Japanese dev posts today (April the 20th)

[Abriael]

Just merge all the darn servers in a single gigantic shard. Technology allow this. The surname system allows this. The multiple guild system allows this

This would give us some definite feeling of "world server", a feeling that very few games can bring. Let the people use linkshells to build their own networks of communities, instead of that arbitrary split in servers.

And yes, this means instancing everything to hold the charge. Instancing is not a problem, since anyway FF14 isn't sold for its lusterfuck groups of hundred of players (like a RvR oriented game would be). Non-instancing bring only technical problems on PvE games.

No. The only MMORPG that does that is EvE Online, and it works only because the "world" is made by hundreds of extremely small self-contained areas.
Even then, when a lot of people gather in the same place, the lag becomes unbearable.

Technology does *NOT* allow this. It's that simple.

[Nipa]

Technology does *NOT* allow this. It's that simple.

Uh?

With instantiation it's really easy, Guild Wars being the prime example: from the point of view of the player there is only one server. Of course due to the mechanics of GW (limiting groups to 6 players I think), it doesn't really show the potential of this outside of the towns.

But the very same can be -and is- applied by most current MMOs to "open" zones. EQ 2 does this. Rift and Aion do this where it's not a problem (starting zones, since they are PvE). But if you drop the restrictions implied by PvP, you can do it at the scale you want.

We are in this case for FF14: we have no need to handle open-world PvP, not big world events (like Rift does), so we can split all those PvE zones as much as we want.

And it's technically way less difficult to do this than to do what Rift is doing at the moment: splitting the players of a single zone in multiple servers, dynamically as it's needed, to handle the charge during events...

No, really, for a PvE game not based on massive events, there is no point splitting the servers. It's only hassle (having to open new servers and to balance the existing ones populations).

Do you want two thousand people at the Uldah Adventures guild during reset?

Instantiation. Please at least try to read the posts.