Interesting population statistics per Wikipedia and suggested server reallocation

[kellyfcwalsh]

Population (in millions)

NA/EU:
EU 508
US 316
Mexico 117
Canada 33
Aus&NZ 28

Total: 1002M (just over 1 billion people)
# of servers: 25
Pop per server (in millions): 40

Japan 126M
# of servers: 25
Pop per server (in millions) 5

This results in a 8:1 player to server ratio for NA/EU vs Japan

These are raw #s and don't reflect the % of the base population that play MMORPGs.
Japan may have a higher % of base population that plays compared to US/EU zone.
I'm pretty sure the %s of players to base population in the US/EU zone is pretty constant across US/UK/CAN/AUS/NZ. Mexico may be less.
Feeling generous we take that into account and reduce the ratio to 7:1

For Square Enix to provide the same level of gaming experience for the rest of the world outside of Japan, they would need to provision approximately 175 more servers.
These capacity numbers are not a requirement that appeared overnight and should have been identified very early in the design stage.

[kellyfcwalsh]

The japan servers also benefit with having all of their players relatively close. The architectural decision made by SE to have a single NA/EU datacenter is likely the source of much of their congestion issues. I can only imagine what SE's ISPs are trying to do to cope with this in Montreal.

Architecturally it would have made more sense to distribute the workload across multiple data centers. Have NA(east), NA(west), EU/UK, Oceania zone.
Put 25 servers in each NA datacenter, 50 in the EU centers(distribute across multiple DCs some in Britain, some on main continent) and 5 in the Oceania zone. That would quadruple the number of servers allocated to the current US/EU players base and still provide us with only half of the player to server ratio that the Japan player base currently enjoys.

Someone at SE might argue that would be expensive.
Your player base might argue that having millions of people return your product for a refund because it is unplayable is more expensive.

[kellyfcwalsh]

Also, somewhere someone over at SE made the decision that open beta would only last 2-3 days and it would occur a week before go live date. That was a serious mistake and something a competent software project manager/director should have caught. With only 2-3 days of open testing you didn't have time to baseline your clients usage patterns or provide real life stress testing. Now your window to correct the issues before full product launch is measured in hours instead of days/weeks and the required "fix" may require more than a few lines of code to fix what most system architects would characterize as "poor design decisions"

[Achtzen]

Do you have a link to back up these numbers your are throwing out there?

[Lullee]

Thank you for the insightful research and explanation. I was really hoping that this theory was just conjecture but I see that there is some truth here. How unbelievably disappointing. Thank you again from a fellow Gilgamesh orphan.

[LamiaTrucido]

Two thoughts:

Wouldn't Australia and New Zealand connect to Japan's servers for lower latency rates?

Nice of you to ignore China and India, both of which respectively have populations higher than the 1b you listed for the NA servers.

[xxSHEPERDxx]

These numbers aren't people playing the game. No frikkin' way.

[Uanael]

It's clear by the way they handled the open beta having people unable to play for over 24hrs myself included. Now I can't even play because the servers are full and they have a queue like every MMO has had to handle full servers. If they keep this up and this game will fail just like their first go around. Don't get my wrong I want this game to succeed, but I'm getting close to the end of my rope this has been by far my worst MMO experience.

[Teardropz98]

Whole heatedly agree that they should of known better then to stick only 25 servers for the rest of the world, where Japan too has it's own infrastructure of 25 servers. I had no idea that Japan Players over shadow the rest of the World population wise? Huge huge mistake SE..... huge.

[Yoona]

As a Japanese player myself playing from NA, I can tell you this little bit. In Japan, gaming is not as "wide-spread" or as glorious as it is here. I don't mean to say that the nation hates games and fun. It's just that the notion of gaming in Japan is different than it is here. In Japan, the most widely adopted form of "gaming" is what we would probably best refer to as "arcade style games." Taiko machines, Beatmania consoles, stuff like that. The era of PC gaming has not really reached Japan as much as it is spread in NA/EU.

The population in Japan vs. NA/EU that are playing FFXIV: ARR, proportionally speaking, are probably quite a bit lower in Japan than it is in NA and EU. I really don't see why NA/EU has fewer servers than the Asian region.