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?

[kellyfcwalsh]

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

Wikipedia for the population numbers. Square Enix itself for the # of servers currently allocated per region.
Suggested server numbers are then extrapolated from base country populations.

[Lumenous]

Ok, the Wikipedia does not have any of these numbers listed anywhere... In fact, they do not contain any population numbers at all for that matter...

You have failed to back put up your statement, thanks for playing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_population

[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.

[Philderbeast]

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.

yep the jp servers are MUCH better for aus/nz players