Was it a mistake to deprioritize data center travel?

[-BlueGreen-]

Back when it was originally announced, I had thought data center travel would have been something that made sense to implement at the tail end of 5.x so that there would be months to break it in and fix issues to have it ready to ease things at the launch of 6.0. Instead, it was deprioritized to focus on the launch of 6.0 itself.

After the last couple of weeks, I'm starting to wonder, was that SE's biggest mistake with this launch? Due to the worldwide situation, server hardware is still hard to get ahold of, and travel restrictions would make actually setting up physical hardware on site difficult even if they had the hardware available. Cloud-based servers were explored and abandoned due to instability, performance, and cost issues. This new feature of data center travel, on the other hand, is likely software-based, or at least mostly software-based meaning that it, along with the optimizations they did do, was probably something SE could have done to ease the login queue problems.

In order to give myself to try out a male Viera look, I thought to first try it on a fresh character, so I don't waste a fantasia on something I don't end up liking. Given the situation on my usual datacenter (US) during times I normally can play, I ended up rolling the test character on a Japanese datacenter. Login queues during US primetime there have been trivial, like single to double digits. I don't think I've seen 100+ in queue, and usually log in within seconds.

Sure, there's latency, but it's not unplayable, especially not for the type of tasks MSQ gives you. I feel like people who just want to get the story done to prepare for the launch of the raids would have been quite happy to simply run on a different datacenter in the short term. Language barriers are likely less of a problem since trusts have proven effective for at least story clears of dungeons.

At the very least, I wonder if this means that the launch of 7.0 will benefit from allowing players to spread out across data centers to even out the load across all times of day? I'll probably try to make sure to prepare for the next launch by clearing out as much inventory as possible to make the experience of playing without retainers for long periods of time more bearable given that I expect retainers to be unavailable during data center travel just like with world visit.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Given connection quality overall seemed to drop a bit when world visit was added along with people seeing login queues regularly when there were none at that point. I'd say they need to make those connections better before thinking about cross data center travel as the connection quality is most likely to take another noticeable hit when it's enabled resulting in login queues climbing a gain as people suffer disconnects more offen.

[Nekaru_Infitima]

Uhh have you seen world visit? I went to Balmung in a minute to play with a friend. Then when he went to bed I went back to Bryn. 9 HOURS i was stuck in Limsa waiting for it to queue down 20 people to get back.

If it takes 9 hours to get back to your HW, I imagine DC travel would take over 24.

[Maxilor]

Honestly it's a tough call.

If they implemented Data Center Travel then more than likely people would overflow onto the Japanese servers, but that would provide a horrible ping increases to most and a terrible gameplay experience. I think it was a smarter move to hold off on Data Center transfers and keep additional stress off the servers.

[TaleraRistain]

Plus didn't they say they were only doing regional at first anyway? There's no guarantee it would have allowed cross-regional even by now.

[ibiteyourankle]

NO! It's a good thing. Keeps my overpriced items selling because people got sick of hopping worlds and getting stuck in a queue but really need the mats to play moar!

[-BlueGreen-]

Plus didn't they say they were only doing regional at first anyway? There's no guarantee it would have allowed cross-regional even by now.

I don't recall that being the case; however, if that is true, then it would make sense that it'd offer no benefit in this context. The idea was to help even load across the world by allowing players during a given DC's prime time the option to utilize the otherwise underutilized DCs in other regions.

Uhh have you seen world visit? I went to Balmung in a minute to play with a friend. Then when he went to bed I went back to Bryn. 9 HOURS i was stuck in Limsa waiting for it to queue down 20 people to get back.

If it takes 9 hours to get back to your HW, I imagine DC travel would take over 24.

I used world visit on multiple occasions prior to 6.0 and found it to function rather smoothly. I did hit a short queue from time to time, and only otherwise had problems with one alt when a certain streamer from WoW decided to roll on a different server in the same DC as a character I was playing around with at the time. Given that it was a single world hit with that spike in traffic, it was simple enough to avoid travel to that world, and since it wasn't my home world, didn't impact my ability to get back. I haven't tried it, or various other features that require a lighter current load on the servers, since the launch of 6.0, but I hear that the best way to return to the home world is to log out, then log in again while setting your character to log in to your home world from the login screen. That bypasses the low-priority visit queue to get in on the home world login queue which processes much faster in this context. There's another thread here discussing that if you want to know more.

It's also why I said for the next expansion I'd make sure I was prepared to go long periods of time without retainer access by having lots of open inventory space for quest rewards and the like. Of course, if data center travel isn't global by then, then there isn't much point.

[TaleraRistain]

I don't recall that being the case; however, if that is true, then it would make sense that it'd offer no benefit in this context. The idea was to help even load across the world by allowing players during a given DC's prime time the option to utilize the otherwise underutilized DCs in other regions.

I want to say they mentioned it in one of the Live Letters.

[Aurikai]

It's more than overcoming software restrictions, DCs half a world away would still need to write back to your DC's data source which would be prohibitively expensive. The fact that this doesn't even exist between regional DCs which are all located in the same physical DC says a lot.

[-BlueGreen-]

It's more than overcoming software restrictions, DCs half a world away would still need to write back to your DC's data source which would be prohibitively expensive. The fact that this doesn't even exist between regional DCs which are all located in the same physical DC says a lot.

True enough, though I'd like to think that securing bandwidth for this purpose is likely far easier than securing servers for additional worlds. Of course, thinking on it, the real challenge would likely be in whatever configuration changes they'd need to make and test out for it would likely require engineers to be on site to run cables and such possibly, and COVID travel restrictions being what they are might actually be the biggest blocker.