Question about Balmung.

[BillyKaplan]

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No, this is you being unrealistic to an extreme. They cannot infinitely expand the capacity of a server no matter how much money and resources they pour into it, and that's before going into the question of whether or not they should. If your favorite restaurant is full, you go someplace else or wait until there's room, you don't tell them to tear down the laundromat next door so they can take that over. No the fact your pals are over at table 5 already doesn't change that.

Balmung took down the entire data center once. This IS SE doing what they can without crapping on Balmung's existing population. They're also adding more and more cross-server utilities, with more and more on the way. So sucks to be you, but they literally can't do anything to help you.

[SenorPatty]

And besides SorrowsEnd, what's your realistic fix for this? People flowed to Balmung while it was still restricted. They couldn't create chrs there so they paid for transfers to get in. You know what that means?

Option A: SE increases Balmung space. People rush there until it blows up, taking the datacenter with it.

Option B: SE makes a world strictly for RP. People still stay because their house>new world to RP in.

Option C: SE tears the hell out of Balmung and forcefully places people else. Cue playerbase rage and unsubs.

Unless you got an actual working idea in mind, their methods will continue to remain and work as intended.

[Settiesama]

Balmung is not 'more special or popular' than the other servers. The only reason it got it's reputation was because of Besaid in 1.0 being dubbed the RP server, which was one of the servers merged to become Balmung. Therefore Balmung became the unofficial RP server. That's it's rep, it's not special, and not more popular amongst the majority of players. The only reason we're in this state is because people kept telling others (a good majority being RPers) to join Balmung despite the fact it was already partially locked, with paid transfers the only way in. SE is somewhat to blame in the fact they did not stop this, but the players flooding in are not blameless.

As someone in Balmung, staying for my FC and housing, I wish the server remains locked, however long it takes for the numbers to reduce. I know first hand what will happen the second that lock is removed, and then they'll be forced to take even more drastic actions. If you want your friends in the overworld, ask them to make alts at the least. You still have cross world parties, and more cross world stuff coming in the future. Coming in here, throwing your toys out the pram because they won't spend on something minor or ruin a recovering server, as well as the whole data centre.. just so you can stand around with them doing nothing... really is not the way to make yourself look good, nor will it change anything at all.

[Keridwyn]

Op had you remained as open as you were in the first post we might have been able to hold a real conversation. But since it is clear that you really just want the answer of 'They will unlock it just for you today' I will leave you with this.

My server isn't dead and you don't get to play with your friends at the expense of the rest of the data centers stability.

[LadyKairi]

Snip

Acting like a child is throwing a tantrum because someone doesn't like the answers given to them, and won't stop whining and crying until they get what they want, which is exactly how you are acting. Just because you don't like the solution, doesn't mean it's bad or the one that shouldn't be taken. Balmung will open when it reaches a population that SE is comfortable with. Balmung isn't more special than the rest of the game's population. You don't deserve special treatment. If people on Balmung want to play with their friends, they can transfer to different worlds, just like so many friends had to move to them before the world was completely locked. Get to play with friends, AND would be contributing to the unlocking of Balmung. These whining posts are just getting old. Especially if people spent less time crying and more time actually doing something about it, maybe it would have opened by now just like gilga.

[reiichi]

Oh boy, this thread again. I love these ones because I've spent the time doing the research on it.

Basically, OP, Balmung is operating at WAY above the suggested capacity of what the other servers are. Square-Enix should have actually locked it and kept it locked a much before so it wouldn't have ever gotten this bad.

The basic server architecture of FFXIV appears to be a centralized login server for all global datacenters (so not China and no Korea), a lobby server per data center, world servers, and zone servers. There are other things in the mix too, like servers for the duty finder, instances, housing wards, etc. All of these come together to make the game we play and their invididual load and limits are different.

The login server is probably rarely, if ever, affected by too many players. It just needs to validate your credentials, set up some session data, and launch the game to connect you to a lobby server.

The lobby server operates on a per-datacenter basis. These are your 2002 errors. If a lobby server goes down, you can't login to a world, but you won't get kicked out either. This is also where character creation and login queues are handled. Once the lobby server's retrieved your character data and it knows what world you're trying to login to, you progress to the world server.

The world server accounts for all zone-inspecific features of the game and also functions as a proxy for all zones. Things like your chat, party, FC features, and Linkshells sits here. Every single player on your world is connected to the world server. Based on the unofficial census data, a world server is typically deemed "full" when it hits about 7000-8000 active players at any time. They might have one or more connections. That is a SHITTON of concurrent data to process and manage and relay to other related players. And it has to happen near-instantly or we'd have terrible syncing issues. A server like Balmung can have around 19,000 active players at times. There are physical limits to what can be done about this. You can't just throw more CPU, RAM, or "servers" at the problem. You can't always just upgrade to a better ISP. Or increase bandwidth. This server is your 90k errors.

Zone/instance/housing servers are then what handle what you can see and interact with on any map. These servers handle NPCs, mobs, status effects, and other general content. I personally don't know where the inventory sits, but the zone server has to load it to process items and their effects. Perhaps it lives on the world server because your items have to be loaded on -any- zone server. When you move zones, especially in and out of instances, your character data is cached to that server so it can retrieve details easily. Anything your character does has to get broadcasted to every other player around you, if not possibly the entire zone. The same goes for everything else you can interact with. Monsters die. FATEs pop. Hunts. Someone doing an emote. The zone server has to relay this to other characters and relay what they're doing to you. And this -also- has to be near-instant or there's lag. It typically polls at 200ms, which is the magic number for FFXIV latency. If your ping is under this, your experience should be perfectly playable with lag. Things like your character state and position also have to be synced back to the main database should you get disconnected or should anything about your character have been changed. Like items. Or maybe if your HP is higher/lower. Or your character died. Or gained a level. When a zone server gets too full to safely handle more connections, it stops new players from entering. These are your "cannot enter X" errors. Like on Balmung, previous patched filled up Mor Dhona to the point people couldn't do quests or enter the map. In Heavensward, Square Enix implemented an attempt at split zones. More copies of zones = reduced load on that one zone. However, FATEs and hunts still need to be synced or someone could possibly game the system and create an unfair advantage. This system was polished for Stormblood by letters players pick a zone or a random one. Balmung needed them for much of 4.0 because the active number of players was making individual zones unstable. It still does for housing interiors, which run on a single instance server/cluster.

Now, I know that's a lot of text above to read. The forums are likely going to give me hell for the pitiful 1000 character limit we're forced on because people abused long posts previously. But give it all a read and then decide if it's really wise for Balmung to be opened up. Look at the unofficial census data, especially Europe's, which tends to have the best distribution. When the entire datacenter starts hitting that magic 7500-8000 number of active players per server, that's what tells SE they need to add a new one. Omega and Louisoix both got HUGE influxes of players and locked transfers. They did exactly what Square Enix needed to happen. On the JP and NA datacenters, we see servers over capacity or tiny populations. They're not going to add a server until the smaller ones are fuller and the fuller ones are smaller. That means for Balmung to open, its population is gonna need to decrease. At the end of the day, it's about keeping the game playable for the most users. It may be easier to suggest your friends and their friends to move to a designated free server if they don't really have any strong ties to Balmung in particular. (Supposedly, there is supposed to be a transfer house feature in the works.)

[KaivaC]

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Oh trust me, some of the responses you've been giving are blowing the minds of 'us people' as well. I doubt Square anticipated that Balmung would get as big as it is, and even before completely locking the server they did try to mitigate the growing size with restricting character creation there. That didn't really curtail the issue, so it was locked. Which has been said multiple times, but you coming here and pouting like a child because you aren't getting your way is mind blowing. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but with your responses, all I can tell you at this point is to:

Deal. With. It.

Balmung's lock is not going to kill FFXIV - it is not the end all, be all server. Either your friends make an alt on Zalera, or you guys continue doing cross-world and maybe hang out elsewhere like discord.

[MistakeNot]

Considering it being the most popular server out of every server currently its something clearly special and nothing but hoping the community leaves isn't fixing it and will not fix it and needs something else to be done. How people cannot see that blows my mind and how they can defend SE for allowing it to get so big,locking the servers without stating it to anybody, 6months go by and nothing has happened and no word from the dev team i'm at a loss. I didn't want another 14 page issue on the matter but just some of the responses you people give is just mind blowing.

The reason Balmung is/was popular is simply because it was the biggest server. Yes, many people went there only because it was the biggest server.
It's also the main unofficial RP server which drew RPers there, but they are a minority of the population.

Your mind getting blown by the responses here says far more about your mind than the responses......

[Jijifli]

Just saying no isnt an answer. Wheres the info coming from SE? Its super frustrating.

Square has stated when they put these limitation in place that the servers only get unlocked when the population of them isn't as high. This doesn't mean the server needs to die, but it needs to let other servers possibly catch up. Gilgamesh is an example of a server that was also locked, but got unlocked when other servers started to catch up. It didn't get behind them, but others were getting up where Gilg's population wouldn't be deciding factor.

That's why Balmung isn't unlocked yet. We were so huge that removing a chunk of our active playerbase still isn't enough. It stinks. I get it. I don't like it either, but our numbers ARE going down ever so slowly. One day it'll come back open. Right now the Aether world's population is doing much better at being spaced around than it was in the past, where back in the servers like Zalera were almost entirely dead of population.

[NolLacnala]

That really wouldn't work they have an fc a house friends etc.

They have an FC house on Balmung? They can sell it at 500% markup, move to your server and be set for life.

So it does work, they simply choose not to. Just like the rest of Balmung.