(05-21-2017, 08:39 PM)Sig Wrote: (2) We should not presume that SE is utterly incapable of handling the population size on Balmung. Resources could likely be allocated to handle the increased load, and there are a variety of less intrusive remedies that could have mitigated any over population problem. SE for example could: (1) assess a higher server transfer fee for high-population servers; (2) provide additional in-game incentives to encourage players to transfer from high-population servers; (3) devote additional resources to banning bots and RMT schemes; (4) raise monthly subscription rates to compensate for the cost of maintaining high population servers; (5) designate official roleplay, hardcore raiding, and special interest servers to encourage certain player groups to transfer from over-populated worlds; (6) implement anti-idling features that disconnect players who idle for extended amounts of time.
Gonna try to answer some of these points as someone who works in the "manages servers" industry. Yes. That's my job. I babysit servers. And their connections. And their CPU usage. And network availability. And network usage. My department gets to make lovely trips to our datacenter to even swap out tape backups (because yes, that's still a thing).
Things before numbers:
It's not a matter of getting "better/newer" servers. Or a different datacenter. Or even faster internet. (Aside from the fact that you won't find faster internet than the connections inside a datacenter anyways).
Quote:Resources could likely be allocated to handle the increased load, and there are a variety of less intrusive remedies that could have mitigated any over population problem.
Servers don't work that way. SE could increase the CPU/RAM/data storage all they want and it wouldn't help the issue one bit. Those are allocatable resources. You can't reallocate network connections from an empty server to a busy server. They just don't work that way.
1) This could help convince some people to not transfer to Balmung. It'd probably do wonders for that. Especially if we took your words from earlier and tried to convince everyone on other servers to somehow transfer into Balmung if it opens.
2) SE appears to already be doing this. They've never offered incentives in FFXIV before. If it's a big enough issue, they'll probably get more extreme, like removing gil limits altogether. (Which will wreck economies if some ass goes and buys gil from a cheap server and then transgers.)
3) SE is already doing this. If anything, closing Balmung means the time is NOW to report as many bots as possible. I was telling this to people in another thread elsewhere.
4) This doesn't work. The cost of running a "full" server is identical to running a server with nobody playing on it. See answer for 1).
5) This could work, but it's unlikely. SE has made it a point to not designate servers officially. Aside from there being no real way to "require" the designated server actually be used for the designation, this really is honestly something best left to players.
6) This comes and goes every patch. It's easily exploited, as people did before. It might help clear up a few connections, but it won't help during primetime hours, which is where the issue's coming from. For everything else, there's "talk to NPC/retainer/market board/aetheryte" or "start a craft and purposely not finish." You'll never be marked as idle in the game. I'm certain I'm not the only person who tested this personally.
