FFXIV Letter from the Producer XXXIX

[Ouch!]

The latest Letter from the Producer went live today. Unfortunately, there are no pretty pictures this time around. The discussion focuses almost exclusively on the progress and future for alpha testing. You can read the whole letter here (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/58629-Letter-from-the-Producer-XXXIX-(11-30-2012)).

The main takeaways from the article are as follows:
We are currently in phase three of the alpha which will end December 2.
The final alpha phase begins December 3. Thousands of new applicants are expected to be invited to join.
Approximately 1/4 Japanese applicants, 1/6 North American applicants, and 1/3 European applicants have been accepted so far.
Phase four will see the addition of a third world for alpha testing and will involve stress tests for server mergers. New alpha testers are encouraged to join the new server (existing servers are Chocobo and Moogle).
Each world is designed to allow up to 5,000 simultaneous connections.
A Realm Reborn features approximately 40 areas, each of which can support approximately 1,000 active players at a time.
Alpha is scheduled to end in the middle of December. They may leave the servers up for alpha testers to continue to mess around with existing content.

There's some other more technical tidbits in there, but mostly it just sounds like more good news.

[Raistlin]

Excellent! Thanks for posting this; it's been a crazy week for me as I try to ensure I can become sworn in next month, and it's nice to have some help during major news times.

I haven't read the full Letter yet, but just going by your notes, it doesn't look like Yoshi-P said much new. But the first time I saw the 5,000 figure, I thought that seemed small, even for just one world. I don't know much about peak figures for other MMOs, but is that a legitimate concern?

[Ouch!]

Honestly, I'm not sure how other games break down; I never paid an awful lot of attention to SWTOR's population and server situation while I was playing that at launch; there were a troutload more worlds to choose from than Square Enix has offered for either FFXI or FFXIV, though.

Final Fantasy XI was a huge financial success for Square Enix, and in nearly a decade of playing the game, I never saw more than 3,000 players concurrently logged in (usually prime time was around 2,200-2,400 even after population decline demanded server merges). Keep in mind that the 5,000 simultaneous connections figure is how many people are playing the game at any given time, not how many people have characters on that particular server. I do not think it is anything that we need be concerned about.

For a look at the other end of the spectrum, while I cannot find any concrete examples of simultaneous connections numbers for World of Warcraft, they have 504 active "realms," each of which is composed of four world servers, a main database server, and an instance server. Assuming an even distribution of players (total population is approximately 10.2 million) across these servers (it is by no means anywhere near even), that would suppose approximately 20,240 players on every server. Given that Blizzard seems to have a far more robust system of servers for each realm in WoW, it sounds like Square Enix's 5,000 simultaneous connections per server is perfectly reasonable.

And yes, not a lot of new information. It's mostly confirmation and details of things that we've already been told about.