Sign if you would of Prefered this over the data Center shuffle

[Stigmar]

Simple proposal sign below if you would of preferred to see a Cross Data Center party finder implemented first before the implementation of World teleport/data center shuffle? Honestly it makes more sense to do it this way than upsetting the community to me anyway. However this more a simple yes or no rather than can it be done exercise because if enough people want it, it will happen "points to chocobo being out while queuing for df" took em 4 years but they did it!

I am curious as to how many would of preferred it done this way.

[Akatosh]

Quite honestly, it would have made more sense (and would have spared everyone a lot of the backlash we are currently seeing).

[Dirwen]

Depends if it helps with queue times. If it just means I'll get a queue of 100+ instead of 30+ as a DPS then no thanks.

[Stigmar]

Note the key words PARTY FINDER not DUTY FINDER

[dragonseth07]

Is that something they could reasonably do? Is the spaghetti code untangled enough to allow for it?

I certainly don't have that answer, but I would bet a lot of money on "no".

[Kurando]

Note the key words PARTY FINDER not DUTY FINDER

They are essentially the same thing. You create a party through the PF and then you use the DF to go in to an instance. Not sure having cross-centre matching would fix anything, if anything it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen based on previous issues.

[Dyvid]

Is that something they could reasonably do? Is the spaghetti code untangled enough to allow for it?

I certainly don't have that answer, but I would bet a lot of money on "no".

Shhhhh. People don't want to hear truth.

[Vidu]

I dont think that what we want matters at all when it comes to this - they knew that a lot of people would be unhappy with the whole split-thing, but they probably looked at all their options and picked the "best" one. No amount of petitions, threads or requests is going to change that.

And if you assume that this would only happen if/because a lot of people say "Yes, we want this", it implies that it would take a huge amount of ressources - away from other things that frankly I deem more important.

So no, I would not like to see them waste a huge amount of ressources on this just because some people cant sort out their relationships. I know that that sounds cold and harsh and I get that its aweful to having to part with your friends, but its not like you cant talk to them anymore (Discord) or play with them (alt-characters; transfers).
The unhappiness will pass once everyone got used to the new Data-Centers, made new friends and/or realised that they can still keep contact with their old ones.

[Derio]

Depends is it within the same region. Such as all NA datacenters? Otherwise no because the connection would be horrific.

I think people will get over it about 6 months after it happens.

[Avenger]

To;dr: It is a cool idea, but unfortunately cross data center play (or super data centers) doesn’t seem to be practical at the moment and would likely introduce unacceptable slowdown and lag, even if the data centers are in the same location connected by a fast network. The reason is likely to be software service scalability, not hardware capacity.

It seems likely that characters, items, and instances require synchronization and shared state, which could run into scaling issues that limit the size of a data center that works well. They seemed to be implying at fanfest that there is a scaling limit to how many worlds can share a single data center - probably resulting in unacceptable performance drops as the load gets too high. The problem probably gets drastically worse if the physical servers are far apart from each other and have high network delay.

It is possible they could overcome it somehow, but for now the workable solution for SE seems to be adding more data centers and spreading/rebalancing the worlds across them rather than increasing the capacity and scalability of single data centers to support more worlds on each one. Doing so would likely not be a simple matter of throwing money and big iron servers and faster networks at the problem - it would probably require software and algorithm improvements that they might not even know how to do yet.

The good news I think in all of this is that it seems that the game is expanding and they seem to be adding capacity so that new worlds can be created in all data centers and regions.