(02-17-2015, 03:44 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: It's only speculation on my part. But from what I know about servers from a little bit of computer science, they should be load-balanced and mirrored, or we'd be having WAY more issues. Our best bet would be for SE to try doing more dynamic resource allocation, like the instance servers, but for the more heavily populated maps. It's a very tricky thing to talk about because we don't have the server details and we don't know the underlying architecture. ...but assuming certain maps have crashed in the past, (like the 2.0 launch), it stands to reason that maps (or some maps) might be separated by server. In that event, SE could try to alleviate some of the congestion issues by mirroring highly populated maps. Like....let's say there were two instances of Ul'dah, channel1 and channel2. If channel1 is under high load, future map changes might try to move a player to channel2. This works GREAT in theory, because there would be less characters to render, but it would be devastating to parties and RP. People would have to manually change over if needed, and it could be abused for FATE grinding, etc. (If anyone played Aion, this should sound familiar).
This is a very good point. Other games deal with large numbers of people nearby by splitting up the world.
Lord of the Rings Online did it, WoW does it to an extent, TSO does it.
FFXIV doesn't which is bad for congestion, because at a certain point you can only make a server so big, and crowded areas like mor dhona have hundreds if not thousands of people logged on at times.
So the choice is either instance zones, like they do housing areas and dungeons, or have them be really crowded and have congestion issues.
I'd rather have the congestion issues.
