New data centers

[Mansion]

They're probably adjusting for peak potential. Were EU servers affected by the problem at the beginning of Stormblood? Did EU servers had to use instances on lochs and possibly other SB zones?

BambooShoo did not reply so I will
Yes : we had instanced areas on Lochs and I think other SB areas (the Ruby sea I think but I don't remember well).
Yes Raubahn was a problem. So was the instance on the island on 4.2, the alphinaud instance on 4.3 on launch day.
We do have congestion, so it makes sense to split DC for the sake of congestion.

Now it's a big chunk of EU population separated, so we can't tell how it will be in terms of population before the split lands. We will see

[Legion88]

Were EU servers affected by the problem at the beginning of Stormblood?

Yes: We also had login queues between 10k to 25k in the early access period and the first week of Stormblood. Also people got kicked out of the queues due to overflowing the lobby server.

Did EU servers had to use instances on lochs and possibly other SB zones?

EU also had instanced areas in 4.0 which got erased with 4.01 i think and shortly after reintroduced for the Lochs.

Meanwhile the population on the EU datacenter wakes up from its hiatus and beginns preparing for Shadowbringers and the free starter edition from twitch prime flooded us with new players already "congesting" prefered worlds.

[Metalwrath]

Honestly the main baffling thing is that they're splitting EU.

Last I saw, EU already has one of the lowest populations, and now they're splitting it in half, effectively making the game worse for everyone that plays there.

There are 24 American worlds.Your playerbase is only double that of EU and we have 10 worlds and considering the fact that out of your server population Balmung is completly congested making up a good portion of those numbers i would say that EU worlds are probably more evenly populated than the US ones.

We've also seen a large spike in player base on a lot of EU servers since the WOW refugees came here in droves at Winter.A lot of those accounts will have caught up to current content by expansion release so this will replace any 'void' left in duty finder by spilitting the data centre.
There's also the fact that Eurekas release took out duty finder for 3 days here in EU where it only badly affected US data centre for half a day.
This should be an obvious indication that EU data centre is under more strain than others.

[Barraind]

...

More evenly populated than Crystal (ir anywhere Balmung + any small servers are), but thats why people are really worried about Crystal on the NA side.

As of January:

Server / Relevant PoP / total PoP (Organized this way for highlighting where servers contribute to the "we dont want patch day instance issues" problem)

(NA-C) Balmung          9.700   18.511
(NA-A) Gilgamesh	7.839   12.542
(NA-P) Leviathan	7.265   11.743
(NA-A) Cactuar	        7.021   11.761
(NA-P) Excalibur        6.178   9.688	
(NA-P) Behemoth	        6.155   10.526		
(NA-C) Mateus	        6.149   14.854
(NA-P) Hyperion	        6.106   9.825
(NA-A) Sargatanas	6.012   10.135	
(NA-A) Faerie	        5.980   10.353
(NA-P) Ultros	        5.868   10.128		
(NA-A) Jenova	        5.657   10.891	
(NA-A) Midgardsormr	5.196   10.186
(NA-P) Lamia	        5.182   9.727	
(NA-C) Diabolos	        5.120   9.724
(NA-P) Famfrit	        5.046   11.498
(NA-A) Siren	        5.087   10.664		
(NA-P) Exodus	        4.837   10.678	
(NA-A) Adamantoise	4.789   9.330	
(NA-C) Malboro	        4.775   9.489	
(NA-C) Coeurl	        4.657   9.392
(NA-C) Brynhildr        4.625   9.431			
(NA-C) Zalera	        4.311   9.207	
(NA-C) Goblin	        4.057   9.403

(EU-H) Ragnarok	        7.109   11.495	
(EU-L) Shiva	        6.900   11.361
(EU-H) Cerberus 	6.745   11.104	
(EU-L) Phoenix	        6.621   10.975
(EU-H) Moogle	        6.429   10.990
(EU-L) Odin	        6.374   10.579
(EU-L) Zodiark	        5.727   12.246  	
(EU-L) Lich	        5.264   10.361	
(EU-H) Omega	        5.129   10.336	
(EU-H) Louisoix	        4.391   10.867

And together in one List:

	
(NA-C) Balmung	        9.700   18.511
(NA-A) Gilgamesh	7.839   12.542
(NA-P) Leviathan	7.265   11.743
(EU-H) Ragnarok	        7.109   11.495
(NA-A) Cactuar	        7.021   11.761
(EU-L) Shiva	        6.900   11.361
(EU-H) Cerberus	        6.745   11.104	
(EU-L) Phoenix	        6.621   10.975
(EU-H) Moogle	        6.429   10.990
(EU-L) Odin	        6.374   10.579
(NA-P) Excalibur        6.178   9.688	
(NA-P) Behemoth         6.155   10.526		
(NA-C) Mateus	        6.149   14.854
(NA-P) Hyperion	        6.106   9.825
(NA-A) Sargatanas	6.012   10.135	
(NA-A) Faerie	        5.980   10.353
(NA-P) Ultros	        5.868   10.128	
(EU-L) Zodiark	        5.727   12.246  	
(NA-A) Jenova	        5.657   10.891
(EU-L) Lich	        5.264   10.361	
(NA-A) Midgardsormr	5.196   10.186
(NA-P) Lamia	        5.182   9.727
(EU-H) Omega	        5.129   10.336	
(NA-C) Diabolos	        5.120   9.724
(NA-P) Famfrit	        5.046   11.498
(NA-A) Siren	        5.087   10.664		
(NA-P) Exodus	        4.837   10.678	
(NA-A) Adamantoise	4.789   9.330	
(NA-C) Malboro	        4.775   9.489	
(NA-C) Coeurl	        4.657   9.392
(NA-C) Brynhildr 	4.625   9.431
(EU-H) Louisoix	        4.391   10.867			
(NA-C) Zalera	        4.311   9.207	
(NA-C) Goblin	        4.057   9.403

[Barraind]

Datacenter / Active / total

Aether       47.581  85.862
Primal       46,637  83,813
Crystal      43,394  90,011
Light        30,886  55,522
Chaos        29,803  54,792

Of the 34 total servers:

Top 25%: 1 Crystal, 2 Aether, 1 Primal, 2 Light, 2 Chaos

Second 25%: 1 Crystal, 2 Aether, 4 Primal. 1 Light, 1 Chaos

Third 25%: 1 Crystal, 3 Aether, 2 Primal, 2 Light, 1 Chaos

Bottom 25%: 5 Crystal, 1 Aether, 1 Primal, 0 Light, 1 Chaos



Crystal says please halp.

[Metalwrath]

Of the 34 total servers:

Top 25%: 1 Crystal, 2 Aether, 1 Primal, 2 Light, 2 Chaos

Second 25%: 1 Crystal, 2 Aether, 4 Primal. 1 Light, 1 Chaos

Third 25%: 1 Crystal, 3 Aether, 2 Primal, 2 Light, 1 Chaos

Bottom 25%: 5 Crystal, 1 Aether, 1 Primal, 0 Light, 1 Chaos



Crystal says please halp.

Id imagine also that roleplayers spend a lot less time in duty finder making the issue even worse.

[Barraind]

Crystal's representation in Eureka instances and Party Finder for EX runs is SIGNIFICANTLY below Aether (its about 3.5:1 based on my tracking this stuff for the last few weeks). Cant speak for the two its picking up from Primal.


I still dont get the need to split the EU datacenter and how they picked the Crystal servers...


If anything, the new EU servers could have gone to handling instance load issues where needed and kept it together. Those are two exceptionally small datacenters unless they've secretly been working on Cross-datacenter Party/duty finder, which would be the BEST news possible at this point for the EU and Crystal.

[Leticro]

I picture it like every player that visits another world will have a time limit whilst they are there and would be kicked if inactive for more than 10mins (akin to Eureka) in order to keep the world that\\'s being visited from being too overly populated at a single time. Of course I could be completely wrong but we\\'ll find out in time.

The new data centres should help to spread the most populated worlds a little more evenly, but definitely queue times are going to take a hit so let\\'s hope we get some nice jobs worth queuing up for!

You can visit another world and stay there with no timer. They've already talked about how you can log off in another world and if you log back in much later, you'll still be in that world. You just can't use retainers and attend EBs in different worlds.

As for the split, I was okay with it until the realization that we're getting moved to the data center that has less than half the raid clears as servers staying on Aether or Primal. Clearing high level content will be much harder on Crystal if the population of people able to clear the content is so low.

If I move back to Primal however, I lose the limited large housing I worked so hard to get. All the people that say you can just buy a house again, they've probably never tried to obtain a large plot. Large plots are never available because of how high the demand for them are. If there was a server where large plots are open, I would happily transfer to that server.

If the decision was a personal thing, then whatever, but my EB partner recently came and settled in my house only to find we're getting cut off from the raid data centers. She is deciding whether to make an alt to still easily clear content with or just keep transferring back and forth between data centers, which is either a pain to maintain 2 accounts, or a dumb unnecessary cost to keep transfering.

[linay]

More evenly populated than Crystal (ir anywhere Balmung + any small servers are), but thats why people are really worried about Crystal on the NA side.

As of January:...

How is goblin some of the least populated when it just got bumped off the preferred worlds list?

how they picked the Crystal servers...

As they said at fan fest, they want balmung to use world visit and spread among the other servers. Aside from mateus and goblin, all the other not-balmung servers are preferred as of now, which is perfect for people to visit (except lately all the preferred servers have been congested several times). I'm also thinking that crystal will be used to dump new players in assuming they don't change from the default data center that they get.

[Metalwrath]

How is goblin some of the least populated when it just got bumped off the preferred worlds list? As they said at fan fest, they want balmung to use world visit and spread among the other servers. Aside from mateus and goblin, all the other not-balmung servers are preferred as of now, which is perfect for people to visit (except lately all the preferred servers have been congested several times). I'm also thinking that crystal will be used to dump new players in assuming they don't change from the default data center that they get.

Actually i think likely it will become the roleplay data centre.From what ive been hearing most crystal data centre raiders plan on jumping to another data centre.
With the fact that the 2 biggest rp servers are lumped together in df i wouldnt be suprised to see the other worlds start to fill with rper's aswell .
Personally im just happy that Moogle world wont be on my data centre anymore.This has been a personal wish of mine for years now.