[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[NanaWiloh]

This is the worst change they've made since I've started playing this game 4 years ago. During the first week of savage I spent 2-6 hours a day spamming log in queues non-stop with almost no breaks, meanwhile my friends were showing me there was a queue of like 20 players on the world for aether. I would have much rather sit through a 3000 player queue that randomly kicks you out, because that only requires interaction when it does kick you out and it does get you through eventually. Me and my friends almost didn't clear savage week 1 entirely due to these changes and we were stressing out about trying to log in for raid. We've since had to move our reclear times to 3AM instead of 9PM because thats the only time we can comfortably log in and play together.

It's appeared to have improved since the initial launch but its current state is still unacceptable and its causing issues even for players native to their data centers. I'm on crystal and I can't even go to Balmung, not being able to go to Aether was bad but I'm not even safe on my own data center. Another friend of mine spent 3 hours trying to transfer onto balmung today too. I would much rather get randomly kicked out of the game or even have servers crash due to congestion than have these changes in place, with the current design I wouldn't be surprised if people were rule breaking to stay logged in defeating some of the purpose this update was meant to prevent. This is definitely a case of them trying to be too safe for their own good.

I also want to know why they decided the worst possible time to implement these changes, on the start of a savage tier is the MOST important time to be able to data center travel, if they're gonna test out experimental changes like this it should really be done on some casual patch like patch 7.1, That way they could at least see how awful it gets implemented and fix it before ultimate comes out, and most people would have done their BiS from savage reclears by then. It's been 2 weeks now with no response on this thread and I'm afraid that nothings going to be done and that its just gonna be ignored, and people will accept this change despite it being a daily inconvenience to thousands of players.

If anyone is trying to log in spam I highly recommend changing your title screen to ARR/HW/etc. as that will let you get to character select faster than the dawntrail title screen.

Just want to pass along something. In regards to Balmung, that world and congestion are married 4 with kids and a house. They have never been apart for long periods.

[dododogu]

(shortened for brevity)

i'm sorry i have no idea how to reply to this or make sense of it. it's so insane lol.

anyway, i really wish they would at least be a bit more open about their plans for changes and how they're implementing DC travel since it's become much more utilized and important to players since EW.

one thing i do like about CBU3 is that they do tend to be more "open" about their process than most would, but i feel like they dropped the ball with this...As frustrating as this all is, i think if they at least went over the "how" and "why" they made these choices, it would make me feel a bit more accepting of the changes they've implemented. that would probably be complicated to answer because it's all infrastructure and data stuff your average player wouldn't know or care about, but i think it would make things just a bit less stressful i guess. more transparency is always nice.

[KazukoHimura]

idk how to reply to that it's kinda crazy. get well soon or congrats. i don't know.

anyway, i really wish they would at least be a bit more open about their plans for changes and how they're implementing DC travel since it's become much more utilized and important to players since EW.

one thing i do like about CBU3 is that they do tend to be more "open" about their process than most would, but i feel like they dropped the ball with this...As frustrating as this all is, i think if they at least went over the "how" and "why" they made these choices, it would make me feel a bit more accepting of the changes they've implemented. that would probably be complicated to answer because it's all infrastructure and data stuff your average player wouldn't know or care about, but i think it would make things just a bit less stressful i guess. more transparency is always nice.

I'm in full agreement with you there. I really think that the ball had been dropped since a lot of key players were pulled away for other projects. There's other things that I think the ball was dropped on, but those are for another thread.

[dododogu]

I'm in full agreement with you there. I really think that the ball had been dropped since a lot of key players were pulled away for other projects. There's other things that I think the ball was dropped on, but those are for another thread.

Oh, I totally forgot...but i don't think ffxiv's connectivity stuff would have been affected by xvi's development, would it? that's like a different department i'm guessing. then again, i'm not at SQE and i have no idea who was pushed to what project lol.

[NanaWiloh]

i'm sorry i have no idea how to reply to this or make sense of it. it's so insane lol.

anyway, i really wish they would at least be a bit more open about their plans for changes and how they're implementing DC travel since it's become much more utilized and important to players since EW.

one thing i do like about CBU3 is that they do tend to be more "open" about their process than most would, but i feel like they dropped the ball with this...As frustrating as this all is, i think if they at least went over the "how" and "why" they made these choices, it would make me feel a bit more accepting of the changes they've implemented. that would probably be complicated to answer because it's all infrastructure and data stuff your average player wouldn't know or care about, but i think it would make things just a bit less stressful i guess. more transparency is always nice.

The server infrastructure is archaic when compared to MMO's like WoW. So their options for dealing with congestion and periods of high traffic are not great. New servers have been added but as this threads shows people want nothing to do with them. Add on top that SE over the years has taken more aggressive approach to handling congestion. Even if that approach upsets people like the restrictions we now have. Some of us have seen what happens when SE does not step in. I have no love for the restrictions but I have even less for the days. When SE just twiddle their thumbs until something melted.

This games server infrastructure and coding are the heart of its issues. But SE wont give the devs the man power, resources and time to rebuild them from the ground up. The game will have to cave under the weight of its issues before SE finally takes proper action.

[VoidsentStatus]

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Bro, the stories I could tell you xD But nah, if you want to hear the details of things that happened in the past and understand how unituitive certain aspects of the community are, we can hop in VC on discord because it's way too much to type. One of the things people don't intuitively know is that most venues, like ~70-90% including some gambling locations even run negative consistently. A low end venue may only run 3-10mil negative a week. But the high end venues that have the biggest crowds, most of them are running 30-100mil negative a week between staff pay, advertising costs on and off hours as well as entertainment costs, during my era. Songbirds as an example (one of the most famous bard groups) used to run like 5+mil/hr to play at a venue/location. When you have owners in debt, RMT'ing (don't do this), struggling financially as a venue, that suffocates the entire experience. Not only are they stressed, but it can influence the entire business model they have, they can be borderline forced out of their property by the real owners or forced out of management, that stress can carry over to staff, etc. One of my old ex-friends, the Vexia name I mentioned, she ended up purchasing Full Moon, the venue that Asmongold went to when he played FF14, that was ~400Mil in debt and bought it from the previous owner and had to re-arrange everything as a business model because they were horribly failing having to take out loans from people like me but never being able to pay it off. I was in voice chat while she relayed to me how staff was whooping and hollering about staff pay being cut and they were getting like 1-2mil each a night (and this was back when average staff pay was like 25-100k/hr). For some places, those finances are the lifeline to every important relationship and purpose of that venue itself to everyone involved. A lot of venue finances are not extra/profit, they are maintenance until you build enough whales as customers that buy out lifetime packages, buy out the bar for 6+ months etc., or cover debt directly like I did that give you that breathing room. That is one of the many reasons it's not fun from a management perspective. When people get irritated at betrayal about gil, it's not a "I gave you extra money you didn't need" situation, it's a "the reason you aren't stressed and having to gil farm for 6+ hours a day is because of me. this venue would not exist as it does, or would not exist at all, without me." and some venues have had to shut down when they lost that lifeline. Some venue owners get way too comfortable spending other people's money. But that's just to give an idea of things that are not intuitive from an outside perspective.

As for the open about the process bit, while there isn't a lodestone, this is the interview:
23:30 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIxQPKBf0E

[Urbancat]

I have to say this last restrictions are really putting a damp on my time in the game.
I am mainly an RPer and been for a long time. I have stuck with the game since 1.0 and seen it's up and downs, but right is the first time I am really having troubles sticking with it.

There's a lot of initiatives that people start and maintain to group like minded players.
In my case is Roleplay, but I can't see those limitations hitting only one type of player.
Is really making difficult to enjoy the game and continue to meet the people I usually frequent and maybe even worse, is making harder for new people to mingle and for initiatives to gain track.

Not sure what technical benefits they are having using those restrictions, but on my side of things the only effect is playing less. Love the game but if it is 10 plus years I am sticking with it is for the people that play it making from hard to impossibile to interact with them isn't really incentiveing me to stick around anymore. So I hope they do something about it because otherwise start to be way less fun to play and continue to do so.

[erroch]

The server infrastructure is archaic ...

I agree on the server architecture being ancient and archaic.
I think the cloud server deployment was a chance to change that up a bit, and maybe when/if that actually gets deployed things might smooth out some and maybe under the hood things might end up a bit better, even if it presents the same to us. That had to be a major lift to go from this sort of odd fixed architecture they have now to something that can be dynamically scaled.

That said, it has been a really long time since servers were actually routinely melting.
I think the last time it was with any regularity was Stormblood. There are instances here and there, sure, often explained away as being the fault of a DDOS attack, but even severe outlier spikes in people on a server, we didn't really get server performance degradation.
(Like the infamous billboard party which locked multiple housing wards to capacity, and caused a hour+ world visit queue)
The instance servers where most activities happen are segregated from the actual world servers anyway.

So far in Dawntrail, on Crystal, the only time things got really bad when somehow we managed to shove 1k people into a single instance for a single boss fate. The server survived but it was not a pleasant experience. The other instances, however, were working great.

These current limits seem exceptional arbitrary and -far- below the thresholds for actual performance degradation.
There's some speculation that this is a 'stick' until the numbers on Dynamis improve.
If that is the case, making it harder to play with others is going to make us dig our feet in (as usual) and is very much not the way to encourage it.

[GiR_Zippo]

So far in Dawntrail, on Crystal, the only time things got really bad when somehow we managed to shove 1k people into a single instance for a single boss fate. The server survived but it was not a pleasant experience. The other instances, however, were working great.

Hmm... 1k player on one server instance and the server can't handle it. Sounds like a normal issue with the update tick, that's the limitation.

If they are used the basic 1&1 how to build a MMO-Server the map, client and network should run on different threads (of course multithreaded) and glued together via push-pop queues.
If this is the case, the map-thread updates everything happening on the map, build the packets out of the box which aren't requires client datas (monster move, vfx, s.o.) and hand them over to the routine which publishes them to the clients in range (normally the server should know where are the clients are located on the map and this routine is publishing parallelized).
Basically everything on the map which's not static is in a queue on the map and this queue will be processed by every update tick.
Please keep in mind, this object-queue is normally not proccessed multithreaded.
That's the easy part.

The hard one is, when you or 1k ppl intercating with the boss, if you gettn the aggro the boss will ask for your position and turn around.
For this you have to get the position from your player-object, whichs mostly in a mutexed region, so every other routine has to wait until the active one has finished the access since the C++ below C++14 or C# dosn't have specialized read many - write once mutex, if not custom implemented like ACE was doing long time ago.
Now we have to push this packet to the players involved (this does the "clients in range" routine).

Getting further: All of them doing damage to the boss, it gets the spell data you hit with, calls a sub to calculate the damage and passes everything to the boss-script too, in case it has to react to your actions.
Now we'll send the response to you and every player in range.
Please keep in mind, this will handled by the map-tick for every player, boss, mob, NPC, s.o. in the object-queue.

The tricky part
The player-object. Normally the map and its queue keeping track of it, unfortunately you have to wait until it's your player-objects turn to be updated (damage calculation, get collision, update position, send data, s.o.).

Oh and there is more: The script engine SE is using for the bosses. I guess it's LUA.
Compared to native compiled routines, LUA is kinda "slow", but it has a huge advantage:
You can change the scripts and reload on runtime.


Had to shorten everything... hope this will help a tiny bit to understand what is going on under the hood of a MMO-server.
(Programmed such server things long time ago, so everything is kinda vague)

Songbirds as an example (one of the most famous bard groups)

Don't know them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[VoidsentStatus]

Don't know them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.twitch.tv/SongbirdsFFXIV
https://x.com/songbirdsffxiv?lang=en

Back before DJ's, when bards were heavily everywhere, as far as I was aware, they had the biggest song catalogue out of all of the groups, and used to host hours long concerts playing famous songs from irl, other game genre's, and previous ff's. they used to do this in open world in limsa, gridania, etc. but eventually you could pay for them at venues, weddings, etc. They eventually expanded and played on eu and jp as well from what I remember back then. you can find a decent chunk of some of the concerts on youtube.