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

[VisperCon]

They said they have considered it and decided against it. Likely for good reasons.

Using AWS as a "temporary solution" is a suggestion born from ignorance - it is not a solution to the temporary problem we have now.

AWS doesn't magically just scale without effort. You need expertise to specifically design for it, otherwise you risk making things worse.

You can't simply copy-pasta your way into AWS. We're talking about complex infrastructure that was not built for cloud in the first place.
They would be looking at a migration process that takes months to years of planning, executing and testing.

Even if we entertain the fantasy that they could "just AWS 4head" in 2 days - migrating to a completely different environment for a temporary problem is a completely stupid business decision.

TLDR: AWS is not magic, stop pretending it is.

Isn't failing to do anything for the last nine months to improve servers to prepare for this launch when they have the data to show their MoM growth and historical data to show the increase in returning players for an expansion even worse? It's not like the idea is "do it in 2 days" but they had MONTHS to prepare for this launch and have utterly failed in that regard.

[RyuDragnier]

Isn't failing to do anything for the last nine months to improve servers to prepare for this launch when they have the data to show their MoM growth and historical data to show the increase in returning players for an expansion even worse? It's not like the idea is "do it in 2 days" but they had MONTHS to prepare for this launch and have utterly failed in that regard.

1. They need a specific chip type to increase the amount of servers.
2. Said chip type is currently hard to find and we have a global shortage of, and have had, for over a year now.
3. All the WoW players came to FFXIV 6 months ago, increasing the active playerbase to a size NOBODY could have predicted.
4. Due to all of the above, they did everything within their power to take care of things while trying to avoid things getting worse.

[VisperCon]

1. They need a specific chip type to increase the amount of servers.
2. Said chip type is currently hard to find and we have a global shortage of, and have had, for over a year now.
3. All the WoW players came to FFXIV 6 months ago, increasing the active playerbase to a size NOBODY could have predicted.
4. Due to all of the above, they did everything within their power to take care of things while trying to avoid things getting worse.

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?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

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?

8 months ago was in peak "there are no chips" season. They would have had to forecast this years ago, which means forecasting WoW falling to pieces and almost everyone and their mother jumping ship overnight. No one forecasts growth like that when its outside norms. Also COVID happened, which caused more people to have time at home, increasing counts of logged in players, and at that point, it was too late to fix things.

[Catwho]

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?

They ordered the OCE data center servers last spring (before they announced it during Fan Fest) and were warned they could not be delivered until 2022 which is why it is scheduled for patch 6.1.

[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

[Hasrat]

Isn't failing to do anything for the last nine months to improve servers to prepare for this launch when they have the data to show their MoM growth and historical data to show the increase in returning players for an expansion even worse? It's not like the idea is "do it in 2 days" but they had MONTHS to prepare for this launch and have utterly failed in that regard.

These posts are always the worst, what with being verifiably false. Hey look, they actually have made efforts to improve hardware and configuration not all that long ago.

Your problem is assuming "months" is a timescale they can work with. "Failing to do anything for the last nine months"? They've been planning to add an entire data center for over a year. Anything they would've or could've done would necessarily had to have been under consideration for after that went into operation, and OCE is already under delays. "They had historical data." Yeah, and the data say everything was going smoothly up until quite recently. They haven't had nearly enough time to adjust to the explosive growth they've experienced.

[Floortank]

Isn't failing to do anything for the last nine months to improve servers to prepare for this launch when they have the data to show their MoM growth and historical data to show the increase in returning players for an expansion even worse? It's not like the idea is "do it in 2 days" but they had MONTHS to prepare for this launch and have utterly failed in that regard.

In the same vein, you had nine months to understand how bad it would be on week one. Also twenty years, give or take, to understand that every major MMO game launch in the history of time has been like this.

[Larirawiel]

In the same vein, you had nine months to understand how bad it would be on week one. Also twenty years, give or take, to understand that every major MMO game launch in the history of time has been like this.

This is not true. Rift: Planes of Telara had a very smooth start. And Trion was not very experienced because this was their first MMORPG.

Cheers

[CaptainFishSticks]

Isn't failing to do anything for the last nine months to improve servers to prepare for this launch when they have the data to show their MoM growth and historical data to show the increase in returning players for an expansion even worse? It's not like the idea is "do it in 2 days" but they had MONTHS to prepare for this launch and have utterly failed in that regard.

I don't get how people still don't understand, if CBUIII could acquire the hardware for new servers and be able to deploy them they would have done so by now. They were open to all options, were willing to spend however much money it could take to make sure launch was smooth, but (1) there was no supply due to the semiconductor shortage and (2) Square-Enix was not willing to pay top dollar for third-party servers to run one of their flagship games.

Like y'all are just thinking we're repeating this as if it were a meme that we use to insult players who are running into issues but it has been well documented that Square-Enix did not consider CBUIII for any more funding other than for content, and that they were not expecting such explosive growth these past few months. Increasing server capacity and login stability was likely in planning for years but they either never had the funds to do it or the hardware--and thanks to the pandemic they couldn't physically go to the datacenters to deploy any of the hardware they might have had.