Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
I would be surprised if the NA and JP servers weren't identical in terms of software and hardware, so a stable JP server should mean a stable NA server. I guess it's more an issue of not having enough of those servers to keep up with all the users.
Basically this. There was no reason for them to bring in the NA servers until they started testing importing of legacy characters in phase three. Phase three should have been far more rigorous in stress testing new servers, and phase four should have been longer to account for this possibility. Given that the JP servers were stable, they probably expected that the NA servers would be as well and got caught with their pants down.

Based on what Yoshi-P has said in his official addresses on the issues, the issue is because too many players are attempting to log onto the densely populated (read: Legacy) servers. It's causing high volume in localized places which is causing servers to crash. Because of the way that the servers are structured, the downtime is causing a bottleneck so that players are all trying to access the same content at the same time and crashing the instance servers. This in turn crashes the rest of the NA/EU servers as they all share that server structure to utilize cross-server match-ups via the Duty Finder.

When everyone stops logging in at the same time and the population gets spread across the in-game world and across content instead of clogging the newbie territories, and server population in general evens out, everything should run fine. In the mean time, we get to deal with the consequences of a bottleneck without an easy or quick solution.

From what I've been able to observe of the official launch day, everything has gone relatively well. There have been far fewer reports of major issues (especially during European prime time earlier today). It's mostly people experiencing log-in queues and full worlds. And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself. As explained in the post above, you can't just add another server and double the population maximum for Sargatanas.

SE's biggest mistake seems to be that they severely underestimated how much of the new player population would want to jump in on Legacy servers. They probably expected more new players to want to start on new servers, thus better distributing the total population of players more evenly. It's likely that it isn't the case that they were unaware and unprepared for the number of new players (they did, after all, have the preorders to gauge by) but rather that the distribution of those players is non-ideal and they weren't prepared to handle that.