(07-29-2015, 07:57 AM)Addison Wrote: Bandwidth isn't the only issue though. Character databases for MMOs are huge. You would get a migraine going through it all. When an update is applied to the game, it needs to be applied to each individual character. That takes a lot of time and is a big reason why updates are several hours long and not instantaneous.
Think of how many people you run by on a daily basis in game. I easily run by a couple hundred per day at least. Now imagine if each of those people had 1-4 alts. (I myself have a total of 5 characters on Balmung.)
Couple that with the fact that the Aether datacenter houses two of the most popular servers in the game and probably has more characters than all the other datacenters combined, you pretty much have a perfect storm as to why these servers are closed with the exception of paid transfers.
A "perfect storm" that is never an issue in any other MMO. >_>
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