Cloud Data Center Stress Test Feedback Thread (November 2023)

[VitaminMT]

I played from the South Central US. While I personally didn't notice a large difference in latency between this and the live servers, I did have friends who had much better experiences on the cloud test. There were maybe a handful of instances where I thought to myself "I bet if I was back on Primal that would've hit me" after dodging something, but I didn't go too deep into testing.

There was one instance on Saturday where it seemed like the server had no picked up that I had used Triplecast, and I seemed to be hard casting Fire IV despite using the buff prior.

In general, I did enjoy getting to play with people from regions outside of the US on the cloud test server. Everyone was really nice, either through autotranslate or basic English chat, and it was an experience I haven't really had since I stopped playing FFXI. I doubt it's in consideration by the dev team, but it'd be nice if there was a sort of cross-regional server, maybe using a permanent Cloud DC, that encouraged people from around the world to play together.

Tested mainly 6.0 MSQ progression, including solo duties, and running all party duties except for The Dead Ends with other players while playing Black Mage. Ran The Dead Ends with a Duty Support group. Also ran a few Leveling and Trials roulette queues on Black Mage and Sage.

[Jeeqbit]

I played there all week.

• Fought and killed lots of S ranks between ARR and Shadowbringers.
• Formed a very large cross-region Cross-World Linkshell for hunts.
• Did Endwalker MSQ just beyond Vanaspati.
• Ranked up my grand company and unlocked a lot of things.
• Fought FATE bosses such as Formidable with large turnouts.
• Cleared the Ivalice raids with 24 people and farmed the Bozjan Southern Front which was busy.

It was all very smooth, all week long. I spent my time there as I would on my normal character.

There were some RP communities there often gathering in large crowds in one place, as well as people there to clear ultimates, people to clear DRS, a lot of people doing MSQ, people there to try out glamours or jobs they normally can't because they would have to level up and some hunters.

The most interesting parts of the experience were communicating with people from other languages, learning to use auto-translate effectively and fighting old hunts and them being tough like they used to be because of small turnouts or lower level gear. It was fun.

Everyone had a goal they set for themselves to do before it went down, but many came to participate in content and behave as they would normally with no incentive to do so, such as joining a party for hunts and FATEs even though the benefit to their rewards is fleeting, offering to pay for items and services even though it's irrelevant because we'll lose said payment, clearing ultimates or DRS even though the achievement and rewards won't exist for long.

[NonBinaryNyan]

I wish I'd been able to play for more than today!

Belatedly realized I forgot to unlock and try Rival Wings on it. *headdesk*

Crowded areas seemed *less* stuttery than usual, which was surprising. \o/

[ostentenacity]

I played on and off all week from the West Coast of the US. My latency was noticeably worse than normal. Most of the time it was only a little worse but there were a few times that the game became so stuttery it was almost unplayable. However, I can't say for sure whether it was due to the cloud server because my connection seemed worse on my main character on Aether as well.

I participated in the Delubrum Reginae (Savage) community effort and cleared three times. On the technical side, this was mostly smooth (lack of actions/items/Zadnor buffs notwithstanding!), except for the very beginning of the second run, where all 31 players in our alliance got 90k'd when we tried to instance in. We also had an issue where when our alliance leader put us in the DRS queue, the "commence" window was visible for less than a second before we were all withdrawn. This issue persisted until we disbanded the alliance and reformed.

On the social side, it was very fun to see the NA, EU, and JP communities interact! We all got to use autotranslate much more than we are used to in the NA community. I thought that using autotranslate to coordinate Lost Actions and strats would be very difficult and clunky, but for the more casual parts of Bozja, it wasn't too bad. For the DRS runs, we had a handful of folks who knew enough English and Japanese to get across the more complex ideas. It helped that almost everyone knew the raid well; I imagine that attempting fresh/blind prog in a multilingual environment like the cloud server would have been a lot harder. It was also very enjoyable to see Bozja in a state of high population with lots of characters of different Resistance ranks doing lots of different things (fragment/cluster farming, story progression, relic grinding, mettle/level grinding, etc.) I did not get to do Bozja back when it was new, but I was around for both the original heyday of Zadnor and the resurgence right after the release of 6.0, and this felt like that in a good way.

I did not bother to try and get to max level on my test server character because I was interested in doing adventuring foray content and there is not a lvl 90 foray.

I did not get to attend the Costa del Sol event but I was present in several heavily-populated server areas in the last few hours of the servers being available (Amaurot and Central Thanalan). I did not notice any performance hiccups aside from the normal stuff: players not loading in until I was right next to them due to how many people were present, being unable to teleport into busy areas due to congestion, etc.

I wish this was a yearly event! I'm sure there are many technical and practical reasons why it's not a common occurrence, but the social experience was completely unlike anything else I've done in FFXIV before. It would be fun if there was a temporary server like this for the Rising every now and then.

[reginleif-]

My initial feedback with location and ping details

Well, after a week of daily playing, I have met only one issue.

On Cloudtest01, the game stuck at the opening cutscene in Ul'dah. After the initial cutscene of our job vision, the transitional black screen stayed for a few minutes before progressing. The sound of the moving carriage was playing, but the cutscene did not start, and the game did not react to button pressing. No connection issues were shown in the Resource Monitor.

On Cloudtest02, the cutscene played as usual.

I mostly did story content, so I visited different parts of the world and witnessed different player activities. It was charming to see! I regret that my schedule didn't allow me to do Bozja, and I'm glad to know that people enjoyed it.

And the farewell made me cry. Thanks for the company, Cloudtest02 folks, see ya.


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[Dysvalence]

Following up from my initial feedback:

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Since then I've played substantially with EU and JP players, especially in hunts, PVP, and a few in DRS, and had great experiences all around. Now that the servers are down I really miss it. There were isolated trolls, but all that showed is that humans on the other side of the planet aren't that different.

I almost never used the autotranslate system before this so I'm not the most familiar with using it quickly, but it worked well when I had the time to go through the options and slowly pick out phrases. I do wish it was easier to use, with support for multi word or partial queries- anything that started with "The", e.g. "The Tower at Paradigm's Breach" was annoying to get to. If market board search is anything to go off of, as an implementation note, it might be worth precomputing results for 3-7ish characters and storing the results in a hash or trie. Ultimately I dedicated an entire hotbar to autotranslate macros for the most common things.

I also wish it were easier to convey complex topics, such as "please use a sac strat on the stack markers because we don't have enough people"- the best I could do was "(spread out) + (raise)". For DRS we had translators handling the heavy work and it went well. I've seen some people comment on how being familiar with the raid helped, and it did, but there were also a few people new to the raid, and others like me who got hard carried once back in Asphodelos.

The fact that LS/CWLS have such little space makes ingame coordination difficult, whereas external tools like discord lack autotranslate and cannot be quickly macroed to or viewed ingame without a second monitor/computer.

From what I hear Materia has issues with queues and side content that are similar to Dynamis, except Dynamis still has the option to call for reinforcements on things like S rank hunts. I don't play on JP or AUS, but please consider linking those two- I think this cloud test proves that there are less cultural barriers than one might otherwise expect.

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During the latest frontlines pvp sync, the servers appeared to have issues keeping up relative to the first one. At times I'd be bouncing around in a stunlock at the rate of the server ticks, and I'd go back to dying in the middle of dragoon LB after losing the LB charge. The netcode is still a bit of a flaming trash heap, but it was interesting to see this isolated from the effects of my own latency, which is a lot higher on the main NA servers. I do want to say in no uncertain terms that this was still substantially better, and I would PVP more with cloud latency.

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[character limit, 1/2]

[Dysvalence]

[2/2]



It would be nice to have a way to view how many people are DF queuing for a duty, so we could see what we should queue for. I get that there might be concerns about being a self fulfilling prophecy, but at lower populations people get split between DF and PF.

It would also be nice to be able to merge alliance PFs- this was an issue for Nier since most bunker or tower groups would only fill when another group freshly cleared the previous raid.

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For future tests, I'm not sure if having 1 or 2 worlds is better- 2 helps for hunts and day 0 logins, but I also found that 01 became the main social hub while StQ activity was strongest on 02 because the main StQ FC was established there. Also made me wish that CWLS could be larger, to act as a substitute for multiple FCs- there were plenty of cool ones.

On future tests it'd also be nice to start at 2nd Lieutenant, just to get access to housing and hunts- it's trivial if you know to go through the extreme primal quests and then it's just some hunt logs stuff but its otherwise annoying.

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Overall this test was lots of fun, in ways that I couldn't replicate on my main character. Besides improvements to latency, I was able to NG+ STQ, play with players from around the world, and experiment with interior design in a large house. I was able to design high level glams on a character with a different race- being a roe player on main a lot of things changed and I couldn't just recycle outfits verbatim. Massive shoutout to all the event organizers, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun without you guys.

I'm aware that being an ephemeral, potentially one time event contributed to all the activity we saw, but it was fun and I'd be down to do it again.


Edit:


-forgot to mention that it was nice being in a world where gil meant little- people were giving umbrellas out for free and effectively using MB to share things. Shoutout to that guy making glasses for everyone.


-I dislike Blunderville, but tested it anyway since nothing makes lag more noticable, except pvp against a good enemy team. I only got solo games, but the snapshots actually felt fair for once and I might have liked it more if it was always this way.

[Teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeej]

I just want to add on a data point for the devs to consider here in favor of region travel for the wider game. Short an implementation of region travel similar to DC travel and world travel, I think some form of a visitable Global DC would also work, like the Guild Wars International District idea suggested a few thread posts ago. Something to allow people from different geographical regions to play the game together should they choose to do so. My biggest takeaway from this cloud DC test was how fun the cultural exchange aspect of this test had been, and the kind of memories it created. Perhaps it might be due to the novelty of the experience, but I think a lot of strong and favorable memories can be made if the devs looked into somehow delivering this kind of experience to the wider subscription base, and it's these kinds of memorable events that tie people to a community.

Also consider drawing inspiration from Everquest progression servers and World of Warcraft Seasons concepts with regards to revisiting/remixing old content--I think this could be a means to experiment with the game in a way that would not make sense in a mainline game patch or expansion, something like a wider implementation of Save the Queen/Eureka with lost actions allowing for player experimentation and actual "character builds". If long term support for such things is a concern then I would say--having experienced the 1-week time limit of the cloud DC test and the explicit understanding of the fate of the characters at the end of the test--any "progression server" style of service could be time-limited in nature. The time limited-ness and ephemeral quality of the cloud DC test really forced players to focus on experiencing the part of the game they enjoy, and seeing how far they could get in the limited amount of time they had. In my case, I set a goal of how many DRS/GD零式 runs I could host to clear (ended up being 5). I saw other players push the DoL/DoH game and try to get max level gatherers/crafters and a few gatherer/crafter relics. Some people focused on clearing Ultimates, others focused on hosting parties. There's a lot of little nuggets here in the player experience of the cloud DC test that the devs and SQEX can look at for potential avenues to expand the service of FFXIV in addition to the straight line that is mainline content development via expansions and patches.

Hope this helps. I saw a lot of people already saying lag and network response was good, so I figured mentioning some qualitative stuff here would help in a different manner. Thanks again for holding the cloud DC test, and I hope you guys got whatever information you needed from the week it was up. As a player who generates content by hosting DRS raids on NA as the main way I enjoy this game, participating in the cloud DC test was a real treat even more than I initially expected.

[Jeeqbit]

My biggest takeaway from this cloud DC test was how fun the cultural exchange aspect of this test had been, and the kind of memories it created.

This for sure. I learned to interact with a lot of JP players and was able to invite and talk with them in CWLS as well.

[Onshinn]

Cloudtest 02 - ran on Mac M1/M2 Sonoma (desktop and laptop) and PS5, Hard-wired and WiFi, in the U.K and Ireland, I had less latency, interaction to quests was quicker - although I didn't find time to do a dungeon (sorry). it also didn't interfere with my other Apps running in the background. Also loading to one area to another is pretty smooth! ALSO even with a lot of players in Limsa Lominsa, it didn't caused any stutter or animation delays and etc.

There is only one thing that happened after every logout; Almost every time as I re-login again to play on my normal character and datacenter, My hardware went into a Kernel panic; I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it; But I thought I'll let you know.