Data Center Expansion - Questions

[Wilford111]

Will que times really go down though? Sure we'll have less tanks and healers queing in but we'll also have less dps so it evens out. Unless you're talking about 24 man ques, in which, yeah I feel ya.

**up, not down. Sorry there's no editing on mobile

[Canadane]

**up, not down. Sorry there's no editing on mobile

You can edit, just use the desktop mode on your phone instead.
And queue times likely won’t change much for content that matters. Party Finder however, will look a bit smaller.

[Kurando]

Apparently though there is only a set number of instances that can be active at one time which adds to queue times. If you have more centres then you can have more instances, which in tail either means the same amount of waiting time or if anything potentially shorter.

Average queue time is about to increase as the same pool of players will now be spread across 3 data centers instead of 2.

It's actually not that bad on EU after the split, roughly the same as before anything was changed and we have much less active players than NA.

[Vidu]

You are correct in your assumption that the amount of servers in each DC and therefor the amount of players is decreasing - in theory.

However I'd expect the actual impact to be very little, at least once we're past the "its the end of the expansion and a lot of people arent playing right now"-time, which currently is your main reason for longer queuetimes. The reason I expect little impact is that they're not doing this split for fun but to add more servers alltogether without creating a negative impact on the overall stability of the game. As it seems to stand right now servers and DCs have reached their capacity and to avoid scenarios like Raubahn Ex and the like they need to offer more server-space if they still want to see this game grow.

Once we're getting a whole new expansion I'd expect queuetimes to still be reasonable - given that you dont queue at odd times or for odd, outdated content (my impression is that most of the time queuetime-issues seem to happen to people who're trying to do T9 through DF on a thursday at 2 a.m. ST...).
Hopefully we'll see lots of new people with 5.0 aswell as the return of veterans who are taking a break right now, getting queuetimes back to a healthy level of "not having to wait for ages for other people" and "not having to wait for ages for serverspace".

(Personally I also consider it easy enough to kill 10-20 minutes in game with all the little sidethings to keep one busy, but hey... or you can always play a tank and enjoy sweet, sweet instaqueues for almost everything)

[Kyeria]

You are correct in your assumption that the amount of servers in each DC and therefor the amount of players is decreasing - in theory.

However I'd expect the actual impact to be very little, at least once we're past the "its the end of the expansion and a lot of people arent playing right now"-time, which currently is your main reason for longer queuetimes. The reason I expect little impact is that they're not doing this split for fun but to add more servers alltogether without creating a negative impact on the overall stability of the game. As it seems to stand right now servers and DCs have reached their capacity and to avoid scenarios like Raubahn Ex and the like they need to offer more server-space if they still want to see this game grow.

Once we're getting a whole new expansion I'd expect queuetimes to still be reasonable - given that you dont queue at odd times or for odd, outdated content (my impression is that most of the time queuetime-issues seem to happen to people who're trying to do T9 through DF on a thursday at 2 a.m. ST...).
Hopefully we'll see lots of new people with 5.0 aswell as the return of veterans who are taking a break right now, getting queuetimes back to a healthy level of "not having to wait for ages for other people" and "not having to wait for ages for serverspace".

(Personally I also consider it easy enough to kill 10-20 minutes in game with all the little sidethings to keep one busy, but hey... or you can always play a tank and enjoy sweet, sweet instaqueues for almost everything)

This actually makes a lot of sense and didn't really think about it from that perspective. Hopefully, you're right here and things will smooth themselves out over time during the lifespan of the expansion and hopefully sooner rather than later, lol.
( Also, I'd try your suggestion of playing a Tank, but I know my limits. The amount of knowledge and pressure on them is too high and I would get people killed constantly, lol. XD )

[Akonyl]

Part of the reason for the split is so that as the game expands, they can add more servers without having to overload the existing datacenters. This gives a bit more breathing room (although I can't help but feel there would probably have been a better way around it), so since it's done to support future expansion of the player base, it's being called a datacenter expansion.

[DiscoDuck]

What about for names tho? Cause there's another Athena Harbinger in the NA servers thats a lvl 1 mule or alt...I don't want to change my name cause of that...but if I have to :/

[Rowde]

What about for names tho? Cause there's another Athena Harbinger in the NA servers thats a lvl 1 mule or alt...I don't want to change my name cause of that...but if I have to :/

Character Names are unique to each Server, not Data Center. So there could be an Athena Harbinger on every single server. It would only be an issue when one of players of Athena Harbinger x tried doing a character transfer between servers. At which point they would be prompted to change their character's name.

This move is shuffling entire servers around to a new Data Center, so character names won't be impacted by that.

[DiscoDuck]

Character Names are unique to each Server, not Data Center. So there could be an Athena Harbinger on every single server. It would only be an issue when one of players of Athena Harbinger x tried doing a character transfer between servers. At which point they would be prompted to change their character's name.

This move is shuffling entire servers around to a new Data Center, so character names won't be impacted by that.

Thanks for the info. I know its not a lore fitting name but I have been working on a story anyways for both my Roes why their names are not of Roe language. But I do plan on changing my Au'ra's name at some point.

[Krotoan]

What about for names tho? Cause there's another Athena Harbinger in the NA servers thats a lvl 1 mule or alt...I don't want to change my name cause of that...but if I have to :/

It's per server, not data center. As long as you aren't moving to another server with someone with the exact same name, it won't matter. When partying with people from other servers on your data center there is a designation of server.. which will likely also be shown if someone is "visiting' from another server on your data center.

EDIT:someone has quicker fingers than I. You get the idea then =]