banned or got flooded away by other complete nonsense"PLEASE DONT NERF THIS JOB OMG PLEASE"

cheers for all the replies<3

General Discussion's also not the right forum for a lot of the game's issues. There are technical support boards, feedback boards, suggestions, etc. Because there are so many threads, people tend to remake the same ones over and over. (Look up "we want 1.0 back" threads. You'll find a bunch. Or ones on glamour. Or class changes. Or "bare feet" as a recent one.)