Nodem

I've seen that happen as well. Yes. What I don't get either? The few people who are helping these communities from Balmung are genuinely trying to be nice to them. They don't seem to have some grand saviour complex either. But alas. I guess we just can't play nice. Funny thing. Some of those people who are throwing shade at people from Balmung, ARE FROM BALMUNG themselves. So take everything said with a grain of salt. I've not received shade on Mateus because I also have characters on Balmung. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gilgamesh isn't an option right now. It's closed too. Unnamed hit the nail on the head with a lot of good points. Be sure to read his post. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Balmung MAGICALLY a place to RP. People are comfortable on Balmung, and it's understandable, but trying to impede any person's work towards building up another server for RP will fracture the community as a whole. Multiple servers having RP doesn't destroy the unity of RP, it's the people that destroy it when they want to claim exclusive rights to it. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Problem with a designated RP server. It most likely won't be a legacy server, so legacy players won't want to switch either.

We had four fighters enter the fray this evening for the First ever Blood Shore! Between them and the spectators we had at least twenty some odd people there. Thanks for turning out, and supporting us Mateus! Before anybody counts the people in the image above, that wasn't everybody, so I'll get better, and more, pictures next time. Without further ado, the winner of the first Blood Shore, a Grindstone event is: Hashim'sae Obataiya The next tournament will be on July 7th, at 9 Eastern! That's right! Lucky sevens for the next event! Next month is also when we go into our normal programing schedule of the First and Third Friday of every month! Thanks to all that showed up once again, and hope to see you at the next one!

We're looking forward to it as well, and to seeing everybody that comes! First Blood will be drawn tonight at 9pm (Eastern), in Middle La Loscea (x21, y19)!

Why are we called The Blood Shore? Well, a panel of experts were given a list of names, and decided The Blood Shore sounded best. Also, we at the Blood Shore has a small sense of humor in that any location we choose to host the event at will be near a Shoreline, beach, or water front. Thus, we're painting the Shorelines Red with Blood. Merlwyb approved of the name as well as it will rival Ul'dah's Blood Sands. Also as an OOC note: We are a Grindstone event but didn't use the name "Grindstone" as to not cause confusion between servers. We do realize that our event name is the same name as a location, however if I told you I live on Main streets, you'd be left wondering which one as well wouldn't you? Our sense of humor ultimately won us over, so we're going to paint Shores red with Blood. The Blood Shore will go on!

Hello people of Mateus! You heard of the Grindstone by now if you're looking at these forums, and now a Grindstone event is coming to you! That's right, The Blood Shore is a Grindstone Event! What is it? It's a combative tournament held twice a month, on the first and third Friday, where fighters are pitted against one another until only one reigns supreme! The Location for The Blood Shore will be near Seasong Grotto in Middle La Noscea at x21, Y19. All information can be found on the Official Blood Shore Tumblr Page. My partner and I look forward to seeing you there!

If I had to guess (well, an educated guess based on people's work doing packet analysis and reverse engineering on both 1.0 and 2.0 server architecture), our instance servers are nearly identical to our normal zone servers. They likely just have a different set of scripts on them and the client handles the rest of the connections. FFXIV utilizes a number of different servers at different stages of gameplay. I'll go over a few in text and then I'll link in a handy picture (and edit the post) for a basic explanation of the server setup that's likely in place. FFXIV uses the following (and likely more than one) Authorization Server - your login credentials Patch Server - self explanatory Once you've logged in on the launcher, it creates your basic session credentials, which are passed to the FFXIV game client. (Which is why you can't just run ffxiv.exe directly). For security's sake, I'll omit what that looks like. 3rd party launcher do exist (not including bots). They're insecure and not really useful if the real launcher is working. Once the game is running, you'll notice that it had initially asked you which datacenter you wanted to play on. This is important! It it was brings you to the next step of gameplay. Lobby Server - This is what loads your account information based off the session created from the Auth server and and game client. Traffic is encrypted now! (Good job SE. Don't turn that off again.) The Lobby Server handles everything until you actually get in game. It handles selecting other data centers (new lobby server), making/deleting/editing characters, and eventually passing off your session over to the next server in charge of things. World Server - These are the named worlds. Balmung, Gilgamesh, Mateus, whatever. This server handles global functions in the game for all players connected to it. Things like your linkshells, party, free company, market boards, retainers, and more! You are ALWAYS connected to this server. At the same time, it's rapidly passing data to a series of additional servers you might also be connected to. We're not sure, but status effects are probably stored in this server's working memory, even if they get handled below. Zone Server - Also known as Map servers, Instance servers, and probably a few more things. This server is where the magic really happens. It's what sends the game client constant updates on what you see and can interact with. All of the game's actors (players, mobs, npcs, interactable objects) exist in this level. It has a TON of things to do and also has to make sure it broadcasts that to every player connected. It's also needs to check in with the World Server to make sure that your chats and party information are synced. And that's on top of running all the events, scripts, monster AI, FATEs, hunts, and other cool things that make the game work. Now, there are multiple zone servers. There has to be or the game would only be able to support a very meager amount of connections. (Think like less than 1000). If you ever got that error message saying "cannot enter zone" it's because this server's overworked for that area. Most likely, we've got at least one of these for every map in the game and possibly per housing ward, although it's entirely possibly all wards are compressed together and that particular zone server just knows how to keep them separated from each other. (FFXIV supported creating private instance areas layered on top of normal maps. This is how levequests, instance battles, and inn rooms are handled, for example!) -- Now, what happens when a server's full? There are multiple places this can happen! The world is full. The world server's unable to handle more connections in a safe manner. This could mean the maximum amount of concurrent connections are all being used, it could mean that it's not able to broadcast packets to all players, and it can also mean that it's getting stressed from too much context switching if it's connecting/disconnections thousands of players at a time to try to keep up with all its global functions. The zone is full. Mostly explain above already, that particular zone instance is maxed out. It can't reliably broadcast packets for everything it needs to do in a timely manner because of CPU/network constraints. -- So why can't SE just give a world server or a particular zone server more resources? It doesn't work that way. When the lock these servers down, it's largely due to network contraints. I've explained this in earlier posts already, but there's no way to allocate more or "better" network connections to a server. When a server gets stressed in these situations, that typically means it's time to go into load balancing or to restrict how many connections are allowed. (FFXIV has done both!) Who remembers the split zones when 3.0 launched? I do! It was a MESS. This was an early attempt from SE to get multiple zone servers handling the same area. (Good on them. Their architecture allowed them to do this!) If any of you remember, it'd arbritrarily select a zone for you. Didn't get grouped with your party? Too bad so sad. The zone servers were split to make sure they could keep running. Not for your party and/or group! In some games, players re given the option to switch between these instances. (Sometimes referred to as a shard or channel). But this only works if the zone server can accept more connections to start. OK. Picture time. It uses some different names, but I believe you all. Please. (credit to the FFXIV private server projects. This one came from FFXIV Classic). This is a basic illustration of only a single World/Zone server cluster. Since at this point in the game, there's no reason to be connecting to the authorization server or lobby server. (But who knows. FFXIV might keep the lobby server too since it likes to kick us back often. ...or the session lasts a REALLY long time and that's how the Chinese bots hacked the game once.) Here's the entire reason Balmung as the sole RP community will not work. Also I recall those horrid instanced zones, and then the zone line selection didn't help it any. Killed your chances for doing lots of things.

This is why people get locked out of houses and FC workshops all too often...

As was pointed out: 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). 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. Servers don't work that way. Balmung's a bar that has surpassed the Occupancy limit and the fire marshal has been called in.

I've had better with less page count. Correct ideas are not always popular. oh my god could you not You're not Martin Luther King. You're some guy that's trying to talk about things he obviously has no idea on how they work, both from a common sense point of view and an infrastructure one. "Hey this restriction you have sucks. I need you to lift it.' "But if we do it'll keep breaking things and the economy will continue to be awful." "Yeah well I need you to lift it." "But th---" "I need you to lift it. IT'S FOR THE GOOD OF (ME) THE PEOPLE" Dissenting (and entirely valid) opinions over the internet sometimes attract vitriol. See post above. Honestly, Val -- you're a good roleplayer. I expected more than petty personal attacks. The points raised in the OP are both coherent, achievable, and would benefit RPers the most. It's not the easy option, but it is correct the one that will benefit the overwhelming majority of RPers. The points in the OP, about having one single RP server, are not achievable, and would hurt RP'ers as a whole. As has been stated several times in this thread alone, this is ALL ABOUT the servers themselves, and not viable to hold the RP community as one server. (See: Balmung is locked, Gilgamesh is locked) It hurts RP'ers when the servers aren't stable, just as much as it hurts PVE people. If the servers constantly crash, then you aren't able to RP, plain and simple. If the servers are down all the time because the server strain is too great, guess what? You don't get to RP on the game. Having all RP'ers on a server, along with their PVE counterparts, who just are as likely to not move, etc, will cause disaster for the WHOLE and the MAJORITY OF RP'ERS.

Seventy One fighters entered, but only one swung for the fences and came out on top during Grindstone 190! This weeks Grindstone Champion is Swyreyn Keltiyrn!

I don't think we have any way to know, but my guess is they're probably already planning on a server split and they're waiting until after the expansion sales plateau so that they can prevent financial blowback (because if they reorganized servers right now, there would almost certainly be a significant dip in initial sales volume of Stormblood). Locking down the server is, IMO, Step 1 of the plan. Step 2 will be incentives, which will be insufficient to budge most players because they will probably miss the mark as to what's important to the players. We have 26k according to that chart. Even if 25% leave due to incentives (which would be a spectacularly successful outcome), that still leaves 19,500 on Balmung, which is still more than the population of the next most populous server Gilgamesh which is also locked down right now. I just don't see another likely outcome for Balmung other than a split. That's the 3 phases actually that happened in FFXI. Creation lock-down > Incentives to leave > SPLIT. ~ I'm not a squareenix employee so I can't accurately say if they would or wouldn't. I don't think SE felt bad about doing it either. Remember, that from a business PoV, stable servers and not having server crashes means they'll make more money long term. Even if Balmung shed 1k of that 25k(?) number due to rage quitters from a split. That'd still be 12k players per server. to give you an idea. The only people with all the account numbers, and number of instanced log-ins during any given time is SE. Mentioning that was just to show it is not below SE to possibly do that, when a server is getting to full. It's why I fully endorse people, even those that don't want to change servers, to support people who are going ahead and helping other communities etc.

No, it didn't tank because of this. That was FFXIV's job, GG there 1.0.

Not to continue beating a dead horse, didn't they do this at the start of HW as well? I know I had to wait to transfer in once I started. It wasn't possible then, it isn't possible now. It got better. Not really. They implemented login queues and added the afk timer again, but most people could still pay to transfer in. (There were a couple small moments when transfers to Balmung were suspended, but nothing that had an official Lodestone post specifically about transfers.) You forgot the instanced zones which people hated. No no, that was "megaserver emulation" but without the option to select which zone server you'd get placed into. From a server architecture view, SE could keep adding extra zone instances like a megaserver, but they gotta make that implementation better. You could select the zone by going to a zone line and selecting the zone. You just had to hope that said instance had space for you to enter. I remember this clearly. It was horrible and since this is all about RP... It would make "Open-world" RP even worse. This is from my experience with megaservers. It's an experience I'd hate to repeat with FFXIV. I only mentioned it as forgotten as that was part of their HW launch stuff, along with what you had listed.

Ironically, because Mateus has such a tiny population. If we all need transfer, we'd actually solve the problem for SE and probably see Balmung open again. I personally am throwing my support behind those guys on Mateus. as I mention, I'm gonna start up a Grindstone event there for them, even if it's just me, there will be a Grindstone event... This isn't a joke. It also would solve their low population issues without the need of a server merger. (Off topic: Foxberry, I still get the emails from SE about FFXI, which is how I know it's still running.)

There's no more content being added into the game, as I recall, but the game itself is still running and still has players on it. She visited for the last major content that FFXI did.

I see you've been having deja-vu crica 2008 as well. The entire time I've been speaking of this, I've been having flashbacks to this event. THIS CAN HAPPEN TO US. Reopening the gates to Balmung will 100% CAUSE THIS. How did FFXI fare afterwards? Did it still do well for long periods of time? Barely a blip in the profits etc? Did it start the decline in the game? Considering FFXI is still running, and still has subs, and has been running for 15 years now? I'd say pretty good. As far as I'm aware FFXI is shutting down? Did I hear that wrong? Celebrating it's 15th anniversary soon. http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/campaign/wcb/index.html?b=1705

This isn't an unheard of scenario either, FFXI forced a split on it's biggest server when it got too congested. Players woke up one day on a completely different server than their I see you've been having deja-vu crica 2008 as well. The entire time I've been speaking of this, I've been having flashbacks to this event. THIS CAN HAPPEN TO US. Reopening the gates to Balmung will 100% CAUSE THIS. How did FFXI fare afterwards? Did it still do well for long periods of time? Barely a blip in the profits etc? Did it start the decline in the game? Considering FFXI is still running, and still has subs, and has been running for 15 years now? I'd say pretty good.

This isn't an unheard of scenario either, FFXI forced a split on it's biggest server when it got too congested. Players woke up one day on a completely different server than their I see you've been having deja-vu crica 2008 as well. The entire time I've been speaking of this, I've been having flashbacks to this event. THIS CAN HAPPEN TO US. Reopening the gates to Balmung will 100% CAUSE THIS. You'll notice a lot of this is sounding familiar too. As if it's happening now.

Not to continue beating a dead horse, didn't they do this at the start of HW as well? I know I had to wait to transfer in once I started. It wasn't possible then, it isn't possible now. It got better. Not really. They implemented login queues and added the afk timer again, but most people could still pay to transfer in. (There were a couple small moments when transfers to Balmung were suspended, but nothing that had an official Lodestone post specifically about transfers.) You forgot the instanced zones which people hated.

Then they'll tag a different server and go, "Here's your RP server." Then you'll still need to transfer off Balmung. Remember this is from their business PoV of wanting the servers even on the graph above. So having a mass exodus of people from Balmung would be the pipe dream for them. In this scenario, people still wouldn't leave Balmung, and we'd begin the cycle anew with wanting Balmung listed as a RP server.

Just to bring this graph here... SE wants the servers to look like the EU ones in this graph, and that's why they are getting new worlds. Clearly NA and JP servers are not that way, so we may see locks for a long while, and/or worse case scenario, a server split in which you don't get the option of where you are going. They've done it in the past. While I'd love to see an official RP server, we should know by now it's highly unlikely, or that we'll see it many years from now. (See: RP tag) We need to move now as was mentioned before, because we only have this option to get new RP'ers into the game. Also we, roleplayers, really are a small group when compared to the WHOLE of FFXIV. So SE will look at the entire business, and not just us. We can't expect them to fix what WE consider important if it will hurt the WHOLE.

I was gonna delay this a bit, as we haven't settled in yet, but... A friend and I will be bringing a Grindstone event to Mateus server. Even if RP'ers don't flock there, they will have Grindstone! Details will be had later once my friend and I get settled in. Edit: No worries Warren, Aoi will still be at Grindstone.

You're 100% correct, and SE has already mentioned this before in the most recent Letter from the Producer live, aired on May 1st. They will offer us stuff to leave our cozy nests, so to speak. Letter From the Producer XXXV

It had one after HW release. People found ways around them and ultimately doesn't solve the over-population issue. It still wouldn't hurt to keep it, if that fixes some server issues x_X Not to mention we also had... Instanced zones. Anybody recall how horrible those were? http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/f3cbcbf43ab38340cba0dbb539bbbb160ec3ce9d/ This was posted earlier, but I didn't see anybody post a reply about it. Balmung has a LOT MORE active players then other servers. http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/b/9/b98042e2.jpg