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

[Adrestia]

BDO is two data centers; one for NA, one for EU. If you make a family on one, when you switch over, it'll prompt you to create a new family name, meaning it's not interchangeable as your statement would lend one to believe. The other "servers" in BDO would be called channels/realms/shards in some other games, like TERA. Adding a new channel/realm/shard isn't nearly as costly as adding a new server or data center, but is meant to split the player-base apart to avoid things like overloading the server. BDO's servers are all of the regions (Olvia, Velia, Balenos, Serendia, Mediah, Calpheon, Kamasylvia, Arsha) - they share certain chat features when you are within that server. The shards are numbered (Calpheon 1 is the first shard of the server Calpheon; Calpheon 1 to 6 will share the same server chat, but when you switch to Mediah, you stop hearing Calphone's chat and gain access to Mediah 1 to 6's instead). World chat broadcasts over the entirety of the data center.

FFXIV is devoid of the shard-server model; the server is the channel/realm/shard.

Links are what I'm greeted with when I pick between NA and EU DCs in BDO.

This is disingenuous. The shard model (devised by Ultima Online) is literally what FFXIV has. What FFXIV calls a "server" IS a "shard." For what matter, what FFXIV calls a "datacenter" is a "cluster" or in WoW terms a "battlegroup."

In MMO terms, server/shard/realm are all literally the same thing. A logical server comprised of many physical servers that in the end give you a game world you can play on.

[splinter1545]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O56g8KC6CM

I always forget about EVE online. Wish more games gave it's players that much freedom.

[Adrestia]

I always forget about EVE online. Wish more games gave it's players that much freedom.

To be fair, some of the things they have to do to make the single shard with the multi-thousand-players-on-field battles possible aren't really compatible with most MMORPG content. But they know what their game's identity is and support what's important for that. Also, insane hardware. Like, they don't use disk storage. They use an Isilon cluster. It's fantastic stuff.

[Ayer2015]

So, the most practical plan of action is to just all make JP server alts and ready them for launch day among a playerbase subset whose concerns are more likely to be addressed?

The most practical solution would be to play the expansion the week after release, if there are problems.

[Airget]

it's baby steps, the longterm objective imo is to make it where each country shard can play with one another. The reason it's split between datacenters is because they currently can't handle the load of being able to grab from all NA servers JP/EU etc.n Once they fine tune this world visiting infrastructure they can look into combining all datacenters under 1 node.