* 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)
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)
