Question about Balmung.

[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.

[SorrowsEnd]

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.

Balmung does not crash the server itself theirs no proof of that. It does not help it being the biggest on Aether however it does not crash the server. Its everybody getting on at once that does it. If Balmung crashes itself of course others are able to exp better connections because 21-22k people on whats like a 10yr server is gone.

[reiichi]

snip

First, Aether's a datacenter. Balmung's individual zones have crashed. While not a population issue, there was that fishing bug recently that would bring down worlds until SE first removed the spots, then finally addressed the issue.

Second, Balmung going down wouldn't just clear up connections. Servers don't work that way. Clients will try to reconnect. They'll also all get kicked back to the Lobby server, which hey, that's "Aether" there. And well...overload the lobby server and there goes the entire datacenter's access to get into every world on that datacenter.

Third, these servers aren't 10 years old. Assuming that SE recycled all their servers, the ones used in the now 7 year old 1.0 would have stayed in Japan. I kinda do this for a living, but you generally try to avoid shipping heavy expensive hardware overseas. Aether was previously in Montreal and now it's in California. Likely, they didn't ship the physical machines either and leased out hardware or just bought new machines. But a bigger and better machine can't always fix these issues. There's still packet processing and packet broadcasting to take into account, which is why the world is locked.

tldr: So like I explain on page 7, you can and do hit physical limitations, whether processing, bandwidth, latency, or a combination based on how many people are connected where. There's a minimal game experience that needs to happen and Balmung already impacts that. Until its population decreases enough for it to be considered stable in the long-term, it's not gonna open.