Expanding Server Capacity Clarification

[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.