Simultaneous Logout Measures

[Unnamed Mercenary]

I've always wondered if SE could time how long someone could talk to a retainer at any given point.

 

Because seriously... WHO looks at their retainer for more than 15 minutes at one time? An hour (reaching with this) at the most?

And it doesn't take 30 minutes to craft a fucking item afaik

 

I spent over an hour reorganizing my retainers today. Literally today. Added two on the mogstation and shuffled a bunch of stuff around between all my inventories.

 

Also, crafting can be pretty long. You can do up to 99 quick synthesis in a row. ...Now, using a macro to cycle keystrokes is technically considered "botting" and can be reportable if it's being abused. (But I've also done it myself. I set up enough stuff beforehand that would run my in-game crafting rotation/macro so I could walk to the store, buy dinner stuff, and queue up more items to craft. I'd never left it alone for more than maybe 40 minutes though.)

That may be true but when you consider you were actually USING your retainer nothing changes. The server can register commands being inputted whether it's a simple item cycle or actually taking something 

 

I guess I should rewrite my question. WHO just stared at their retainer for hours on end without inputting a single command? The server should be able to pick that up and auto disconnect seeing as how for example in PvP if you do nothing for two minutes straight you get auto booted

 

The crafting thing still has a cap though unless people are literally buying enough crafting items to get through an entire day of AFKing?

 

Back when a friend played in 2.2, he was RICH. He'd buy up materials and craft all day. Made like 25 million gil before he got bored and his sub ran out. It could be done. Should it? Debatable.

 

I do think idle-time should be determined by the server instead of the client, but that would be additional load and a lot of overhead to keep track of on top of their session info. It's important to note that while there are plenty of good ideas that sound fine, and may work fine for small groups, they scale horribly when you hit thousands of players together.

[Kage]

Started queue at 57 min ago with 1086. Now at 94. Pretty much 1086 per hour maybe.

[Warren Castille]

1564 queue, tried it before bed.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

If it continues not moving well, I'd imagine we'll see inscreased restarts to benefit the greater population. ...which is gonna suck if it's simply that primetime has too many active players.

[ShoggMommy]

Just checked it myself since I got home. It's at 1.4. So seemingly dropped but eh. That can be just a fluke.

[Lydia Lightfoot]

People will flat out quit if they restart too often, because it'll make it very inconvenient to do duties in a timely manner. Someone might only have a couple hours a day to play, and if a restart happens to be timed during their normal hours, that could be very disruptive.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

I don't think two restarts would be awful. The one at 12 PDT today worked pretty well. But they'd likely need to do another at 5 or 6 PM PDT which would really suck.

 

But hopefully, more people will be logging off instead of AFKing while sleeping or while at school/work/etc.

 

I imagine that once FC transfers from one server to another is done, we'll see another large wave of users heading off.

[CallmeYahweh]

I don't think two restarts would be awful. The one at 12 PDT today worked pretty well. But they'd likely need to do another at 5 or 6 PM PDT which would really suck.

 

But hopefully, more people will be logging off instead of AFKing while sleeping or while at school/work/etc.

 

I imagine that once FC transfers from one server to another is done, we'll see another large wave of users heading off.

 

Two restarts would definitely be reasonable if this is the route that they're going to be taking from here on.

 

1.4k queue when I got home. I'll keep an eye on it as I'm cooking.

[Kellach Woods]

Give it a couple of days - Saying it's a success from one day when people only learned of the timing 1 hour before it happened is asking for trouble down the line.

[PhantasticPanda]

Give it a couple of days - Saying it's a success from one day when people only learned of the timing 1 hour before it happened is asking for trouble down the line.

 

I mean, what else is gonna happen when people know about the time now? Ask the boss for an hour break so you can drive home, enter queue. Go afk again then drive back to work? A lot of afkers are no doubt people who were already going to afk from morning/previous night to prime time to escape the queue.

 

I'm one of the people that AFK as well but only because I'd go out for lunch or make dinner which takes just a bit over 30 minutes. I'm usually back doing content before the hour.

[Nebbs]

People will flat out quit if they restart too often, because it'll make it very inconvenient to do duties in a timely manner. Someone might only have a couple hours a day to play, and if a restart happens to be timed during their normal hours, that could be very disruptive.

 

 

That may not be a bad thing

 

"If he be like to leave, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

[xelliexell]

I had positive queue results last night as well. Although it took some bravery, I logged out to experiment with how bad it would be during one of the most primiest of times (shortly before 7 PM CST.)

 

It took me a little over an hour to get in, which wasn't an unfathomable inconvenience (I cooked/ate dinner and browsed the Steam sale in the downtime.)

 

Other people in my LS also reported more favorable results. I even had a couple of people who were angry over the measures upon their announcement (including one EU), but after experiencing it, they were like "oh, this is better/not that bad, I was worried over nothing." Said EU friend logged out during the designated time -- as there were plenty of warnings, similar to logging off for maintenance -- and logged back in without much incident after the window had elapsed.

 

Now comes the question of whether people will panic and circumvent the mass-kick system via remote log in en masse to cause the issue all over again, I guess?

[Ellmida]

I was skeptical but after seeing and hearing the results these measures seemed to have worked. I think the issues of people staying logged in was more widespread than we thought and people frustrated by the queue times caused them to try to stay logged in as well which only exacerbated the problem. Since the measures have enabled shorter queues at least for now this should make people more confident about logging out and reduce numbers over time.

[Gegenji]

I was actually surprised at how effective it was. I honestly expected the queues to be about back to "normal" - aka the 3+ hour wait - by the time I got home (around 5pm EST), or at least have gotten back to that sort of timer by 8pm-ish. Finding out that it dropped to a little over an hour at most even at the peak times is really good to know!

 

... And makes me all the more annoyed at the AFK-dodgers who caused it to get like that in the first place.

[Branson Thorne]

More then a few skeptical people I knew are now singing a different tune after this auto-kick.

Sure it's not the end all solution but it has certainly improved the circumstances.

[Jana]

I've been using the TeamViewer app on my phone to log in while I leave work so I'll be at the head of the queue by the time I get home, but when I popped it yesterday, the queue was only at 52 so I closed it. By the time I got home an hour and a half later, it was already over 900, but I got into the game maybe... 45 minutes later, so even that wasn't so bad.

[Blythe]

While I honestly think they should just make it a kick after 30 minutes of not moving even if you are crafting or at a summoning bell or a market board, this is probably the next thing that we can ask for right now. 

When I got home, it was only 900 in queue instead of the 2.3k+ I was experiencing the days earlier. And yes, for those days, I had to AFK craft (not going to lie) since it would've taken me 3 hours or more to get in at prime time. Being that it only took 40 minutes instead of the three hours, I was pleasantly surprised. It meant I could actually make dinner and eat it without feeling like time was going to drag. Plus I got in a few rounds of playing another game while I as waiting. So it wasn't that bad.

[Kage]

If only SE would kick only the servers that need it (Balmung, Cerberus, Omega?)

[PhantasticPanda]

If only SE would kick only the servers that need it (Balmung, Cerberus, Omega?)

 

Maybe someone can enlighten or correct me on this, but from my understanding, interior housing, inn rooms and apartments also take up space in the instance servers for the entire data center. So while other servers don't exactly need it, I think overall its a plus to clear up whatever amount of space AFKers use up in that regard. (Sometimes I can't even enter my own FC house to access merchants or melders )

[Branson Thorne]

If only SE would kick only the servers that need it (Balmung, Cerberus, Omega?)

 

Maybe someone can enlighten or correct me on this, but from my understanding, interior housing, inn rooms and apartments also take up space in the instance servers for the entire data center. So while other servers don't exactly need it, I think overall its a plus to clear up whatever amount of space AFKers use up in that regard. (Sometimes I can't even enter my own FC house to access merchants or melders )

 

Very few ingame issues tick me off more then "Due to server congestion, you are unable to leave this area. Please try again later" as you repeatedly try to enter your housing.

 

It's downright infuriating.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

If only SE would kick only the servers that need it (Balmung, Cerberus, Omega?)

 

Maybe someone can enlighten or correct me on this, but from my understanding, interior housing, inn rooms and apartments also take up space in the instance servers for the entire data center. So while other servers don't exactly need it, I think overall its a plus to clear up whatever amount of space AFKers use up in that regard. (Sometimes I can't  even enter my own FC house to access merchants or melders )

 

No, that's pretty much correct. It could be the case that SE has different pools of instance servers for things, like keeping housing instances per world and then sharing dungeon/raid/trial instances, but I'm not sure if there'd really be a benefit to splitting them up. Then again, thye very well could be doing it this way which would explain why they have to add more housing even to unpopulated servers to make room for the larger servers.

[Lydia Lightfoot]

Reset is at noon Pacific today again, which suggests the timing is static. Just FYI.

[Val]

If only SE would kick only the servers that need it (Balmung, Cerberus, Omega?)

 

Maybe someone can enlighten or correct me on this, but from my understanding, interior housing, inn rooms and apartments also take up space in the instance servers for the entire data center. So while other servers don't exactly need it, I think overall its a plus to clear up whatever amount of space AFKers use up in that regard. (Sometimes I can't  even enter my own FC house to access merchants or melders )

 

No, that's pretty much correct. It could be the case that SE has different pools of instance servers for things, like keeping housing instances per world and then sharing dungeon/raid/trial instances, but I'm not sure if there'd really be a benefit to splitting them up. Then again, thye very well could be doing it this way which would explain why they have to add more housing even to unpopulated servers to make room for the larger servers.

 

With how the behavior of personal quests went during the 90k fest of early access, I imagine they're pooled pretty specifically. I got past Raubahn EX pretty early, and even though I was leagues beyond the zerg fest still stuck at Rauhbahn, the occasional random story instance would still DC me. And it wasn't a fluke, either. Sometimes it took me 10+ tries of spamming the NPC to get it to work.

[3Bears1Goldy]

There was a small update on this on Friday.

 

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/3ca129ebd21f9f9dca99e0522e9ac014b237497f

 

Only the heavily congested servers will continue to have the logout procedure. Servers without congestion, or that had the login issues resolved will no longer be subject to the mass logout procedure.

[Kage]

Ever since Thursday? I have pretty much the usual pre-early access SB queues, aka cancel through near instant queue.

 

Has anyone else had longer queues?

 

(this does not count the after 12pm PDT queue after the forced logout)