ELI5: Why the absolute hell did SE not use Azure or AWS as a temporary solution?

[Zileth]

These all sound like issues of a systemic failure that were years in the making compounded by either an unwillingness to invest or strategize. They had record profits in April of 2021, that was 8 months ago and the population continued to grow MoM. That's just basic trending and forecasting. Companies need to be able to pivot to deal with these types of things but SE's complacent approach to their servers have showed quite the failure. If they "did everything within their power to take care of things"...what exactly did they do?

Wait what? Are you new to earth?

You do know they been trying to get new servers for some time lol and the semiconductor issue has been going on for amount over a year there a reason why there a shortage in graphics cards and why some car factories had to shut down or why there a bunch of cars just sitting there in lots waiting for chips and a shortage of XBOX and PS5.

The Devs already made plenty of announcements about the server issues and even recently stated que times are going to get worst due to them not able to secure any new hardware for adding new servers. Also they wernt expecting such a huge influx of players during covid and defiantly wernt expecting the flux that got in the past what 2 or 3 months with all the things happening with Blizzard and WoW.

Any way Karen please go off and tell us how you know everything and how snapping your fingers you are able to do better since clearly in this one thread you prove you know nothing and spouting of opinions like they are facts with no research just like half the other people rambling on about cloud servers and SE needs to do something lol. There a reason why people a defending the company to an extent since they are the ones that have done the googling and research and actually read up on things that have happened and is happening around the world and not acting like a Karen

[PredatoryCatgirl]

Source: I am AWS certified.

Thank you for providing us with an opinion of someone who can do more than grasp at straws.

[Divinemights]

These all sound like issues of a systemic failure that were years in the making compounded by either an unwillingness to invest or strategize. They had record profits in April of 2021, that was 8 months ago and the population continued to grow MoM. That's just basic trending and forecasting. Companies need to be able to pivot to deal with these types of things but SE's complacent approach to their servers have showed quite the failure. If they "did everything within their power to take care of things"...what exactly did they do?

First, no one is expecting Covid 19
Second, no one is expecting US government would be "not smart" enough to actually launch economy war on China during Covid 19.
A lot of restrictions have been put on TMSC and that Korean semiconductors manufactures where they need to do background check first
What do you expect these manufactures do?
Do the background check or just sell to the companies they recgonize?
This further add burden to the semiconductor shortage.
So get over with it and deal with it

[Eriane_Elis]

People who have no experience doing sysadm shouldn't really comment about how easy or cheap it is to move to the cloud. You do realize that cloud isn't actual clouds right? They cost money, a lot of money. Azure/AWS is expensive, Azure more expensive than AWS but AWS over-complicates everything so good luck not accidentally triggering something that'll cost you thousands in literally minutes. (sorry, personal rant here)

To meme it a little... One does not simply migrate their game over to a different architecture. You can't mix onprem and cloud so easily. Migrating to "the cloud" can take years. I'm not kidding when I say it's not a matter of copy and paste.

Yoshi P. already released a few statements regarding the situation dating back way before the WoW exodus. Again, after the exodus, another statement was made. And again in the past few days. THEY KNEW what would happen and they did all they could to buy new servers to no avail.

People expect things to "just work" in 2021 even though that's unrealistic. That's not how life works. People should have learned their lesson by now, it's been 2 years since the bizzaro world covid hit and yet "everything can be magically perfect".

But to go back to OP's question... It's like if you developed a game for PC but need it for a Mac, or the Playstation. They are different architectures and made differently. You would have to change how the game server functions and how the client interacts with the game server entirely. It just doesn't work unfortunately and all we can do is hope we have a short queue and don't get kicked. The limited availability of servers have punished us all and it's by no fault Square Enix. FF14 started development around 2004 I believe, it's been a long time.

[SnowVix]

Speaking of AWS, I'm getting emails from a job site I used to work for about an outage that basically would make me unable to do my former job there. And they can't just go in and fix it, they have to wait for AWS to fix it. That's what SquareEnix gets if they were to transfer the game servers to a third-party cloud provider. Ever noticed how if there's a server issue with a particular world server they can get it back up in under an hour most of the time? If they went to third-party hosting, that's gone.

[Lanadra]

People expect things to "just work" in 2021 even though that's unrealistic. That's not how life works..

It is though, both Jensen Huang from Nvidia and Todd Howard told me so. It just works.

i am obviously not serious

[TristanX]

I predicted myself the servers won't be able to handle the load. Never even complained once on day 1 because this is not the first time I see hiccups from xpac launches. Square Enix got jumped by massive increase of players a few months ago. Shortage made it harder for upgrades. I know some things are out of their control.

I just look for workarounds. Beat the queue by queueing early when I work from home. When I'm in office, I used remote desktop to queue estimating when I'll be back home vs the queue.

Eventually, they'll fix the issues. It takes time.

[Eriane_Elis]

It is though, both Jensen Huang from Nvidia and Todd Howard told me so. It just works.

i am obviously not serious

lmao! Also the irony is that AWS East coast is offline right now. This is another reason why I really don't like AWS.

[Komarimono]

Apparently it does: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametec...rpg-migration/

Ah yes, amazons advertising. Here's the truth of the matter. When they did the migration, everyones latency when to heck. Would be fine at first, ping of say 32. Moment a world even happened though? Well over 300, worse for those not near the servers and connecting from afar. New World is also plagued with this, random latency spikes, massive lag and slow down during 50v50 PvP, it's pure laggy chaos.

Even WoW, when it used AWS, people got massive performance loss in latency with again random spikes from no where.

Of course Amazon stated it was peoples ISP, which was proven wrong many a time, and that it was their servers and the spikes coming from their end. But what do you expect when they use Wolfsdale era Xeons (2008 technology) for a lot of their "Servers". Why it's a cloud. They didn't do it to be faster, or superior. They did it so they could keep using ancient(in hardware terms) technology without having to invest into new as often.

[Warlyx]

just wondering if anything of this can be used only for logins and not the game

i dont mind waiting , but i mind 2002 4004 errors...