Raising Simultaneous Login Caps
The population that can be logged in to each World server at one time is capped; however, as some of you have noticed, this cap is not the same for all servers, and differs somewhat between data centers (Mana, Aether, Chaos, etc.). The main reason for this has to do with a data center’s “matching server.” A matching server can only handle so much information, so to ensure that it functions properly, a capacity limit must be set. This limit determines the overall maximum population of a data center, which is then divided by the number of Worlds in the data center to calculate how many players can be logged in to each World. If a matching server were to overload, it would result in the Duty Finder ceasing to function properly and instability when entering instanced content, hence the importance of login caps.
Differences in login caps occur due to differences in the number of Worlds per data center, as well as differences in matching server performance.
As it happens, the matching servers used in the North American data centers were recently upgraded to higher-performance models. Continued optimization of this new equipment has allowed us, as of July 16, to increase the maximum number of simultaneous logins across the NA data centers by 18,000, or approximately 750 per World server.