Simultaneous Logout Measures

[Blythe]

Can't say I'm too thrilled with this development or consider it the best means, but I suppose if it lessens the queues for the people on Balmung I'm willing to be aggravated once a day if it's only temporary.

 

If nothing else I'm curious to see if this will actually work. I recall on FFXI that after maintenance, the bots and AFKers were right back on the servers within minutes. By and large they seemed to be the sorts of people who would / could simply come back just long enough to log back in. I couldn't say if this is the case with Balmung but I'm certainly curious.

 

Most of the people that I know that have done this to circumvent the AFK timer normally do it because they don't want to wait several hours after they come home from work. Based off that, most of them won't be able to log on until they get home near prime time. For those that don't have work as an excuse... well... I don't know. 

 

As for the bots, considering Balmung's been locked, that should hopefully be a non-issue on getting into the server.

[Teadrinker]

Everyday it gets harder and harder to believe this is a subscription MMO.

[Dravus]

To be fair, whilst Square Enix could have handled things better to avoid this mess in the first place at least some of the blame needs to be thrust upon players themselves. I also recall the biggest MMO on the market having congestion issues and lengthy queues immediately before and after expansion launches.

[Nero]

I'll preface this by saying that this was ultimately a necessary measure (although if they don't time it right, it'll also be hilariously inadequate), but I'm also against blaming the players because blaming the players imply that the players have been given the adequate tools to handle this as a community issue, when players demonstrably have not received any such thing for the ~4 years this game has been released.

 

"Alright, our sledgehammer put several holes into the walls, but at least that damned fly is dead!"

 

You know what's really jarring? Watching the FFXIV NoClip documentary and then waking up to this kind of news.

 

On the one hand, you have the amazingly well-oiled machine that is the FFXIV ARR team rebuilding an MMO in 2 short years while the other team maintains 1.0. Hearing the difficulties and success in intense project management to get an acceptable product out in a very limited amount of time, the amount of organization and dedication that must have taken.

 

And then things like this happen. Server issues that have existed for years finally reaching critical mass during an important time like an expansion launch. The sheer lack of planning and foresight.

[Valence]

Wouldn't a better solution be to add more servers? If the population is so congested that even low pop worlds are full, maybe add more worlds.

 

Half if not more of the NA servers are underpopulated (compared to EU, that has a lot less servers but most of them are well populated). Adding servers when some can welcome a lot of players is certainly not what SE or any logical sense dictates to do. This is also why they added one for Europe, because they do'nt really have underpopulated worlds.

 

This is also why they bring incentives for people to use free transfers to those worlds. And yes, the 4.0 congestion on overpopulated worlds and the huges queues are part of those incentives.

 

It's very pragmatic.

[Nero]

I posted this over on the OF (if you've been reading General Discussion you might notice me banging my drum over there quite loudly), but I think it's worth posting here as well.

 

Namely, the "World Selection" thingy at the character creation screen when you first make a character.

 

 

This screen is hugely inadequate and gives absolutely zero information.

 

Let's go back in time a bit to 2014, when Balmung was closed except for 2 AM character creation windows and transfers.

 

You're a new player, perhaps even a roleplayer, and you want to play on a relatively large and active server.

 

From this window alone, how do you know what server to pick to best suit what you want?

 

And the answer is you don't. You have absolutely no information as to a server's population or what kind of community it might have. World of Warcraft has "PVE", "PVP", "RP", "RP-PVP" labels on it, and very rough population indicators of "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Full".

 

And if you scroll down, you'll notice Balmung and Gilgamesh are closed to character creation, because they're full. You're bummed out because those servers definitely have the largest and therefore most active communities, but you can't get on there. No other indication exists as to whether a server has what a player wants, but Balmung and Gilgamesh have so many active people that they're full! So if I want to play on the largest community, I'd have to play on Balmung or Gilgamesh!

 

And then along the line, you hear that Balmung and Gilgamesh are open to transfers. So of course, since you want to play on an active community, you transfer.

 

Anyway, my point with all of this is that in addition to a new RP server, the World Selection screen needs better information so players have an idea of what they're getting when they're going to that world. Perhaps not total population because that's imprecise, but something like "Average Active Connections" or something.

 

Will that stop people from gravitating towards the largest servers and most active communities? Well, no. The only way to stop that is with something like the Balmung transfer restriction.

 

But people would be willing to play on other servers if there was some indication or guarantee that the server wasn't a ghost town. If Balmung is closed because it has 25k active connections at a given time, then a new player would be more inclined to play on a lesser populated server if they have a rough idea of what that population is. They might want to be on Balmung, but hey, Exodus has, say, 15k active connections! That's not as large, but it's still pretty large, so I will still have an active community! Or Cactaur has 12k active connections, that's still a LOT of people!

 

But still, the fact that players--especially new players--have to rely on stuff like unofficial censuses based on Lodestone sweeps is just a tiny bit ridiculous.

 

[Val]

While I get what they're trying to do, I don't think forcing everyone to log out once a day is going to help. For example, say they do it at... 6PM.

 

People that work will stay logged in and still back it up until 6PM. People that don't will try to log in and get a 1-2 hour queue, be able to play for an hour, then be forced back into another 1-2 hour queue. Others that already stayed logged in using the workaround will already be able to play when they get home.

 

What they need to do is remove whatever restriction is keeping the forced logout from working. I can't imagine it's an entirely difficult fix? I'm not sure how it's coded for them but it should be a fairly simple work around. ....Unless it isn't, and it's SE so it may not be. I can't imagine this is going to work out unless they do it in the middle of the day to force log out the people that go to work or whatever, and even then queues aren't awful at that point. They're bad at prime time, but it'll be screwing over people trying to legitimately get in at prime time.

[Kage]

While I get what they're trying to do, I don't think forcing everyone to log out once a day is going to help. For example, say they do it at... 6PM.

 

People that work will stay logged in and still back it up until 6PM. People that don't will try to log in and get a 1-2 hour queue, be able to play for an hour, then be forced back into another 1-2 hour queue. Others that already stayed logged in using the workaround will already be able to play when they get home.

 

What they need to do is remove whatever restriction is keeping the forced logout from working. I can't imagine it's an entirely difficult fix? I'm not sure how it's coded for them but it should be a fairly simple work around. ....Unless it isn't, and it's SE so it may not be. I can't imagine this is going to work out unless they do it in the middle of the day to force log out the people that go to work or whatever, and even then queues aren't awful at that point. They're bad at prime time, but it'll be screwing over people trying to legitimately get in at prime time.

It's probably a client-side based force and I'm not sure how well you can do work around it. Because your client is engaged, it gets the error and can't boot.

[Nero]

The auto-afk boot is nothing more than the server sending your client a /logout command. It's the same as hitting escape and pressing "Log Out", except the server is doing it for you, which is why crafting and Retainer Bells and NPCs circumvent it, since you can't log out while on those windows.

[Val]

It's probably a client-side based force and I'm not sure how well you can do work around it. Because your client is engaged, it gets the error and can't boot.

 

I figured it was something like that. If they're going to pull the plug, you'd think they just momentarily bring down the server and not the data center unless they just want to take out people as a whole. I admit people standing afk in places is an issue, but I think they're going about it the wrong way.

 

...Like just about everything else SE does, really. So business as usual?

[Lydia Lightfoot]

"Shit, people are pissed there's no labeled RP server so they've designated their own on one of the legacy servers which already has a high population. Let's close creation, but let them pay to get in still rather than implementing transfer-off measures right away."

 

"Shit, people are pissed they have to pay to get there, but it's still getting bigger. Let's close it altogether."

 

"Shit, people are pissed their friends no longer have any way to come join them in the game, but it didn't get smaller. Let's finally do transfer-off measures."

 

"Shit, people are pissed that the expansion is making enormous queues and people are pissed and unsubscribing. Let's start spamming in-game ads about our transfer-off incentives."

 

"Shit, people are pissed about the spam, and our afk-logout method is flawed, let's not fix the method, let's just log everyone off at an unspecified time by poking the reset switch on all the servers."

 

-sings- Tell me why create, a circle that can't break...

[Gegenji]

Also, I've been thinking. What will this mass-logoff actually accomplish?

 

If it's announced and the people are anywhere near or around where they can log back in... that just means there's going to be a "new wards added"-esque stampede as soon as the servers go live again. So there's likely to be just as huge of a queue then as everyone tries to flood their way in.

 

Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who loads up the connection fast enough to get in... but how long before it's back to being stuffed to capacity again?

[Val]

Also, I've been thinking. What will this mass-logoff actually accomplish?

 

If it's announced and the people are anywhere near or around where they can log back in... that just means there's going to be a "new wards added"-esque stampede as soon as the servers go live again. So there's likely to be just as huge of a queue then as everyone tries to flood their way in.

 

Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who loads up the connection fast enough to get in... but how long before it's back to being stuffed to capacity again?

 

That's just it. It solves nothing ither than scrambling the login and forcing thousands upon thousands of people to all try logging in at once. Some people will be booted, but I don't think enough will be to make a massive impact. Time will tell, I guess.

 

And some coworkers and I were discussing their logoff measures. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to use a client-based logoff function instead of capturing the IP upon logging in and dropping it?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

/me swoops in with ideas and speculation

 

Booting off all the players for a world is a smart idea to get rid of people abusing the AFK timer. This is the laziest possible way they could have gone about doing it.

 

Seeing how the population issues aren't hurting the datacenter as a whole but specific worlds, refactoring the current worlds into different datacenters wouldn't solve the queueing issue at all. It could help with those pesky "reserving instance" issues if SE added a new datacenter to NA without removing any servers from the current ones, then balanced all three (or more) so that the average active populations were all about the same. (So split Balmung and Gilgamesh from being on the same DC. Sprinkle in the lower-populated worlds around. ...does Primal DC even have issues?!?!?!)

 

Again. We don't need more worlds. NA has plenty of low-population ones. Adding mroe worlds is just more stress on the Lobby server if they aren't on a different Datacenter, which means a different Lobby server.

 

NOW! Here's what they could have done to make this a whole lot less painful while also getting all the AFKers just as easily.

 

Go zone by zone and restart them individually. Do the same hour-warning. Do it again 15 minutes before. 10. 5. 1. Then boot anyone in that zone off. Then move on to the next zone. And the next. Restart the housing ward zones and their instances. Don't. Touch. Duty Finder. Instances. Those are clearly active players. (Now, this actually poses an issue because when you queue into an instance, you're still technically considered to be playing on whatever zone you were on previously. That how the server knows where to put you back. Yes, it's kinda stored in the database too, but that would make it S L O W if it had to retrive that kinda data every time someone left a duty. Bad idea.)

 

edit: Where the fuck did we assume this is gonne be client-based? (THe idle AFK timer is, but that's not what they're using here). There's no reason for it to be client-based. They're gonna shut down the server for 10 minutes which will kick everyone off no matter what they're doing, including the Lobby server, so you can't get booted back to the character select screen. By then, your session will have expired on the login side of things so you can't sit on the start game screen unless you pick a different data center. (And let's just hope they aren't rebooting them all at the same time because that would also be really dumb)

[Lydia Lightfoot]

* Unnamed Mercenary swoops in with ideas and speculation

 

Booting off all the players for a world is a smart idea to get rid of people abusing the AFK timer. This is the laziest possible way they could have gone about doing it.

 

Seeing how the population issues aren't hurting the datacenter as a whole but specific worlds, refactoring the current worlds into different datacenters wouldn't solve the queueing issue at all. It could help with those pesky "reserving instance" issues if SE added a new datacenter to NA without removing any servers from the current ones, then balanced all three (or more) so that the average active populations were all about the same. (So split Balmung and Gilgamesh from being on the same DC. Sprinkle in the lower-populated worlds around. ...does Primal DC even have issues?!?!?!)

 

Again. We don't need more worlds. NA has plenty of low-population ones. Adding mroe worlds is just more stress on the Lobby server if they aren't on a different Datacenter, which means a different Lobby server.

 

NOW! Here's what they could have done to make this a whole lot less painful while also getting all the AFKers just as easily.

 

Go zone by zone and restart them individually. Do the same hour-warning. Do it again 15 minutes before. 10. 5. 1. Then boot anyone in that zone off. Then move on to the next zone. And the next. Restart the housing ward zones and their instances. Don't. Touch. Duty Finder. Instances. Those are clearly active players. (Now, this actually poses an issue because when you queue into an instance, you're still technically considered to be playing on whatever zone you were on previously. That how the server knows where to put you back. Yes, it's kinda stored in the database too, but that would make it S L O W if it had to retrive that kinda data every time someone left a duty. Bad idea.)

 

...or they could just make it so the existing afk-logout ignores player status (crafting, etc) and ignores repetitive keystrokes (so people can't just weigh down arrow keys and run in circles to avoid the logout). I mean your idea has merit too, but it seems better to just implement "no seriously, we mean it, AFK means AFK".

[Unnamed Mercenary]

...or they could just make it so the existing afk-logout ignores player status (crafting, etc) and ignores repetitive keystrokes (so people can't just weigh down arrow keys and run in circles to avoid the logout). I mean your idea has merit too, but it seems better to just implement "no seriously, we mean it, AFK means AFK".

 

This is gonna sound mean, but do you have any idea how a server works? And how impossibly difficicult it would be to differentiate between "valid" keystrokes/movement data and "AFK avoidance" keystrokes and movement data? They can't just boot people who've been in a zone for X number of minutes. RPers. People FATE farming. Crafters. Gatherers. The list goes on.

 

They also are not going to track patterns for every single player. I don't know any game company that has the time and storage to do that. An active connection is defined as the client and server exchanging data. They could buff up the AFK code to require client packets going to the server, but that wouldn't stop someone from using a crafting macro or a macro to run in circles. Or to run between zone lines every X minutes. (Easily achived with arrow keys alone).

[Val]

* Unnamed Mercenary swoops in with ideas and speculation

 

Booting off all the players for a world is a smart idea to get rid of people abusing the AFK timer. This is the laziest possible way they could have gone about doing it.

 

Seeing how the population issues aren't hurting the datacenter as a whole but specific worlds, refactoring the current worlds into different datacenters wouldn't solve the queueing issue at all. It could help with those pesky "reserving instance" issues if SE added a new datacenter to NA without removing any servers from the current ones, then balanced all three (or more) so that the average active populations were all about the same. (So split Balmung and Gilgamesh from being on the same DC. Sprinkle in the lower-populated worlds around. ...does Primal DC even have issues?!?!?!)

 

Again. We don't need more worlds. NA has plenty of low-population ones. Adding mroe worlds is just more stress on the Lobby server if they aren't on a different Datacenter, which means a different Lobby server.

 

NOW! Here's what they could have done to make this a whole lot less painful while also getting all the AFKers just as easily.

 

Go zone by zone and restart them individually. Do the same hour-warning. Do it again 15 minutes before. 10. 5. 1. Then boot anyone in that zone off. Then move on to the next zone. And the next. Restart the housing ward zones and their instances. Don't. Touch. Duty Finder. Instances. Those are clearly active players. (Now, this actually poses an issue because when you queue into an instance, you're still technically considered to be playing on whatever zone you were on previously. That how the server knows where to put you back. Yes, it's kinda stored in the database too, but that would make it S L O W if it had to retrive that kinda data every time someone left a duty. Bad idea.)

 

edit: Where the fuck did we assume this is gonne be client-based? (THe idle AFK timer is, but that's not what they're using here). There's no reason for it to be client-based. They're gonna shut down the server for 10 minutes which will kick everyone off no matter what they're doing, including the Lobby server, so you can't get booted back to the character select screen. By then, your session will have expired on the login side of things so you can't sit on the start game screen unless you pick a different data center. (And let's just hope they aren't rebooting them all at the same time because that would also be really dumb)

 

The mention of the client-based thing is because they ARE using the idle AFK timer to try to boot people, which isn't working. The reason this measure has to be done in the first place is because it's not working. The idle afk timer is client based, or it has to be, because of the logoff command issuing an error when trying and the user is otherwise "occupied."

 

I get that they're not using it for killing the server, and I definitely agree that shutting down zones in particular would be a lot better than killing it for everyone.

[AquiziTC]

Looks like today's (and possibly all future occurrences of this) will be happening at Noon PDT.

[Perth]

If I remember correctly, Balmung and Omega are the ones with these abnormal queues.

Not really, my friends from Cerberus have been 2k queues as well and taking 2 hours to log in.

 

Also Gilgamesh. Y'know, the other server that's considered congested, no one likes to talk about that one. :roll:

[Val]

Looks like today's (and possibly all future occurrences of this) will be happening at Noon PDT.

 

So really all this is doing is screwing over the people in their own time zone because those in Eastern/Central will be able to get home and log in before others and still afk out using the work around.

 

Or the people that get home after that but still have things to do can just do it again. I think it'll help some, but in the grand scheme of things it may do very little. Time will tell, I guess.

[Kage]

If I remember correctly, Balmung and Omega are the ones with these abnormal queues.

Not really, my friends from Cerberus have been 2k queues as well and taking 2 hours to log in.

 

Also Gilgamesh. Y'know, the other server that's considered congested, no one likes to talk about that one. :roll:

 

From all reports of players I've spoken to, their queues during what is considered NA prime time or Balmung problems (Balmung has long queues for a period of 12 hours.) are less than an hour. Usually a cancel-proceed will get them in.

 

What's the queue like on Gilgamesh and when?

[Virella]

If I remember correctly, Balmung and Omega are the ones with these abnormal queues.

Not really, my friends from Cerberus have been 2k queues as well and taking 2 hours to log in.

 

Also Gilgamesh. Y'know, the other server that's considered congested, no one likes to talk about that one. :roll:

No because the lelddit army is on Gilgamesh, and they just want to #blame Balmung

 

RPers are scum after all

[AquiziTC]

Looks like today's (and possibly all future occurrences of this) will be happening at Noon PDT.

 

So really all this is doing is screwing over the people in their own time zone because those in Eastern/Central will be able to get home and log in before others and still afk out using the work around.

 

Or the people that get home after that but still have things to do can just do it again. I think it'll help some, but in the grand scheme of things it may do very little. Time will tell, I guess.

 

I think just based on the nature of time zones anyway that this would always be the case unless they did the reset at like 5PM EDT, which I feel would be a bad idea.

[Val]

Looks like today's (and possibly all future occurrences of this) will be happening at Noon PDT.

 

So really all this is doing is screwing over the people in their own time zone because those in Eastern/Central will be able to get home and log in before others and still afk out using the work around.

 

Or the people that get home after that but still have things to do can just do it again. I think it'll help some, but in the grand scheme of things it may do very little. Time will tell, I guess.

 

I think just based on the nature of time zones anyway that this would always be the case unless they did the reset at like 5PM EDT, which I feel would be a bad idea.

 

You're not wrong. It was always going to be an issue regardless of what time they picked, which is why I didn't think this was going to be effective. Their best bet would be to just cut the connection of whatever IP has been flagged as AFK for x amount of time, but I'm honestly not even sure if they have that capability at this point.

[Gegenji]

It's funny, the noon PDT time-frame falls pretty neatly into the guesstimate range I had when discussing the timing for the forced disconnect. The initial concern was interrupting RP events and the like, obviously, but I ultimately assumed that the best time for SE to do this thing would be in the "noon to early afternoon" time window. With the cutoff being around 4pm at the latest (EST preferably, since I'm EST, of course).

 

The reasoning for it was pretty simple. The further you get into the evening, the more likely you're going to be dealing with people who are... y'know, actually playing as opposed to idling. The kids are home from school and the adults are home from work - at least, if you consider the normal school and work schedules (your 9-5s and whatnot). It kinda sucks for the people with alternative work schedules (graveyard shifts and the like), but then again... they're most likely to actually be playing and can just reconnect afterward.

 

Thus, it should hopefully catch most of the idlers who set things up before going to class or work. As mentioned, it won't keep them from coming right back and doing it when they're home... but I guess it's a start?