Datacenters: A Plea For Community Building, Not Fracturing

[Cleanse]

Lol... You didn't think this through did you?

What is the flaw in using the visitation feature to automatically load balance a bottleneck in the MSQ?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

What is the flaw in using the visitation feature to automatically load balance a bottleneck in the MSQ?

Because the instance servers are split by datacenter, as is lobby servers. This is effectively adding 50% more instances to the NA world's.

[Dzian]

Because the instance servers are split by datacenter, as is lobby servers. This is effectively adding 50% more instances to the NA world's.

OK maybe it's too early for me but how do you work that out. having 3 datacentres instead of 2 isn't magicallly going to mean 50% more people playing or running instances.

all it means is the people running them will be much the same only split across 3 ares not 2...

so instead of say 2 data centers with 15,000 players each. you'll have 3 data centers with 10,000 players. in both cases there's still only 30,000 players so the number of instances won't really change.

[Reinha]

OK maybe it's too early for me but how do you work that out. having 3 datacentres instead of 2 isn't magicallly going to mean 50% more people playing or running instances.

all it means is the people running them will be much the same only split across 3 ares not 2...

so instead of say 2 data centers with 15,000 players each. you'll have 3 data centers with 10,000 players. in both cases there's still only 30,000 players so the number of instances won't really change.

The number of players is still the same but the maximum number of instances that they can occupy is 50% larger. Normally we can enter an instance as soon as all roles have been fulfilled, but during expansion launches we may have to wait in queue until there is room for new instances. Having fewer players per instance server will help prevent problems like quest battle NPCs becoming unresponsive or housing being inaccessible. I think having another lobby server will have a similar effect on login queues (not sure about that).

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

What is the flaw in using the visitation feature to automatically load balance a bottleneck in the MSQ?

The instance servers are set by datacenter; not by world. So lets say there's a 1000 instances available to 5 servers in the datacenter. Adding another 5 servers will intensify the workload and make the bottleneck worse, not better, as more servers are now competing for those instances.

The 3rd data center split was done to alleviate the congestion; by distributing worlds across more datacenters, competition for the instance server naturally decreases. It's their "solution" to Raubahn EX/Sigmascape entrance EX issues that have been occurring throughout the expansion. I'd rather personally take a few days of congestion over fracturing communities, but from a business point of view I can see why they made this decision. it looked super bad on Stormblood release when 99.9% of the MSQ players were being blocked; I doubt they want it to happen again.