Quote Originally Posted by Arawn View Post
however, 5 million copies sold, by the math you used in this point and only 230,000 players can play at any given point, SE stated. So, is their fix going to allow for the rest of that 4.75 million to get a chance to play the game? I hope so.
Everything I posted about the numbers were just things I grabbed out of mid air. Now, the average cost of making an MMO is exactly what I posted. Still, 5 million copies, that is 90 million (again, this is assuming every copy made the company 18 dollars. With the PC version being 30, they made way less then that per copy. Probably around 9 dollars, which would give them only 45 million income. If I had to guess, I would suspect this game cost around 75-100 million to develop.)

Now, not sure I have seen the 230,000 only figure, would love a link to that. Even so, this downtime is over 10 hours. I would say they are adding not only more servers, but I know they mentioned they are raising the player concurrent login numbers (basically, how many people can be logged in at one time without there being a que or the world is full.)

I expect that Square is not just going to add servers. In fact I am positive, because that alone wouldn't fix the problem, and also it's the reason they couldn't do this right away this past Tuesday. They are not only going to increase the amount of servers, but the amount of capacity each server can hold. I also assume, because it's just logical when expanding servers, that less worlds will be on a single server. When you log in to see worlds, like say, yours is Siren. Siren isn't the only world on that server. There could be 3-5 other worlds on there. Like say the group was Siren, Cactuar, Balmung. These three worlds run on the single server. Those are the three worlds the duty finder will pull from.

What SE will do will not just add servers, but lower the world amount. So instead of say, five worlds, it would be just Balmung and Siren. This means a larger amount of concurrent users can player on Balmung and Siren, but the duty finder can only pull from those two worlds now. With the increase of the amount of players on each server, it should even out on the duty finder. Even though it's pulling from less servers, it has more people now to pull from.

This would be why, and I didn't go into detail, MMOs can't just flick a switch and add more servers. They need to add more capacity per server, move world groups around. lower or raise them. Add more world groups. Tune the duty finder to the new layout. Make sure the data login servers are connecting properly to the new layout and capacity. Add more data centers for login auth if needed. Then test it all and make sure it works before reopening the service.

Hence the large downtime tonight. And all this had to be planned, and worked out with whatever company they are running their servers through. They had to rent more space, buy more equipment, add more cooling, etc. All this cannot be done in a day. It's impressive they have worked so fast to get all this bought and planned in a week. Not they have all staff working to upgrade, install, test etc. During downtime.