Data Centers/World Locations Info from the LIVE Letter

[Jeronlmo]

I am still trying to understand why you all care that we want global servers, it really does seem insane, you can have your regional servers, they already fkn have them ready, its going to happen, people just want the "option" that you are all so fond of saying, and your trying to talk us out of it or something? FF has been this way for 12yr+, I could not give less of a damn if your accustomed to regional crap in wow and cant manage to communicate with EU/JP people, I can, and so can the rest of the people from FF11, we did it for 10yr+ and could do things around the clock.

I tried wow and was on a NA server but not a single guild had events for more than 3hrs except maby the first week after a major patch release, it just doesnt happen. You could sit in a major city and do /shout groups and after hours get a gimp group of people wearing AH pvp gear, that in the end, will never get far.

[Rokien]

I am still trying to understand why you all care that we want global servers, it really does seem insane, you can have your regional servers, they already fkn have them ready, its going to happen, people just want the "option" that you are all so fond of saying, and your trying to talk us out of it or something? FF has been this way for 12yr+, I could not give less of a damn if your accustomed to regional crap in wow and cant manage to communicate with EU/JP people, I can, and so can the rest of the people from FF11, we did it for 10yr+ and could do things around the clock.

I tried wow and was on a NA server but not a single guild had events for more than 3hrs except maby the first week after a major patch release, it just doesnt happen. You could sit in a major city and do /shout groups and after hours get a gimp group of people wearing AH pvp gear, that in the end, will never get far.

Because, it's ok for them to have what they want, but it's not ok for us to have what we want.

[Starlord]

Because, it's ok for them to have what they want, but it's not ok for us to have what we want.

This is how fights occur.. I want this.. NO I WANT THIS.. Your idea sucks! Really?! I think something is wrong with you.

That's what I feel like I'm hearing out of these forums, back and forth stuff XD.

[Soukyuu]

This is an MMO. Your game is being saved and loaded constantly. Data is written whenever it changes and is read whenever it is needed, which is all the time. As such, this has the potential to slow down your response times even when you're on the server physically near you.

Not really as updating the data is not battle relevant. I highly doubt the game dumps your HP/MP to the savestate every time it changes, that would be dumb beyond reason.

So what happens when people from area in region server A move to an area in region server B? You can't have the different parts of the server spread all over the world. Different people will lag at different times and the lack of consistency makes this even worse. Your suggestion just makes no sense whatsoever. This is what your proposal sounds like to me:

Lobby server [japan] <Everyone connects to this to access their character data
Area server 1 [NA] - contains la noscea
Area server 2 [EU] - contains thanalan
Area server 3 [JP] - contains the other stuff
All of these combined are one game world.

And this is where you misunderstood.

- Each region server has several area clusters containing the whole game world.
- Each region server is connected to one lobby server.

Basically, all it does is change our current login process from:

authentication -> server select -> character select -> play

to:

authentication -> character select -> server select EU -> play -> server change [US] -> play

all with one character, instead of having to make additional ones just to change region.

[Rogue]

I am still trying to understand why you all care that we want global servers, it really does seem insane, you can have your regional servers, they already fkn have them ready, its going to happen, people just want the "option" that you are all so fond of saying, and your trying to talk us out of it or something? FF has been this way for 12yr+, I could not give less of a damn if your accustomed to regional crap in wow and cant manage to communicate with EU/JP people, I can, and so can the rest of the people from FF11, we did it for 10yr+ and could do things around the clock.

I tried wow and was on a NA server but not a single guild had events for more than 3hrs except maby the first week after a major patch release, it just doesnt happen. You could sit in a major city and do /shout groups and after hours get a gimp group of people wearing AH pvp gear, that in the end, will never get far.

let me just say i couldnt really care less if there was an option for a "global" server but lets just look at things logically for a second;

how many JP would choose to join a global server? i say not many at all

and what would be the difference between them choosing to join say an NA server if global servers wasnt an option? no difference i think.

so we have narrowed it down to EU and NA- at this point the idea of a global server is allmost redundent but anyway; some EU people will choose to join an NA server and vice-versa so again; i dont see the point in just giving a server the name "global"... what difference will it make?

besides potentially lowering the number of players per server because you want the player base split 2-3 more ways.. which ironically could hinder your idea of a global server.

i dunno, jus what i think.

[Jeronlmo]

JP prefer global servers just as much as we do, the fact that most of you refuse to even try is not my problem. The only EU's that will go to NA are those that have wierd work hours and vise versa which also only fits into that normal server prime time. Reguardless if a NA server has EU people, they are only there because they fit prime time. We do not want 1 prime time on every server.

[Soukyuu]

Regional channels could be beneficial, yes, but there would still be server side latency when the world server would communicate to the database. It's much, much more complicated than a simple save/load state of your character as you say. Everything that happens in the world has the potential to be some sort of database write/read.

Take a seemingly simple item drop for example; we'll neglect that you're in any sort of party so the item drops directly to you. Your current channel decides you get a drop, awesome! That item will need to be generated in the database, then that item will need to be given ownership to you as well as assigned a slot in your inventory. All this information can be passed at once to the database server to deal with, but you'll be waiting for the database server to do that operation(s) then respond back to your channel. Now not only are we waiting for our channel server, we're waiting for a second server as well that is far away. This is only for an item drop, you still need to think about experience points updates, if the character levels up off of that battle, achievement updates, statistical updates for that particular monster, durability updates to gear, etc.

That's with only one fight. With the new battle pace coming to x|v, we'll be killing a handful of mobs every couple of seconds. Now multiply that by tens, hundreds, thousands of players. The milliseconds add up.

Having a local cache of the database wouldn't be wise either, it opens up way too much potential for having synchronization issues and merging conflicts, not to mention the problems that would arise from wanting to switch channels.

It certainly is possible to host channels across the world, but it does come at a huge server latency and response cost that the player pays for in the end. There are ways to hide the latency, but that doesn't solve the problem.

It might not solve the problem, but the improvement the regional channels would bring should be enough. It won't be as good as pure regional servers, but also not as bad as servers on the other side of the world as we have them now. And it comes with no community segregation as a bonus, so it's a good compromise imo

[Starlord]

JP prefer global servers just as much as we do

Source? o.o I wish I knew Japanese

[Jynx]

From what I gleam on the Japanese servers through my limited understanding they seem rather indiferent about it.

From saying they don't really care, to they will miss the players from other regions. I didn't see any posts wishing the door to not hit us on the way out like some people are insinuating they are.

Like I said if anything it's not a big deal either way for them. I could be totally wrong but at least the First-middle-last pages of their thread on it seem to not be full of vitrol.

[Starlord]

If they don't care about us, why should we care!? Protest! Protest!