What the hell SE

[Hulan]

When Bungie showed off how much data Halo Reach was producing during it's first few months, I believe it was at the 6TB mark. Halo is a shooter, far less data than an MMORPG (but still a lot of data), yet it still produced that much data for not having all the bells and whistles of an MMORPG.

Well, alot of that data is inconsequential for the question at hand. Things such as transaction histories, checksums to detect speed-hacks, or any number of other data that can be stored is probably going to be thrown out, and thus doesn't add to the proposed transfer time.

[Shura]

Your forgetting the core engine the game runs on is different, converting character data to the new engine will take time. We are not simply talking about copying and pasting here, 2.0 will have different ability names, different skills and such so that also has to be changed. There is also the issue of items, its already been said that inventory space will be less in 2.0 for both character and retainer, left over items would have to be placed on a npc. Transferring, the items from the character data to npc will take time and they also have to remove dated items and such from all the character/retainers. Then they have to test everything on the new engine to see if it works(pretty sure there will be issues, any programmer knows porting like this has issues) & fix issues. If FFXIV was designed from the beginning with the intention of allowing character data to be ported to a new engine then it might take less time but i doubt FFXIV developers thought there game would fail this bad or that there would be a new engine 2 years later and the data needs to be ported.

Also the fact the game servers need to go down to port data is something we have known for months, all this was already mentioned. You should of made plans earlier, the road map to 2.0 has been available on the main page for almost an year.

[Hulan]

<mumble>I told myself I wasn't going to get involved in this...</mumble>

Ok, I am not entirely sure where this 400k inactive subscribers number comes from, but it doesn't sound that far-fetched, so I'm going to use it to play with some numbers quickly (Given that on release, there was still a substantial amount of interest, I wouldn't be surprised if there are indeed in the realm of 400k inactive accounts).

Disclaimer: This is not the absolutely best way to store this data, it is only meant to be a quick and dirty estimate of the space required.

Given 400k subscribers, let's see if we can't break down what data needs to be stored per account given a worst-case situation. Items can be referenced by a UID (or foreign key), but each account has some information that has to be stored uniquely to them, namely repair value and spiritbond for gear, quantity for items. Worst case, that means about 4Bytes per inventory space. Counting retainers, that's 2kB for inventory, per character.

Now, quest progression is also stored server side, and because they track progression, has to be stored as an integer (probably a short of some kind). Between Missions, Quests, and Achievements, that's about... potentially another 6.4kB (assuming around 400 quests, missions, and achievements) per character - yes I know this can be done more efficiently, but knowing nothing about the original servers (except that apparently they are terrible) I have to assume the worst. I'm going to be generous and toss out the piddling little stuff like: Armoire storage, current class, equipped gear flags, etc.

Add it all up and you're looking at about 8.4Kb per character, which is about 3.3GBytes of data. It could be much more, it could be much less, but I would wager it is within a margin of error of +-2GBytes. Hardly 40TBytes, but also not so insubstantial an amount as our OP has implied either.

[Wynn]

Let's be logical about this.

Why would SE take as much time as they plan to in order to transfer the game data if they didn't have to? What possible benefit would they gain from this? Especially since all eyes are on them right now to get this thing right since they fudged up so badly the first time.

I'm no programmer and I won't claim to have knowledge that I don't. However, I do use a little thing called common sense. SE wouldn't be doing what they are doing if they didn't have to do so. I'm sure they'd rather be continuing to bring in the monthly subscription revenues for as long as they possibly could.

So these arguments about sizes of databases and what actually goes into what they are doing are pretty irrelevant. At the end of the day all that matters is that the company is doing what it has to do.

[AsterBarnivere]

Let's be logical about this.

Why would SE take as much time as they plan to in order to transfer the game data if they didn't have to? What possible benefit would they gain from this? Especially since all eyes are on them right now to get this thing right since they fudged up so badly the first time.

I'm no programmer and I won't claim to have knowledge that I don't. However, I do use a little thing called common sense. SE wouldn't be doing what they are doing if they didn't have to do so. I'm sure they'd rather be continuing to bring in the monthly subscription revenues for as long as they possibly could.

So these arguments about sizes of databases and what actually goes into what they are doing are pretty irrelevant. At the end of the day all that matters is that the company is doing what it has to do.

I like you, lets be friends. (I don't normally become friends with hyur, but when I do, they have common sense)

[Hulan]

Thank you, Wynn, agreed. I was just so fed up with people on both sides throwing around numbers that seemed to have absolutely no grounding in fact, so I decided to walk through figuring out the required size myself. It's all academic though, since in the end it doesn't really matter why only that they are.

Except for this idea that they're using the old hardware for the new servers, which would be impossible if they brought 1.x back up (which is the very option we are discussing), concurrently with the beta tests. Ok, not impossible, but prohibitively ridiculous.

[sdegrazi]

i think there should be a CS showing meteor hitting the planet, nice destruction effects, then the servers go offline. that would be awesome

[Lavieh]

This thread proves that some people are just plain ignorant....

The simple explanation : If you don't understand something and have to complain about it the shut up because you are obviously missing something. Its pretty obvious that the OP knows nothing about server migrations, data transfer or what even a "New Graphic's Engine" entails. He can't even wrap his mind around why SE would offer us some more play time on a game so that way we can have fun still while waiting for 2.0.

The better way is to shut up and deal with it, play the game or don't. Wait for it or don't but don't be the idiot that starts rushing something and is then unsatisfied with the end result because it was unpolished.