Question about Balmung.

[Keridwyn]

My goal was simply to come up with quick ideas without thinking much.

Apology accepted.

The biggest problem is you keep calling things dead servers when NA no longer has any such thing. Our populations are huge in comparison to the JP servers. It just seems like it because what we did have were massive population swings. At one point Balmung had a 5:1 ratio on Mateus (our tiniest server). Then they locked Balmung and Greg and suddenly a diaspora occurred and every other server had a population benefit. But it still hasn't been enough. This why an upgrade won't be helpful because all you'll see is the population swings in action again. People will desert the smaller servers all trying to crowd back on to Balmung again and then...the cycle will repeat.

[SorrowsEnd]

Apology accepted.

The biggest problem is you keep calling things dead servers when NA no longer has any such thing. Our populations are huge in comparison to the JP servers. It just seems like it because what we did have were massive population swings. At one point Balmung had a 5:1 ratio on Mateus (our tiniest server). Then they locked Balmung and Greg and suddenly a diaspora occurred and every other server had a population benefit. But it still hasn't been enough. This why an upgrade won't be helpful because all you'll see is the population swings in action again. People will desert the smaller servers all trying to crowd back on to Balmung again and then...the cycle will repeat.

I appreciate you accepting it and at the end of the day you seemed like a person who was intelligent and also understandable. The issue I have isnt just Balmung its all locked servers. People can't play with friends unless they leave and I don't agree with that. I didn't want some big thread again about Balmung like all the others my intent of the post at first was to know if theirs any info about Balmung in particular that was spoken. Just info would be enough for me. I looked online and haven't found anything. Most replys I got were "it's locked because its full or it needs to be locked etc etc" some even down right disrespecting my friends which angered me. It seems like SE isnt very public about another thing I wish they'd improve.

[Keridwyn]

It seems like SE isnt very public about another thing I wish they'd improve.

Most companies aren't very public with sensitive server information. Every once and a while we get an official census but it's very unlikely that they're going to come out and say 'here are the limitations on our hardware'. All we can go by are best guesses. That's why a lot of us are watching Levi right now, it's climbing close in active numbers and we're waiting to see what happens. If it locks tight we'll know that it's gotten too close to full. If it stays open we know that they're trying to drop Balmung's numbers far enough so that the server has a chance to absorb all the people that will likely rush it the moment it opens.

Also they're not likely to comment on Balmung in particular simply because they're not playing favorites. They're treating all the servers the same, which is good news! Since we've already seen Gilgamesh get locked for a significant amount of time and then unlocked we know that they've got some kind of plan in mind and that they're sticking to it. It means that when Balmung hits whatever number they've got in mind, it too will get unlocked. Is it fair...yes. They're doing their best to affect only the servers that need it. While it has a ripple effect in the fact it separates friends, those are fairly small ripples compared to other things like massive server overhauls. Those will be a short term solution at best and while I would welcome some better hardware, I'm realistic about how much good it would actually do when it comes to server numbers.

This is what we do know. At the beginning of Heavensward Balmung did crash Aether. It was never officially mentioned to my knowledge but if you google it you'll find plenty of people talking about it because it was easy to observe (just like when Greg crashed during the SB early access a ton of people suddenly got through the Cold Steel questblock). SE tried to soft-lock the server but that didn't work, people continued to pay money to transfer on and exploit a tiny post-maintenance window to get new characters onto the server. Honestly, the soft-lock should never have happened. That, more than anything, is what made the problem worse. It helped sell the allure of the server, it made it into an exclusive club. Had they just locked it right then, there would have been thousands of less characters on the server and the problem could have been abated much sooner. Instead they let it stay in that half-locked state for the entire HW expansion, only permanently locking it come SB. Queue forum anger.

We are never going to get away from the necessity of locked servers until we figure out how to fit infinite data on a server. Otherwise there will always be a cap of some kind just for the sake of the server being stable. We can always try to upgrade to bigger and bigger servers but that's just delaying the inevitable. There just currently isn't an answer that's fair to everyone for the problem. Now could they possibly work on a technology that generates unique cross-server zone instances for cross server parties...sure. But at that point we're getting away from the question of what can the servers handle and what will the not so gracefully aging game engine allow. Still, I'd endorse them pursuing such an option to help solve the playing with friends issues.

[Galgarion]

They just have to take a hatchet to Balmung. Flat out. The players won't do it themselves,they're too settled and indolent. Take the decision away from them, and carve that server up like a roast turkey, SE. You know what you call one artery that's swollen and bigger than the others? A guaranteed bad time.

[Theodric]

They just have to take a hatchet to Balmung. Flat out. The players won't do it themselves,they're too settled and indolent. Take the decision away from them, and carve that server up like a roast turkey, SE. You know what you call one artery that's swollen and bigger than the others? A guaranteed bad time.

They don't need to do anything. The server is bloated though it is no longer bloated to the extent that it crashes the entire datacentre each time a new patch goes live. The people remaining there do so with the knowledge that nobody new will be joining the server for quite some time. The people who are not on Balmung who really want to go there simply need to reconsider their stance.

[Galgarion]

They don't need to do anything. The server is bloated though it is no longer bloated to the extent that it crashes the entire datacentre each time a new patch goes live. The people remaining there do so with the knowledge that nobody new will be joining the server for quite some time. The people who are not on Balmung who really want to go there simply need to reconsider their stance.

So it's like one of those post-apocalyptic British flicks where all the women are dead and children are no longer born?

[Theodric]

So it's like one of those post-apocalyptic British flicks where all the women are dead and children are no longer born?

Pretty much!

[SorrowsEnd]

it crashes the entire datacentre each time a new patch goes live

You do realize that it isn't Balmung that crashes the server right?
It's everybody from Aether getting on at the same time.

[BillyKaplan]

You do realize that it isn't Balmung that crashes the server right?
It's everybody from Aether getting on at the same time.

Servers have their own capacity and management to an extent. Servers can and do crash independently without the other servers on the data server suffering. I remember one time early SB Gilgamesh crashed and suddenly all of Balmung could go through Raubahn extreme it was glorious. But the rest of the data center yet lived.
When Balmung goes down, on the other hand...

[reiichi]

You do realize that it isn't Balmung that crashes the server right?
It's everybody from Aether getting on at the same time.

while everyone on Aether contributes, Aether's also got some of the most populated servers. Balmung can and does crash the entire datacenter at times. It was also one of the only servers that needed to keep the multiple zone instances and AFK timers. Square Enix also had to initiate nightly server reboots during Stormblood to keep our queues down. Queses over 3000 people that took MULTIPLE HOURS to get through. Imagine not even being able to login because you had thousands of people ahead of you in line and the server was so overfilled that five hours later, assuming you didn't get a 90k, you were still waiting to get in. That was Balmung.

If haven't, go back and read my post on page 7. I already went into detail on what can and cannot be done.