Too many idle players

[Ellevix]

The game has too many people sitting idle in it... there is a LOT.

If Square Enix introduces an idle timer it might help reduce the load on the servers but most importantly will allow others to play instead of the server spot being used by a person doing nothing.

It can't be that hard to implement an idle timer, say 15-20mins...once the player has not moved after that period they are given a pop up screen warning and countdown of say 30secs...if no response to that they are removed from the game back to the log in screen.

Cheers.

[Sleep2Little]

That would free up a lot of room for others to at least try to see if the game is worth coming back to. Yesterday I was able to get on and I saw the same two toons still standing in the same spot from the day before. To make matters worst when I came back a couple of hours later they were still there. Now today I am unable to even dream of logging on to a NA server because I did not get up at 4:30am to get on. Are the worlds full and not allowing others to even queue because they know that no one will log out once in? I have seen quite a few people on other forums admit they stay logged in just so that they can play when they come back after school, work or a nights sleep.

I did not even get to level 4 the first time around before the free month was up with FFXIV because of the lag. This is not what I would call an improvement.

[dryxaline]

Absolutely. It's a joke. Unbelievable, when i logged in the other day there were at least 50 people just standing in a big circle around me. Way to go SE. I don't blame the players though, eventho i myself log off when i'm done so someone else can have a chance to play, i completely blame SE, the fact that this is still ongoing for this long is ridiculous. Yes, i know they say they will be opening new servers on Wed. something tells me that's not going to fix it. This goes on for much longer this game will crash, even though it is such a great game, they have a longer fail period because of that, but even that will only last for so long.

[Superdave]

The game has too many people sitting idle in it... there is a LOT.

If Square Enix introduces an idle timer it might help reduce the load on the servers but most importantly will allow others to play instead of the server spot being used by a person doing nothing.

It can't be that hard to implement an idle timer, say 15-20mins...once the player has not moved after that period they are given a pop up screen warning and countdown of say 30secs...if no response to that they are removed from the game back to the log in screen.

Cheers.

Can you blame them? They don't want to be here like we are, unable to log back in.

[Akinari1]

Can you blame them? They don't want to be here like we are, unable to log back in.

Yep I know someone who once he gets in refuses to log out for that specific reason he knows he wont be getting back on its insane. People are afk for hours on end and people who want to play get World Is Full give me a break setup an inactivity time limit with a warning then kick people out if they dont respond

[DayumQuitPlayin]

15-20 minute idle time is too short, especially for an MMO.
Sometimes you have to step out real quick for real life issues.

1-2 hour timer would be more reasonable.
Remember, there's Sanctuaries in the game that's meant for people to stand and idle in.
Making the game boot ppl in 15 minutes of inactivity is ridiculous.
They're already in the process of enhancing the servers and adding more.

I don't agree with idle-booting period, but if they are to implement a system like that, it should be more reasonable. 1-2 hours.
People are paying to play this game. It's not the fault of the players that they want to remain in the game for fear of not going back in. SE are to blame for this and they have already announced that they're making improvements that should start this coming week.

[Nibble]

It shouldn't matter how many people are on.

Idle kicks are not the right answer.

Free world transfers are a partial solution, as are additional worlds. But these too are not the right answer.

Better software and systems engineering is the only real solution.

I have no faith that continued maintenance will solve the problem and I expect this to continue for several more weeks until world transfers are made available. Even then, the problem remains, these services can't handle the load. They bug out.

Yoshida does not guarantee capacity problems will be addressed. They are "hoping" and they "believe" that they can handle the load in a week. The lack of a definitive answer really bothers me, as though Yoshida's staff is unable to define and correct the problems we now experience.

Meanwhile you are clamoring for ridiculous things that will only take time away from making a product work as intended.

I've personally written services that handled millions of concurrent users, billions of requests per day, hundreds of thousands of requests per second on clusters 'small' enough to fit in only a few cabinets (read, a few hundred machines). I can't fathom why Square is still experiencing problems. Is it tooling? Is it platform? Partnerships? Were these services not engineered to scale out on demand? DID THEY NOT HIRE THE BEST OF THE BEST FOR THIS?! Maybe this is another draconian approach to service implementation and topology where you have 100 service instances, all single threaded and all on the same physical network.. e.g. not truly scalable. *shakes head* I've worked for companies that screwed up in capacity planning and watched cluster sizes double three times over, daily, until resolved.. I've watched software utilization drop to 10% as our brightest developers in the company rethought how services should operate and worked tirelessly to solve load and performance issues, I've watched companies overcome with a sense of urgency I'm not seeing come from Square.

...and you think an AFK timer will help solve "the problem" -- *shakes magic 8-ball* "Seems unlikely." During peak hours servers will still fill up for as long as the game is popular, with active players, replacing who would have otherwise been inactive. What then, should we ask for randomized disconnects as well?

</rant>

[Aleisterz]

It shouldn't matter how many people are on.

Idle kicks are not the right answer.

Free world transfers are a partial solution, as are additional worlds. But these too are not the right answer.

Better software and systems engineering is the only real solution.

I have no faith that continued maintenance will solve the problem and I expect this to continue for several more weeks until world transfers are made available. Even then, the problem remains, these services can't handle the load. They bug out.

Yoshida does not guarantee capacity problems will be addressed. They are "hoping" and they "believe" that they can handle the load in a week. The lack of a definitive answer really bothers me, as though Yoshida's staff is unable to define and correct the problems we now experience.

Meanwhile you are clamoring for ridiculous things that will only take time away from making a product work as intended.

I've personally written services that handled millions of concurrent users, billions of requests per day, hundreds of thousands of requests per second on clusters 'small' enough to fit in only a few cabinets (read, a few hundred machines). I can't fathom why Square is still experiencing problems. Is it tooling? Is it platform? Partnerships? Were these services not engineered to scale out on demand? DID THEY NOT HIRE THE BEST OF THE BEST FOR THIS?! Maybe this is another draconian approach to service implementation and topology where you have 100 service instances, all single threaded and all on the same physical network.. e.g. not truly scalable. *shakes head* I've worked for companies that screwed up in capacity planning and watched cluster sizes double three times over, daily, until resolved.. I've watched software utilization drop to 10% as our brightest developers in the company rethought how services should operate and worked tirelessly to solve load and performance issues, I've watched companies overcome with a sense of urgency I'm not seeing come from Square.

...and you think an AFK timer will help solve "the problem" -- *shakes magic 8-ball* "Seems unlikely." During peak hours servers will still fill up for as long as the game is popular, with active players, replacing who would have otherwise been inactive. What then, should we ask for randomized disconnects as well?

</rant>

I would rather have active players then inactive ones just taking up space.

[Nibble]

I would rather have ALL players online regardless of their state.

You know what's real funny, though, is despite all those AFK players we can all get on no problem during non-peak hours. So it's not like the AFK players are even the problem. And with 40+ people swarming FATEs in most zones I don't see there being a shortage of active players.

[ansielf]

I agree! Please bump this.

It is a totally acceptable procedure to automatically log out people who have been idle for > 15 minutes.