XIV:ARR Halts Sales to Help Fix Server Issues

Originally Posted by Aelitalily

I do believe he must have a difficult job.

Not just because he is both producer and de facto championing spokesperson for the entire project

Originally Posted by Jiro

Friend of mine is unable to join any of the NA servers, they're just not taking characters. Weird and frustrating. I hope it sorts out soon, and they offer world swaps in the future.

Yes, when I tried to play yesterday, every NA server was full.

Right now the number of people playing and the number of hours people are playing are both very high. Later, a lot of people will quit and a lot of people who still play will play for fewer hours, so the servers won't be as stressed, and I imagine registration will open on the currently-full servers again. It would be bad if SE added a bunch of new worlds that later ended up being ghost towns due to not enough players in them.

Originally Posted by Miriel

Originally Posted by Ouch!

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

Oh you know what I meant. At this point when they've told us that certain servers are at capacity, if you jump onto a server that's full, you shouldn't expect to play. That's kind of how this stuff works.

Edit: For anyone who is wondering why Square Enix has been so overwhelmed and caught with their pants down on the success of the MMO, the most ever concurrent connections for a Japanese-produced MMORPG was approximately 150,000 prior to FFXIV launch. They broke the record with 187,000 concurrent connections and expect that number to soon hit 200,000. Sure, the news about the servers being full and crashing could hurt them, but as we're seeing, this is very easily spun into a good problem to have.

Ya this has been a little bit of a bummer. I was pretty excited to get going but by the time I did the only servers still accepting new characters were Eu Servers. I made a character just to check out the game, but I was hoping to get on Sargatanas (NA) with pretty much all EoFF. I'm on Odin (Eu) now.

On a not-so-sidenote however, this game is super-smooth and has FF written all over it. The graphics are top-notch as well as the UI imo. Good stuff SE. I can't wait for the NA servers to open back up.

Originally Posted by Miriel

Originally Posted by Ouch!

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

Originally Posted by Yeargdribble

Originally Posted by Miriel

Originally Posted by Ouch!

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

I'm doing the same. I'd stop doing it if I actually had a queue to sit in when trying to re-enter.

Originally Posted by Mirage

Originally Posted by Yeargdribble

Originally Posted by Miriel

Originally Posted by Ouch!

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

I'm doing the same. I'd stop doing it if I actually had a queue to sit in when trying to re-enter.

Same. The queue exist, but it's apparently very short and very broken. Sometimes if I even get lucky enough to get in the queue, if it's over 20, it'll just disconnect me anyway.

Here's hoping they get the new data center stuff up soon so everyone can play. We had a friend that was super interested in playing, but by the 12th hour of open beta he couldn't make a character on our world... a few hours later he couldn't make one at all. Now he doesn't seem interested since there are still major problems going on.

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Following on from Ouch!'s earlier post about concurrent connections, they've now hit 230,000. Blimey!

I don't feel bad about idling in the inn, personally. It's the only way people can leave friend requests and tells on my screen when I'm not logged in, and without an accepted friend request I can't send them mail nor can I add them to the Linkshell or Free Company. So... yeah. Fix all these little issues and I might feel a lit-- actually, no, I still won't feel bad. I paid to play the game, I should be allowed to idle in the inn for as long as I like if that's how I want to play. I like seeing the LS chat when I get back to the PC.

Originally Posted by Loony BoB

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Following on from Ouch!'s earlier post about concurrent connections, they've now hit 230,000. Blimey!

I don't feel bad about idling in the inn, personally. It's the only way people can leave friend requests and tells on my screen when I'm not logged in, and without an accepted friend request I can't send them mail nor can I add them to the Linkshell or Free Company. So... yeah. Fix all these little issues and I might feel a lit-- actually, no, I still won't feel bad. I paid to play the game, I should be allowed to idle in the inn for as long as I like if that's how I want to play. I like seeing the LS chat when I get back to the PC.

Lucky you, I got booted off at around 9pm yesterday and was unable to log back in the entire night, when I tried to log on this morning I still got loads of 1017's so right now I am just losing my trout with them not implementing a decent que system or an auto dc function especially if said afker is only going to play for a few hours in the evening then afk for another 18+ hours.

Said afker isn't using the resources which are bottlenecking the situation (duty finder instances) and SE have stated they are monitoring things 24/7 to allow increases/decreases to server populations based on resources used. This is why the devs aren't that bothered about the afk'ers. Let's put it this way... they set the world capacity at 3,500 and then boot all the afk'ers, say 500 of them, so it's 3,000 people online. The demand on the duty finder server? Exactly the same. So they adjust the world capacity to 3,000 with no afkers instead of 3,500 with afk'ers. Nobody wins. The resources required for an afk'er are pittance compared to the resources required by an active player. If the devs really felt that the afk'ers were causing these problems they would have done something about them a long time ago.

The problems lie with the stresses caused by the duty finder, so they need to sort that out instead of coming up with scapegoats that do nothing to fix the problem. If they implemented afk booting, all it would do is result in more people logging in which would take up more stressful resources in one minute than the afk-in-the-inn member would use over hours.

Also, just to make matters worse, you end up with a feature that naive people will think will magically solve the problems and it won't, and when it doesn't, how do you think these people will feel? Happy that an afk boot is in despite still not logging in, or even more frustrated that they still can't log in despite an afk boot? And now they're competing with people who come back from afk, too, for placement on the server, and the lobby server goes under further stress (after the duty finder server or "instance server", the lobby server appears to be going under more stress than any of the other servers), and the problems exaggerate.

People need to stop making assumptions without any consideration for/understanding of the the actual issue. Jealousy of those who are online is not going to make your problems any better. Instead, let SE deal with the real issues and know that they are the ones with likely very stressed out heads and perhaps (at worst) careers on the line, while all you have on the line is the ability to play a game as often as you like. I trust they are doing everything they can to optimise the number of people who can play the game short of making it financially unviable.

Classic Square. They're really not having a lot of luck with FFXIV are they?

I was hoping to pick this up yesterday, but couldn't even find a retail copy anywhere. You would think by now that anyone launching anything popular would realise that you should estimate demand and then multiply your estimate by at least 3. Even Apple figured that out eventually :P

Originally Posted by Cloudane

Classic Square. They're really not having a lot of luck with FFXIV are they?

If anything, things are going better than they could dream of - they have so much demand that they can't keep up with it. Unfortunately for them, the demand came about far later than was ideal meaning they couldn't accommodate it in a hurry.

I was hoping to pick this up yesterday, but couldn't even find a retail copy anywhere. You would think by now that anyone launching anything popular would realise that you should estimate demand and then multiply your estimate by at least 3. Even Apple figured that out eventually :P

No, people were sceptical at best about FFXIV for a very long time. In fact, it wasn't until a couple of weekends before (early access) release that the interest shot up notably and it wasn't until the week of release that demand shot through the roof. Even here at EoFF people were cautious with their optimism - even me! But the game itself seems to appeal to the vast majority of people that actually are able to play it, so they're definitely doing something right.

I loved the reddit page Zach linked earlier, particularly for this link I found in it: Google Trends

Originally Posted by Loony BoB

Said afker isn't using the resources which are bottlenecking the situation (duty finder instances) and SE have stated they are monitoring things 24/7 to allow increases/decreases to server populations based on resources used. This is why the devs aren't that bothered about the afk'ers. Let's put it this way... they set the world capacity at 3,500 and then boot all the afk'ers, say 500 of them, so it's 3,000 people online. The demand on the duty finder server? Exactly the same. So they adjust the world capacity to 3,000 with no afkers instead of 3,500 with afk'ers. Nobody wins. The resources required for an afk'er are pittance compared to the resources required by an active player. If the devs really felt that the afk'ers were causing these problems they would have done something about them a long time ago.

The problems lie with the stresses caused by the duty finder, so they need to sort that out instead of coming up with scapegoats that do nothing to fix the problem. If they implemented afk booting, all it would do is result in more people logging in which would take up more stressful resources in one minute than the afk-in-the-inn member would use over hours.

Also, just to make matters worse, you end up with a feature that naive people will think will magically solve the problems and it won't, and when it doesn't, how do you think these people will feel? Happy that an afk boot is in despite still not logging in, or even more frustrated that they still can't log in despite an afk boot? And now they're competing with people who come back from afk, too, for placement on the server, and the lobby server goes under further stress (after the duty finder server or "instance server", the lobby server appears to be going under more stress than any of the other servers), and the problems exaggerate.

People need to stop making assumptions without any consideration for/understanding of the the actual issue. Jealousy of those who are online is not going to make your problems any better. Instead, let SE deal with the real issues and know that they are the ones with likely very stressed out heads and perhaps (at worst) careers on the line, while all you have on the line is the ability to play a game as often as you like. I trust they are doing everything they can to optimise the number of people who can play the game short of making it financially unviable.

If what you are saying is true (I would like the source on that info btw) then why at 10:30am was I still getting 1017? I find it hard to believe that there are that many people doing duty finder at that time of day to cause such a bottleneck that you describe.

The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore it's that servers can crash if there are too many people in densely populated areas - such as the starter areas, which is why they had really limited capacity at the start and have gradually increased them as the population has spread out across all areas. Even if you are on the server doing nothing you are still consuming resources that is preventing someone else from logging in.

Also worth noting is they haven't ruled out kicking people who are AFK. They have openly said they are considering it but are waiting to see what the situation is like after the hardware upgrades this week.

Don't ask me to explain why you can't get in - I'm not on the phone with Yoshi and I don't think he'd have the time to look into individuals. I disconnected at something like 8pm on a weekday and got back in immediately with a queue of 18. Perhaps a lot of people in America are staying up late on Sunday night playing the game?

As for sources...

Yoshi, in his "Further Details on Access Restrictions" post in General Discussion of the official FFXIV:ARR forums...

Originally Posted by Yoshi

The restoration of crashed servers is usually followed by a rush of players attempting go log back in, which, in turn, puts a straing on our lobby server, and can ultimately have an adverse affect on all of the Worlds.

To prevent this from happening, we felt the safest course of action would be to limit logins.

This is why you get 1017 at all. They limit logins rather than putting you in a queue that might never end because of the strain such an unlimited queue can cause on the lobby and subsequently other worlds.

Originally Posted by Yoshi

However, we would like you to know that the restrictions are under constant surveillance. We are currently monitoring login numbers on all Worlds 24 hours a day, and actively removing/applying restrictions as soon as we detect even the smallest fluctuation in concurrent connection numbers.

...so, monitored 24/7, as I said. If they feel they can let you in, they will.

Originally Posted by Yoshi

In addition to increasing the number of Worlds, we are also optimizing the Duty Finder (party matching) management servers in an effort to reduce server load and ensure better stability when using this feature.

Here he acknowledges that the Duty Finder is a problem, which pretty much everyone and their uncle knows if they look into the problems that the servers have experienced and looks through more of the dev posts. Seriously, dev posts are great.

Originally Posted by Yoshi

From several users on some of our more congested Worlds, we have received requests for a feature which automatically logs out characters who are AFK for an extended period of time. We are actively looking into the implementation of such a feature, but have decided to first concentrate our efforts on increasing the number of Worlds and optimizing the Duty Finder servers.

This is where he says that the Devs feel that the overall number of worlds and the Duty Finder servers are more important than an auto-afk-kick.

Originally Posted by Aulayna

The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore it's that servers can crash if there are too many people in densely populated areas - such as the starter areas, which is why they had really limited capacity at the start and have gradually increased them as the population has spread out across all areas. Even if you are on the server doing nothing you are still consuming resources that is preventing someone else from logging in.

The resources being used are absolute bugger all compared to the resources that would be used by an active player. Like... less than 1% of the resources. Going by what has been stated in Zach's link where a bunch of server admins for similar games are posting, the amount of resources used by someone in a small area single-character instance are tiny compared to someone through Duty Finder. I wouldn't be surprised if one character in the duty finder would have the same cost as hundreds of users in their inns doing nothing. And again, this is the only way I can get friend requests. I dare say there would be around 10-20% fewer people in our LS - perhaps even 30% fewer - if I couldn't receive friend requests. No afk = No friend request = No LS/FC invite. I know we have other leaders but they aren't always online and I'd much prefer the simple ability to add friends who are offline, have them accept when I'm offline, add them to the LS/FC when they're offline, etc. etc. This would go a very long way towards me altering my opinion on AFK'ers. I do agree that AFK'ers in the cities are annoying, though - that's why I insist on returning to the inn.

Oh, and there are still issues with the duty finder. The "stories" haven't stopped - the lower caps on server population are a direct result of the resource-intensive things such as (as you stated) the starter areas and (as I've mentioned) the duty finder. It's repeatedly mentioned by server gurus walking the forums and, it seems, reddit that the duty finder is a massive resource hog. I mean, think about it - they're adding a few more worlds, right? They have 25 servers and one duty finder covering all 25. If they add a few more, they say this will create a need to split the duty finder for the data center. Now, if you were to split those few worlds' populations amongst the existing servers, that would cause a similar problem for the duty finder (as it's the same total population regardless of being spread over 25 worlds or over 28 worlds). Therefore, it's a reasonable conclusion that the duty finder is still restricting the world capacities.

Also worth noting is they haven't ruled out kicking people who are AFK. They have openly said they are considering it but are waiting to see what the situation is like after the hardware upgrades this week.

They're actively looking into it, which is a shame because it's clearly just to pander to the masses and won't actually have any huge benefit. If anything, it could have an adverse effect in that of the servers which actually struggle most - the lobby and the duty finder - the lobby would actually have an increase of activity. This is the main reason I think they're not prioritising it, actually. Think of all the information required to log in (more than you might think) compared the information required for a character to idle in their inn.

I'd happily have them afk-kick anyone who idles in the busy areas, though.

Yes but the Duty Finder isn't the ONLY problem.

He even specifically addresses this in the same post:

At the game’s start, however, while everyone is still at a low level, the majority of players are concentrated in the three city-states and surrounding areas. This can not only lead to a lack of enemies to slay (preventing quest progression), but also see area servers overloaded, and ultimately lead to crashes.

Fortunately, differences in total individual play time, login times, and character/class progression will eventually lead to players being more spread out within each World. Once this happens, there will be less need for both login and character creation restrictions.

This is why people are complaining about AFK'ers. The Duty Finder alone isn't why there are limitations in place and when you AFK you are still using resources that are preventing someone else from logging in, even if neither of you touch the Duty Finder. The whole "I'm not using the DF so it's okay" argument is a half-truth really.

Now I'm not going to get on your case about it as I did it myself all weekend so I could avoid the login errors, but I will full well admit that I intentionally did it knowing full well I screwed people over by doing it (heck there were people in our own LS that couldn't log in due to people like you and me being logged in but AFK for hours on end) and not trying to justify it with a selectively quoting or paraphrasing dev posts in a way that makes it sound like no big deal.

And of course upgrading the hardware is more important but if the issue persists and they don't see further upgrading hardware as financially viable barring a continued surge of demand following digital sales re-opening, then they will shift those development resources to putting in that autokick-AFK feature because they haven't openly said "we're not doing this."

Originally Posted by Aulayna

Yes but the Duty Finder isn't the ONLY problem.

He even specifically addresses this in the same post:

At the game’s start, however, while everyone is still at a low level, the majority of players are concentrated in the three city-states and surrounding areas. This can not only lead to a lack of enemies to slay (preventing quest progression), but also see area servers overloaded, and ultimately lead to crashes.

Fortunately, differences in total individual play time, login times, and character/class progression will eventually lead to players being more spread out within each World. Once this happens, there will be less need for both login and character creation restrictions.

I acknowledged that the starter areas were part of the problem! But I must have misread your post, I thought you said "The issue isn't related to the duty finder anymore" when you said "The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore" D= My bad.

This is why people are complaining about AFK'ers. The Duty Finder alone isn't why there are limitations in place and when you AFK you are still using resources that are preventing someone else from logging in, even if neither of you touch the Duty Finder. The whole "I'm not using the DF so it's okay" argument is a half-truth really.

Hence I said that I don't mind AFK'ers in busy areas being booted. The problem isn't AFK'ers, it's the volume of people in starter areas which AFK'ers happen to be part of... so boot those in the starter areas, but don't make the people like me sitting in my inn room using sod all resources suffer for it, because I need my LS people to be able to add me. Or, if things go well, don't boot anyone if the new servers solve the problem.

Now I'm not going to get on your case about it as I did it myself all weekend so I could avoid the login errors, but I will full well admit that I intentionally did it knowing full well I screwed people over by doing it (heck there were people in our own LS that couldn't log in due to people like you and me being logged in but AFK for hours on end) and not trying to justify it with a selectively quoting or paraphrasing dev posts in a way that makes it sound like no big deal.

I genuinely think that AFK'ers in the inn are not "part of the problem". If they booted all the AFK'ers that were barely draining their resources they could get in, what, four to five more people in the duty finder? They're not going to up the server capacity count by four or five. I am not 'screwing over people' because if there were 1,000 of me booted, the server load wouldn't change, and all that would happen is the server capacity would be lowered further to avoid the stress of 1,000 more people who were actually active. The problem is not the AFK'ers sitting in their inn, the problem which Yoshi himself conceded was that he never anticipated such a demand for the game and they need more servers to cope with it. The AFK'ers are not at fault for that and shouldn't be booted. We're getting new servers, that should solve all the problems. Why kick people then?

And of course upgrading the hardware is more important but if the issue persists and they don't see further upgrading hardware as financially viable barring a continued surge of demand following digital sales re-opening, then they will shift those development resources to putting in that autokick-AFK feature because they haven't openly said "we're not doing this."

They've openly said that the login problems should disappear, and in a shocking twist, I believe the people who know what they're talking about. If the problems don't disappear, enable auto-kick for those who are draining resources, sure. But you can bet I'll be in my inn and having some kind of macro that makes me rotate an inch every 15 minutes until I can get my friend/LS requests made while I'm not logged in.

Many of you out there likely chose a server during Phase 4 or Early Access and have friends, family, or guild mates who can’t join you due to the character creation lockouts. I have friends in this situation as well and I wanted to find out what, if anything, next week’s datacenter upgrades would have in store for people in this particular situation. New worlds are great and all for the overall health of the game and population distribution, but what about getting on servers where your friends are already playing? There are world transfers planned for mid-September, but there is also a chance that, at least on some servers, players may not necessarily have to wait that long.
One of the main culprits of server congestion and instability has to do with the game’s Duty Finder tool. This tool allows players to find players for group content game-wide, at the moment. But it’s this very aspect of the tool that has been causing many of the issues players are experiencing, loading the world servers such that they can’t accept additional logins or new character creations without risking detrimental effect to the server as a whole. As part of the server work going on this week, Square Enix will be breaking up servers into groups for the purposes of the Duty Finder, think World of Warcraft’s Battlegroups, for example. Once this is implemented, Mr. Yoshida tells us that world servers should be much less taxed and this will both allow for upgrades in the server concurrent user cap (so more players can login at once) and also ease restrictions on character creation.
Mr. Yoshida also touched briefly on the notion of queues and an AFK idle kick. The team is willing to look into an AFK kick or queue system, but as of this moment, they are devoting 100% of their efforts towards getting the aforementioned additional servers and server changes implemented this week. We were also told that while players may be seeing tons of other players idling around AFK, the vast majority of players logging in are actually playing, they’re just putting in some crazy hours.
It’s also important to note that if you are in a Free Company, you will not be able to transfer Free Company data with the initial implementation of server transfers in mid-September. Even if your entire FC decides to move to a new server, you will be starting from scratch as far as your Free Company progress goes.

Originally Posted by Loony BoB

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Yesterday it took me about 200 attempts to log in. Protip: You can hit 0 on your keyboard over and over to do the login process. I was hitting it every couple minutes absentmindedly while playing a DS game for about an hour before it worked.

It's 1:43 PST right now and I can't log in again. I'm not too upset. They said they might give us another week free trial to make up for the time no one could play this week. That seems fair.

EDIT: Yep, one hour later, completely unable to log on.

Yeah you can try and white knight this all you want, but they should ​have been a lot more prepared than this. People spending money on a game, and a week later still can't log in to play.

They're an incredibly large global company, dealing with a global market using one of the most prominent franchises in a multi-billion dollar industry. That's why they should have been prepared. Let's not even get into over a decade's worth of real-world data for these situations.