Expanding Server Capacity Clarification

[Azmaria]

Can you please tell us your working to raise the 5000 concurrent player limit, from the sounds of the latest post it seems your just making new worlds and not increasing the limit each world can handle. Can we get words on what your plans on. I have friends still unable to join me and I hate to have to coordinate all of them onto a new world if you are not addressing the 5k a server limit. (which already I think is pretty low)

[stratogod]

I was wondering the same thing... Are they going to transfer people off of the existing worlds to help alleviate the load? I can't imagine that going over well. It sounds to me that adding new worlds won't help with the already busy ones that have login restrictions... They need to add a load balancer and more horse power to the already existing servers, as well...

[Azmaria]

Yea they say that the new tech will make it easier to login, just need to find out their reasoning, is it because of more concurrent connections able, or shifting more people to other worlds with transfers? This is actually nagging me to death.

[Alozaps]

Yoshi's letter was a nice gesture, but I didn't find it was as reassuring as it should have been. Why didn't he mention anything about increasing capacity of existing servers? I just get the feeling that even after these changes, people are still going to be dealing with 1017 during peak hours, and it's not going to be pretty at all.

[seikenflash]

I just hope I can transfer to Excalibur where all my old ls mates hang about, i also wish I could cross server friend req from the new loadstone instead of just following

[Azmaria]

Yea I have one friend who won't play or register his game cause he wants to play with me on leviathan, since he was unable to do it during EA it seems like he is just never gona be able to game with me

[Alhanelem]

Can you please tell us your working to raise the 5000 concurrent player limit, from the sounds of the latest post it seems your just making new worlds and not increasing the limit each world can handle. Can we get words on what your plans on. I have friends still unable to join me and I hate to have to coordinate all of them onto a new world if you are not addressing the 5k a server limit. (which already I think is pretty low)

From what they've been saying it seems like a hard limit. So odds are they'll have to offer people transfers to ease the limit.

5000 really isn't very low. You can see tons of people in every area as it is now. remember 5000 simultaneously means tens of thousands of characters active on the server in total.

[Azmaria]

From what they've been saying it seems like a hard limit. So odds are they'll have to offer people transfers to ease the limit.

5000 really isn't very low. You can see tons of people in every area as it is now. remember 5000 simultaneously means tens of thousands of characters active on the server in total.

Please explain to me how that works, I would imagine 5000 concurrent connections meant total players connected to the server, mind just enlightening me on the tech side of what that statement means to what you say?

[Alhanelem]

yes, its the number of people simultaneously connected to the servers. Exactly how many depends on how much bandwidth is required on each connection and the amount of CPU power needed to process the data being transferred. The limit can only be increased, for practical purposes, by optimizing code to require less CPU usage, and/or reducing the size of data transferred. However, they've very likely spent a huge amount of time doing just that. There's only so far optimization can take you.

[Hulan]

While I too would love an increase in capacity, such a thing is not a simple thing. They spent a good portion of the alpha optimizing their current architecture for concurrent users. I suspect that 5,000 is pretty much pushing the envelope of their capacities without extreme measures (such as expanding server clusters per world and rewritting whatever mechanics handle the load balancing to handle the larger cluster) which is the work of weeks, if not months. The more physical servers house a single outward facing facade, the more complex the operation and maintenance of the clusters.

In other news, while I haven't personally done the leg work on this, snooping around the internet for a bit showed a general belief that P2P MMOs tend to sit around 4,000-7,000 concurrent users per server. That puts FFXIV comfortably on the lower end of the middle; not great, but I personally consider it acceptable.

yes, its the number of people simultaneously connected to the servers. Exactly how many depends on how much bandwidth is required on each connection and the amount of CPU power needed to process the data being transferred. The limit can only be increased, for practical purposes, by optimizing code to require less CPU usage, and/or reducing the size of data transferred. However, they've very likely spent a huge amount of time doing just that. There's only so far optimization can take you.

Strictly speaking, that isn't true. There are a few tricks you can pull to maximize your bandwidth. For instance, FFXIV polls position every 0.3 seconds. By staggering the position polling, they could offset each server to maximize the bandwidth usage. In principle, you're right, for a single physical location, there is a hard limit on how much bandwidth you can physically get. But for corporations, that physical limit is much higher than what SE is using right now.