Quote Originally Posted by Catwho View Post
Even if the reset was at a known time, as long as it was during the daytime hours, not everyone who is doing this will be capable of using remote desktop to log themselves back in.
On the other hand, let's do a thought exercise. We'll use made-up numbers, 'cause heck if I know what the real ones are.

Let's say that a given logical world server (like Leviathan or Lamia) can handle 50,000 simultaneous users. Let's say there's 50,000 users on, and 3000 people waiting in queue for their turn on the server. Let's pretend that 1000 of those 50,000 users are botting.

Now they reset the server.

Sure, the 1k people who were botting can't log back in. But the 49k people who were actively playing absolutely can. And probably will. And it's worth noting that almost no server system can let everyone in a queue on at once, for practical reasons. So now you have 52,000 people in the queue. And sure, those first 3000 get on much faster now, but anyone who then goes to get into queue after the server reset and was expecting to see "You are position 3178 in the queue." is horrified to see "You are position 51894 in the queue."

But wait! There's another problem.

We know that the lobby server cannot cope well with more than 21k connections at a time; when you exceed 21k, that's one of the things that causes 2002 errors.

52k is greater than 21k, which means as soon as all the people actively playing attempt to log back in, the queue becomes a flood of 2002 errors. And if you think it's disheartening to get from 3k to 1k in the queue and then 2002, imagine if you went from 3k to 1k, 2002'd, and then found yourself at, say, 47,735 in queue.

And that's without adding in the fact that I think the lobby server may be shared across the data center -- meaning you aren't dealing with, say, 52k people in queue for Leviathan, but with everyone on every server in Primal trying to reconnect.

*pause for internal screaming*

This isn't to say that server resets might not alleviate the problem; likely only Square-Enix has the numbers to know for sure one way or another. But it is to say that it's not guaranteed to fix things, and that it can absolutely make the problem worse. Queues are weird things, even in the mathematical abstract, and only become moreso when you add in technical limitations.