Datacenters: A Plea For Community Building, Not Fracturing

[Jojoya]

For only two weeks? Really? That's acceptable to you?

No it's not acceptable in my opinion and that's not to mention the fact that many after waiting forever in queues of over 3000 to get in only to get kicked and to have to get back into line again. I applaud SE for taking measures to try and prevent that from happening again. One can hope that this will in fact work and I'll guess we'll find out when expansion hits.

Except this won't prevent it from happening again because most players refuse to make smart choices. They'll once again zerg the game at release, causing bottlenecks and crashes.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Except this won't prevent it from happening again because most players refuse to make smart choices. They'll once again zerg the game at release, causing bottlenecks and crashes.

I'll reiterate one more time. This wasn't a player issue but a SE one. They put an instance ten quests into the MSQ, thereby ensuring virtually everyone would all queue at roughly the same time. Move that instance further down and this doesn't occur. Why? People will naturally veer off. Some are going to blitz the story and skip everything, others will take their time. Some will go level other jobs or do side quests along the way. Speaking of leveling jobs. Guess what also had instances in their first quests: Red Mage and Samurai! It's almost like having three instance extremely early on during an expansion launch is a very bad idea.

For only two weeks? Really? That's acceptable to you?

No it's not acceptable in my opinion and that's not to mention the fact that many after waiting forever in queues of over 3000 to get in only to get kicked and to have to get back into line again. I applaud SE for taking measures to try and prevent that from happening again. One can hope that this will in fact work and I'll guess we'll find out when expansion hits.

If the choice were between what ultimately is a mild inconvenience for 4% out of a given year's total weeks, yes. I would rather have the larger pool we currently have for PF and DF since I intend to play far larger than those initial two weeks. So less people means potentially slower results long term. And those massive queues weren't an issue on other servers. Said queues also died down completely when they did force log outs. So the tools are already there to mitigate the problem. Implement the forced log out immediately and don't put three instances super early into quest chains and maybe the problem doesn't occur.

[Iscah]

Split up the datacenters to destroy communities and increase queue times for everything even more. Sounds like a great and innovative solution to a bleeding genre right now!

Queue times could go either way, or remain the same - there might be less people, but that also means less people trying to share a (presumably) fixed number of instances.

Though come to think of it... with the upcoming introduction of the NPC trust system, that would mean more instances getting used for a single player + NPCs instead of four players sharing an instance, which would potentially have quite an impact on queue times...

[Knahli]

Arguments for and against aside, I was under the impression that this was being done to heal underlying problems that we - the players - could not see... not resolve some "BIG" issue that has been ongoing for a while. I'm not familiar with any Sigmascape scenario, so all I recall are the Raubahn/Pipin issues at the beginning which, while frustrating, was not a massive deal when accounting for all the time between 4.0 and 4.4. I can't imagine such a dramatic decision was being made to account for what is essentially a blip in the lifetime of an expansion, so I assumed there was more to it that simply wasn't reaching the surface but needed addressing.

As for 3,000 queues.... I'm not quite sure why that is seen as an issue as it only occurs under two specific scenarios; the first being the moment servers go live following an expansion release... and the second, the same thing, but with housing patches.


To me, those are all extremely petty things to fret over and I had forgiven and forgotten Raubahn EX as soon as I slipped by him because I was simply relieved that I could progress and enjoy the expansion. Would I like for it to be avoided in the future? Absolutely, but I don't hold any grudges. The only comment that makes sense to me is the thing about it not looking good for SE from a business perspective, but other than that, I don't understand where people are encountering all these glaring flaws which I feel like I should be experiencing the most -if at all - being that I am on Balmung.

[Hamada]

As I have said in another thread regarding the third NA DC:

This wouldn't have happened if the balmung population wasn't so stubborn about staying on their server despite all of SE's attempts to balance out the population.

Also the fact that players on balmung of all places are the ones complaining is hilarious. It and Mateus will be in Crystal together anyway.

As I have said in another thread regarding the third NA DC:

This wouldn't have happened if SE managed thier servers and housing better. People did not really want to move because it meant losing a house and other things. I find it hilarious that someone from the balmung exodus server are mocking people from balmung for SE's short coming when addressing their own server problems.

How can you blame the player base when SE completely opened balmung in SB not to long ago? defeats your argument. Stop blaming the playerbase for SE's bad management.

For the topic, I am sure one data center would be possible if they actually upgrade their servers and netcode. But no, lets overburden the servers with pointless repeated data exchange because rushing out 2.0 was more important, and it is more important to save money so lets never address that.

[Cleanse]

As I have said in another thread regarding the third NA DC:

This wouldn't have happened if SE managed thier servers and housing better. People did not really want to move because it meant losing a house and other things. I find it hilarious that someone from the balmung exodus server are mocking people from balmung for SE's short coming when addressing their own server problems.

How can you blame the player base when SE completely opened balmung in SB not to long ago? defeats your argument. Stop blaming the playerbase for SE's bad management.

For the topic, I am sure one data center would be possible if they actually upgrade their servers and netcode. But no, lets overburden the servers with pointless repeated data exchange because rushing out 2.0 was more important, and it is more important to save money so lets never address that.

/bow People just echo chamber hate on Balmung (and PvP), when this will affect a lot of their friends, if not themselves in the end.

[Hyperia]

For the topic, I am sure one data center would be possible if they actually upgrade their servers and netcode. But no, lets overburden the servers with pointless repeated data exchange because rushing out 2.0 was more important, and it is more important to save money so lets never address that.

Looking back on it now, yes, it would have been nice for them to overhaul the code from the 1.x days to significantly improve the systems for 2.x+ but... they were doing triage with what resources SE could scrounge up for them to salvage the mess that they were given. Any other game company would have just shutdown the system and said screw it. SE didn't, nor did Yoshi but they lacked two critical resources that were necessary to overhaul the server systems and that was Time and Money. They had to get 2.0 out as soon as humanly possible. Yes, they had to make compromises, many compromises they wish they had not made but at the time, it was the best they could do with what they had. I know there looking at ways to improve the backend system, but it will be done incrementally over time, how long, nobody knows besides Yoshi and the Server team.

I'm not happy that I am going to loose friends, my static and acquaintances I have made on my old DC. Nobody wanted this, not us, not the devs, nobody. I have accepted the fact that this is happening and the best thing we can do now is to welcome those who are transferring and give a proper sendoff to those who are moving on.

Maybe in 2020, cross DC groups / chat / visits will become a thing. Its something for us to add to our wish list now so the Devs can start working on it now and present it to us at Fanfest 2020. Who knows, maybe at Fanfest 2024 we will be shocked that the devs are merging all worlds into a mega-server that can support the entire population in a given geographical region. Wouldn't that be something...

[SomeRandomHuman]

As I have said in another thread regarding the third NA DC:

This wouldn't have happened if SE managed thier servers and housing better. People did not really want to move because it meant losing a house and other things. I find it hilarious that someone from the balmung exodus server are mocking people from balmung for SE's short coming when addressing their own server problems.

How can you blame the player base when SE completely opened balmung in SB not to long ago? defeats your argument. Stop blaming the playerbase for SE's bad management.

For the topic, I am sure one data center would be possible if they actually upgrade their servers and netcode. But no, lets overburden the servers with pointless repeated data exchange because rushing out 2.0 was more important, and it is more important to save money so lets never address that.

The player base is just as guilty sadly. It's not all the fault of one side. It's from both sides. A lot of people hate on Balmung because when that server crashes the whole DC, we ALL lose sub time. Not just the server, but the whole DC while its clear that people on Balmung are saying its tech related. Many tech savvy people here on the forums have tried to explain the actual expenses of hardware upgrades. Especially when SE has said they don't wanna have to rebuild their infrastructure from the ground up.

So by trying to force SE to upgrade the servers, SE is executing their last ditch effort to relieve stress: forced moves. The community brought it upon themselves. I'll be losing touch with a few friends, but guess what? That's what things like discord are for.

We're too far in to get SE to change their mind. You just have to accept it. If you wanna try to make a change then you have to speak with your wallet.

[Doozer]

People are complaining about their communities being torn apart, but didn't they say there will be a 2 week period of free world transfers? If you want to be together so bad, go join them! I've been looking to get off Primal for a while (certain worlds seem to be full of people that really ruin the fun), but I had no interest in moving over to Aether. So to see that I can leave Primal and join a data center that has the world a friend of mine is on (which was previously in Aether) makes me look forward to hopping over to Crystal when the time comes.

The fracturing is up to the people who I guess don't care enough about their friends to join them. It's not that deep.

[Seraphor]

People are complaining about their communities being torn apart, but didn't they say there will be a 2 week period of free world transfers? If you want to be together so bad, go join them! I've been looking to get off Primal for a while (certain worlds seem to be full of people that really ruin the fun), but I had no interest in moving over to Aether. So to see that I can leave Primal and join a data center that has the world a friend of mine is on (which was previously in Aether) makes me look forward to hopping over to Crystal when the time comes.

The fracturing is up to the people who I guess don't care enough about their friends to join them. It's not that deep.

Pretty much this.
Its an inconvenience, but you can move servers without losing much. Even if you own a house, you can store your furniture in retainers, get a full refund plus 3mil, and because of the upheaval there's bound to be empty plots coming up on your destination server.

The only issue I see is if you have several friends all on different servers, soon to be different datacentres, and the choice of which friends to stick with.
If those friends are all friends with each other, you should be able to come to a group arrangement.
If not then you've got problems.