Increased Server Capacity Means...

[edgefu]

A lot of people are thinking that increase of server capacity means increasing the size of the servers to allow more players on specific servers. Looking at the post on the below link, it seems the definition of doing this is to just add more servers. This will not help legacy players and other players who have friends on a specific server as they will still not be able to get in if they or other players don't move to a new server when it's created. I could be wrong, but discuss...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...72#post1111872

[edgefu]

BUMP

Char(10)

[Rhywden]

You're correct in that they seem to be talking about adding new server clusters only - and not adding capacity to existing clusters.

That's actually not such a big surprise to people who know a bit about servers - scalability is one of the harder achievments when creating server software. You can't simply slap a new server into a cluster and call it a day, you'll need to think about communication between the servers, where the data is stored and who has read-write-access at which times and so on and so forth.

EVE Online, for instance, has a pretty ingenuous solution for congestion: They simply dial down the flow of time

[edgefu]

I'm not familiar with EVE too much, what did you mean by dial down time?

[Rhywden]

It's their version of time dilation - while for you as the player in front of the PC everything works normally, everything inside the star system in question goes slower the more people pile up.

In extreme cases (2000+ players) it means that for every ingame second, ten realtime seconds pass. This slowdown would happen anyway (at least until the server crashed), so this way they get to control the whole thing and can recover from such fringe events.

This solution wouldn't be usable for FFXIV, however, and adding additional calculation capacities to a server cluster pretty much has to be designed into the code right from the start. If your software isn't scalable, you're pretty much out of luck when demand exceeds capacity.

[edgefu]

I can see how that won't work here at all. After the server capacity thing is done we will hear complaints that they did it wrong because the server size wasn't increased. The only thing would be if increasing the size of servers is included in the other "measures" mentioned in the post.