What the hell SE

[Delsus]

they are lying to you, they think you are stupid, and you are for believing that it takes months to convert data, a 5 year old can figure out they are recycling the server hardware

And you are stupid for thinking its the same as converting a WMV to MP4, these are large complex databases they are converting, when I say large I am talking about at the very least 40TB of data, then they need to run a checksum on every file and every record in the database, because one file becomes corrupt and everyone could loose relics, imagine what that would do to the community.

They know there are problems with the existing server hardware so Mr. Knowitall what would be the benefit of recycling server hardware, they spend millions to rebuild the game from the ground up just to not solve anything? This is FFXIV's last chance, it fails at ARR its dead and SE wants the income.

Your post lacks any logic, if there is any please point it out to me.

[nasomi]

And you are stupid for thinking its the same as converting a WMV to MP4, these are large complex databases they are converting, when I say large I am talking about at the very least 40TB of data, then they need to run a checksum on every file and every record in the database, because one file becomes corrupt and everyone could loose relics, imagine what that would do to the community.

They know there are problems with the existing server hardware so Mr. Knowitall what would be the benefit of recycling server hardware, they spend millions to rebuild the game from the ground up just to not solve anything? This is FFXIV's last chance, it fails at ARR its dead and SE wants the income.

Your post lacks any logic, if there is any please point it out to me.

40tb of data... You're clearly out of your mind. The game servers have a smaller amount of graphics data than clients. The rest is control data. few hundred thousand lines. What makes games large is not the code, it's the graphics. Physics engines, environmental action data, etc, is not large compared to graphics. Lets take a game like gran turismo 5. Incredibly large. However it's physics are not much more than GT4, but it's graphics are. I'd bet that every characters .dat file is no more than a meg, and closer to 150-200k. Even if you had a flag for every single in game item for whether the character had it or not, and 2 flags for gear, 1 for if you have it and 1 for if it's equipped, plus each class/job flag and number values for lifetime xp, that's the largest and most inefficient way to do it. However I'm sure they just have a sub container inside the module that has a list of items in inventory which would take up much less space. And it would be in a numerical format, not a list that reads the actual item. For each character plus 2 retainers, the entirety of the data would certainly be no more than a meg. Ever open a .config file for a game? It looks like that. Not some magical graphics rendering of your character and stuff.

[KiriA500]

Oh damn, so many game developers play this! Lucky for Square-Enix to get so much free input on what they've been doing for 25 years!

[nasomi]

There's no problems with the existing hardware, other than it's not fast enough. So while they're coding I'm sure they're optimizing hte code to run more efficiently. Take a program you wrote 1yr ago. Then re-write it now without looking at the code. If it hasn't changed at all then you haven't gotten any better at programming. YOu could even look at old code and think "wow, what was i thinking, this is a much better way to do it." I have a document for some personal program code i've written and it has probably over a hundred thousand lines of code, and it's about 600kb. I'd really love to hear where you came up with the 40TB number, because that's simply unrealistic for "code".

[Elexia]

40tb of data... You're clearly out of your mind.

Lol, 40TB is almost nothing for a game of this nature.

[nasomi]

Sorry, you said database, not code.

40tb database.

I have an entire datawarehouse that records every transaction at the line item, plus a table of 35,000 customers, a table of 350,000 items, about 150,000 invoices each day, with anywhere from 10 to 300 lines on an invoice. And it stores 3 years of data at that line item detail. It's 2.5tb. So SE must be storing information on where every grain of sand in thanalan is, every leaf in the shroud, and every idiot in la noscea.

[Elexia]

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.

If you're comparing an eCommerce database with an online game database, that's where you're getting confused on the "high number" and why you think it's not possible to be high.

[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.

[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.