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

[Ayuhra]

Ask New World players how stable AWS is to actually play on.

The servers were great when I played. They were about the only part of the New World experience that did work.

I am hoping that game can uh...fix its issues some day. It could be a very unique and interesting title if it had a coherent endgame and didn't try to explode all the time.

[Somnolence]

Based on the "experts" that start such threads they had to design for cloud support and infinite scalling up from beginning, ARR.
"Hey, we are trying to salvage this flop of an MMO by reworking it, lets design it so it can scale to be biggest MMO ever as well!"

[Larirawiel]

Hey.

The problem here is, cloud instances are not really comparable to real servers. A typical cloud instance has a very low performance per CPU core. But you can rent thousands of them. If the FF14 server software is not prepared to run in those cloud instances then the results will be a real mess.

And yes, you can also rent real servers. But nobody knows whether the FF14 server software can run on standard PC server hardware or not. If they have something more special like Sun SPARC then it will be far more difficult to rent something like that.

Cheers

[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.

[Razkine_Blazehawk]

AWS or Azure can be used as a last resort, if it takes to long for SE to get new servers. It maybe a little complicated to make it run stable, but with the right knowledge and coding it can

[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.

[Lanadra]

Oh look.. another know it all who is going to tell the people running the server how they should be running their server. I assume you got some professional experience backing up your professional opinions?