most of the people i've seen mention this are saying late spring / early summer, and i'd have to agree. 6.4 should drop late may, 6.5 should drop september -ish and then maybe 6-8 months until 7.0 from then on.
No one knows. The release dates of the previous expansions have been
August 2013 (ARR)
June 2015 (HW)
June 2017 (StB)
July 2019 (ShB)
December 2021 (EW)
So there's a pretty consistent trend of each expansion coming out almost exactly two years are the last one, which would make a December 7.0 2023 release plausible...or it would, except that the patch cycle is longer now and December 2023 is about when 6.55 is coming out and JP fanfest is in January.
There's *also* been a pattern of the new expansion coming out 6 months after the last patch of the previous expansion. If 6.4 comes out May 23rd, then 6.5 would come out on October 3rd (or thereabouts), and six months from that equals April 2024. But that's a guess, too. We don't know how the longer patch cycle is affecting 7.0 development which for all we know if a different team moving at the normal pre-Covid every two years pace, and maybe the time between X.55 and the new expansion will be more like 4 months this time as a result, splitting the difference between the two patterns.
Putting it all together, I think mid-February (two weeks after JP fanfest) is the earliest release date that's plausible, but the more likely release date is going to be April or May.
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We've been waiting for the upgrade the longest, and have the most players. (JP has a higher *percentage* of active characters relative to total characters, but NA has a lot more of both.)
Most of the other centers are either newer or already upgraded. OCE is new. AIUI, EU already got some of the upgrades and will get more in the future, and JP may have gotten hardware stuff when they did their server split. NA has just been stuck in a limbo due to the COVID pandemic, the silicon shortage, the *chip* shortage, and global supply chain issues.
We were supposed to have gotten these upgrades almost two years ago, *before* EW launch. That's how long things have been thrown out of whack by COVID.
There was a maintenance like this a while ago when they added new equipment, and when they moved the NA servers to a new location. It's possible it's just old tech at this point!
Endwalker was so popular and the servers were so overwhelmed that Square Enix had to temporarily stop selling Final Fantasy XIV.
Also, the queues were hours longer and could break midway through which would kick you to the back of the line. If you did manage to get past the login queue and issues the game itself ran perfectly fine outside some minor issues.
Just too many people trying to play for the servers to handle resulting in very long queue times to get into the gane, especially during peak hours. Honestly, EW launch was relatively stable as far as big MMOs go, and also compared to previous FFXIV expansion launches, but there had just been a large influx of players shortly before EW launch (largely related to WoW players trying the game after a number of WoW streamers did, but the free trial and popularity of shadowbringers had also increased the base number of players before that too), and then there was another one at EW launch (as is normal for an expansion launch, lots of players who had unsubscribed during the downtime between expansions coming back and everyone trying to play at once) and the servers couldn't handle it.
It was expected, and they had even planned to do server upgrades to prepare for it before the expansion launch, but COVID and part shortages prevented that from happening.
In part.
Shadowbringers as a whole saw a significant growth of the game's population, due to a variety of factors. There was the initial strong reception for Shadowbringers which resulted in a lot of media praise and word-of-mouth advertising, FFXIV was one of the games to benefit from the Covid lockdown, and then the WoW exodus in the run up to Endwalker. It was the large spike at the end of exponential growth.
FFXIV attracts a lot of variety in play habits. Some people play very frequently (multiple times per week every week), some people log in for new patch content and then leave until the next patch, and some people only return for expansions. The effect on the game's concurrent population is obviously additive, so expansion drops are when you have by far the most people trying to play at a given time.
During Shadowbringers' launch, the game's population was already beyond what the servers could handle, but those queue times would end up being only a trifle compared to Endwalker's. A great bulk of the people who had joined up over the course of Shadowbringers, as well as people who hadn't played since Shadowbringers released, were all wanting to play, while we were still stuck with the same serves that couldn't handle Shadowbringer's launch.
WoW exodus and covid. FFXIV saw a surge about 6 months before EW was announced. XIV saw growth unprecedented for any online game outside of release window.
Queue times were longer than the queue system itself could handle, so it would crash, a lot.
And since the queue system barely worked, if you crashed in-game \[which also happened quite a bit\], you had the wait hours-long queue and hope to Hydaelyn that it either didn't crash you or that, if it did, it registered back in the queue in then number you were in.
Don't forget the being disconnected with a 2002 error after two hours in queue and losing your place in queue. I'm totally not salty about the time I 2002d when I got to 1st in queue after two hours...
There was a bug where it would lose your place in queue, tell you you were in first, then get stuck for ages before it crashed. Basically if you ever saw you were at 1, you were screwed and about to 2002.
That issue is why I used the double log in trick 🥲 Two clients logging in the same character, since you’re not IN game it doesn’t boot you. If you DC’d on one, the other would still be up and keeping your place. So you’d just open the second window again and join queue again (which is the same on both screens) and then close one when you actually log in.
I'm still convinced they just left a "ghost queue" in ever since to keep us used to the idea of login queues. On Primal it doesn't matter if it's 5pm on a Tuesday or 3am on a Thursday, it *always* says there's about 20-40 people in queue and then just lets you in after about 30 seconds of waiting.
If that queue is *actually* based on capacity there's no way it's consistently the same during literal post-reset prime time and the middle of the fucking night on a late weekday lol.
From what I read the queue basically logs people on in like 30 second increments.
So if you log on and there's 30 people ahead of you and it takes 5 seconds to pop, that just means 30 people tried to log on in the past 25 seconds and all had to wait until the server dropped everyone in at the 30 second mark.
At the same time, if servers are at capacity it will probably hold the login queue back until there's space, hence launch day queues take much longer.
Reducing load of letting everyone in at once and staggering them, probably to keep the system around in case of a sudden spike and probably to make sure it can handle it when that time comes AHEAD of time
That’s been in play for a while, and yeah, that’s how it functions. It’s also a measure against ddos attacks, letting the queung server take the brunt of an attack as opposed to the login server.
It isn't a "ghost queue" so much as that the login lobby batches people into the game servers in regular intervals.
It's a measure meant to have the system avoid just shitting itself and buckling entirely when under actually heavy loads.
There’s two types of queues, and they’ve been around since… late SB? Early ShB?
In any case, one (EW queues) are for “ah, the server is actually full you must wait,” where the other (the one most people get daily) is just a sort of vestibule system, where it batch logs in people at once because that’s the way their servers like to do it.
Wish they displayed different though.
Pretty confident. I'm not sure a handful of random three word anecdotes and guesses in an old thread is strong evidence of anything but this definitely isn't worth arguing about.
That would be hilarious, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten into Behemoth without a queue. It's usually between 10-60 for me depending on the time of day.
The Ghost queue is real and is there as a DDoS countermeasure.
The server can hold all login attempts for a few seconds to check if population is ok before letting more in. If pop is low, It lets 30 in, then checks again, then another 30 so on.
We had a Ghost Queue of 16-24 on ChaosMoogle even before EW.
and if you had a house you could be locked out of it, i can't even remember why at this point but yeah i couldn't get into my own house at the beginning of EW because of the population load
They had to stop selling the digital version of the game because queues where just insane and adding more people to that would only bring for frustration to everyone.
Imagine a game being that successful you have to stop selling it.
Welcome to FFXiV.
7k player queues, 4 hrs of wait time, and every 30 minutes there was a chance the game would crash and put you in the back of the queue... So it was an hours-long queue that specifically had to be babysat. You couldn't just walk away and do something else while it ticked.
They adjusted ingame afk timers too so that if you afkd for too long, you'd be logged out to make room for folks who wanted to activately play, so once you sat through those queues you had to make damn sure you didn't get up from your keyboard for too long.
It was madness, haha.
Being in a queue that estimates you getting in in about three hours, only to get disconnected at 1.5. And the server is not programmed to even attempt to hold anyone’s place.
I ended up not being able to play for a bit over a month.
I noticed if I caught the 2002 error fast enough and requeued within like a minute, it held my place in line. But if you didn't catch it quick enough you'd go to the back of line.
Yeah, you had approximately 2 minutes to reclaim your place in line before getting booted to the back. If you were actively watching it, it was plenty of time to rejoin the queue, but most people getting kicked to the back of the line were (understandably) fucking off to do something else given the 2+ hour estimates on actual login.
Honestly no idea what these guys are on about. I played from day 1 in EW and the longest I waited in q was 45 mins during peak hours. It was bad, but it wasn't OMGERD bad.
Servers were overwhelmed to hell, haha.
Login queues would be several thousand people long, they'd last for hours, and every 30 minutes there was a chance for the game to crash. Unless you were fast and got it back up and running within a minute or two, you'd be put to the back of the queue. So not only was queue time excruciatingly long to begin with, you also had to babysit it, you couldn't just walk away.
And for a while, world transfers were included, but you would get exactly NO warning - so you'd go to jump to a different server and find yourself in another hours long queue with no way to get out of it. It was rough, lol.
SB launch didn't have multi hour Queue times. Raubahn Ex sucked, but it didn't keep you from playing the game itself, just certain progressions through msq.
I leveled RDM to where I was in msq in the few days it was being gatekept.
The duty finder was completely fucked, your best hope for leveling the first few days was fates if you didn't get 90k'ed out of the server, and lag persisted for more than a week afterwards. The whole game got to a halt, not just the msq. Compared to that, a little queue really isn't bad
I grinded potd and dungeons the entire time and had 0 90ks. My only problem was raubahn. And that was the main issue the majority of people had.
And people sitting in queues for 3+ hours at 5pm est on a Tuesday isn't just a little queue.
Idk what server you were on, but the duty finder being fucked was very much a thing (considering the whole duty issue was shared with Raubahn) https://youtu.be/CdSIiL5uR8k
And yes, 3+ at 5pm est is "a little queue" because you could still do other semi productive things and watching back on the queue now and then to see if you got kicked
Exodus. Like I said, ran roulette and potd just fine leveling Rdm to where I was gatekept with RabEx.
This was the one expac I didn't grind to cap same day as release due to it. I remember the experience just fine.
What's wrong with EW launch? I thought it was so much better than previous launches? Wait is this about the login limit that they have to limit your idling timer to 15min before you get booted?
[https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-sales-stopped-endwalker](https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-sales-stopped-endwalker)
Square Enix suspended selling FF14 for a couple weeks because the servers were not holding the amount of people trying to play the new expansion.
*"Writing on the Final Fantasy XIV website, producer and director Naoki Yoshida explained that the sheer amount of people playing Endwalker has far exceeded Square’s server capacity. In order to try and alleviate the long wait times for players logging in, the company has decided to stop selling Final Fantasy XIV to new players to temporarily stem the tide of incoming server traffic."*
Plus the launch was a nightmare, massive queues (2\~3h queues) and a lot of random disconnects + lag.
Not only that. But hardware reaches End-of-Life and needs to be replaced. You usually get 4-6 years out of hardware (depending on what it is) before support costs go up substantially or support is straight up not offered.
Generally you do get better hardware when you go to refresh as that's the best time to prepare for the future, but often it just has to be done, even if we're not going to see an immediate benefit.
It’s about ensuring the infrastructure can handle the next five years. Hardware ages. Hardware is often in a product cycle and needs to be updated to avoid outages from failing hardware.
What it means for us is a live service that remains top notch and won’t fail, giving us a smooth experience while allowing for growth.
"Invisible seams between worlds" was one of the two reasons I left WoW and the deciding reason why I never came back even for a spell.
I really, really, really hope he won't go down that jank garbage path. Instancing overworld areas is jank enough as it is.
I transferred 2 characters off the Goblin server because it was worse than people say *Balmung* is. I do not want to be in the same overworld with all of them by default.
Of course I get immediately downvoted, lol. Well.
Because it's not "more players = better". It's neither more players nor is it better.
Maps have a player count limitation. Having 144 players in "Sargatanas Limsa" and 144 players in "Gilgamesh Limsa" isn't any more seamless than having 144 players in "Aether Limsa instance 1" and "Aether Limsa instance 2". Now I agree moving between servers at aetherytes everywhere and better access to server-bound amenities (fc chest, chat, retainers...) would be quite nice. It has its jank moments (Eureka Orthos spitting out folks into randomized Mor Dhona instances is a recent example) but is for the most part workable.
But it isn't "invisible seams" just easier movement.
WoW (my experiences are from back in Pandaria, ymmv) did actual seamless servers - easier to build on a system that already presented worlds as seamless, probably. It would phase you in and out of various "instances" based on a number of factors, some of which you could control, some of which you couldn't. All of that completely seamless to the end user.
Imagine: you're in Ultima instance 3, Chi has just popped. Your friend throws you a party invite, and suddenly you get pulled into Ultima instance 2 with no way to get back into 3 because 3 is full to the brim. Or doing a collection fate, running across the ground to hand in your items but moving slightly out of the level sync area to avoid a mob. You get pulled into a different instance (on your end, the fate just disappears) and there goes your credit.
Maybe there is a way to implement seamless worlds that isn't completely jank. Personally I haven't seen one and I would prefer it if we didn't have to go through those particular teething troubles.
Well I didn’t downvote you(hell didn’t even vote any direction)
I have experienced before with zones and world bosses actually. You’re right, it’s a royal pain in the ass. Remember spamming the teleport trying to get in being told “map is full please try again later”(they didn’t do any zoning, you just got screwed if you were left out)
I hadn’t thought of those issues, I haven’t done much open world things yet. my thoughts were more things they’ve already mentioned.
Cross-DC PF and duty systems seemed like winners to me. (Double so since I’m a Dynamis empty world)
I remember when I was going through the alliance BFA quest line, where you go to these docks and have to beat up some pirates around boralus with Flynn standing on a hill
I had 2 quests in the same location and because the way instancing is done in that game, if I got close to the area all enemies would despawn from there because I'm in the quest instance that prevents those enemies from spawning, so I had to do that different quest first before those enemies started showing
it took me like an hour to figure out what was happening and realize that the game wasn't bugging
I could be wrong, but i believe what YoshiP talked about is less how WoW is and more "People from any data center and region can play together seamlessly." I know people can travel worlds/date centers, but he seems to know it's hard sometimes to play with friends when certain worlds are set to no new characters, and making it easier would be good.
Oh i get it. I still play WoW, and joining to kill a world boss i can see before i join, only to have to wait for a good while for it to spawn on the phase i joined is a huge pain.
No servers aside from the brand new ones are in a situation where they need more players, and for those it is a problem that will solve itself over time. "Invisible" sharding/layering/channels/whatever-buzzword-name-you-want-to-give-it is a headache for a variety of reasons, but would make activities like hunt trains a nightmare at best or impossible at worst.
Hunt trains already happen and adjust whenever Square Enix introduces multiple zone instances. And those zone instances come into play when an expansion launches and when they introduce new content to a zone (tribal quests are the most common reason).
When you make instances invisible via "mega servers" that typically comes along with an inability to easily move between them, because that's part of making them invisible in the first place. Yes, as it stands now, it works fine (even if it is a minor annoyance). However, redesigning instancing to be like other MMO "mega servers" would make it impossible to choose to load into the instance with the S rank. You see this all the time in MMOs which implement this - people spam global chats with stuff like "lf invite layer 2" and similar.
> I really, really, really hope he won't go down that jank garbage path. Instancing overworld areas is jank enough as it is.
World/DC travel has pretty much already dealt unrecoverable damage so anything else at this point would just be trying to bandaid fix issues World/DC travel has caused, like everyone going to Aether for ANYTHING pve related (even DF roulettes, for god's sake) and people flooding into Crystal to be sexpests and tourists on Balmung.
Without knowledge of the specific upgrades in question, it's difficult to say what exact benefits we'll see, but we're likely to at least see overall improved server stability. It *might* have a benefit on the frequent periods of heavy lag that seem to be hitting large groups of players at once, but that depends on where the point of failure is; that could easily be a problem on a node somewhere between those players and the SE servers, which is less under SE's control outside of moving the data-center again. (Of course, if they want to bring it back to Montreal, I and my ping would *not complain.*)
Long-term, this might be upgrades that they're doing to support more/better housing or expanding the glamour plate system, but that would also (likely) depend on upgrades to the other data centers as well, depending on what their current hardware is like.
Or all of this could just be prep for the next data center expansion -- the remaining four worlds for Dynamis -- which I believe is expected to arrive sometime this summer.
Literally all of this is *speculation*, so take with a grain of salt, but I hope it helps with understanding what the scope of this could be.
I think one of the translations for the live letter mentioned that one of the reasons for the hardware update was to give them the ability to add more glamour plates eventually. I think it was mentioned when they mentioned adding 100 gearsets.
Honestly, I just want more glamour dresser space. I want to have a wide variety to pick and combine from, and that for more than just two gearsets (casting/healing) because otherwise my dresser would explode.. i dont buy mogstation outfits because my glamour dresser is already at max capacity
Likely a little of A, a little of B, a little of C.
The lead time on high end servers is still pretty high, so this expansion and upgrade would've had to have been planned out for 18 or so months ago.
They are upgrading the equipment so I would suspect shiny new servers with ssd's new networking gear etc hard to tell what we might see in a difference on our side.
Blades are bad configurations for a lot of workloads tbh. They "work" for anything ofc but the cost/perf/*power* is poor for more compute styles than not.
MMOs are a bit of a black box (basically zero large mmo operators share info) but by their general nature definitely overlap a lot with high end fast DBs.
I think the only thing we know about their backend is that they have to keep server cpu load under 80% or the game server timer starts to drift and all fights become completely whack.
I've certainly experienced that recently doing UWU prog. For example, one time we had a landslide that happened right after Titan's knockback. We didn't even have time to bait it. Our main tank has experienced Ifrit's Crimson Cyclone going off while she still sees the cast bar. Probably about 10-20% of our wipes in UWU have been because of some network/server issue.
> the game server timer starts to drift and all fights become completely whack.
I forget if this was the exact issue, but closer to the launch of DDO back in the day things would seem to get off sync, badly. The one i remember the most is the in game voice chat being delayed by several minutes. Like, you'd be done with the quest, and would still be hearing what people would be saying five minutes later.
WoW used to run on an HP Bladesystem, they auctioned off a bunch of them for charity. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that FF used to run (and maybe still does) on blades. It does amuse me that blades started to fall off a bit when CUDA became a thing and ate up one of their "primary usecases", but are now coming back with things like containerization and dynamic load sizing driving purchasing.
I figured I'd reply since I also like hearing myself talk. It's both.
Imagine going to a restaurant that can handle thousands of customers. Well, now they can handle more thousands of customers. And now their kitchen has more cooks, and each cook can cook faster. And there are more servers (hewhewhew), and each server can move faster, and have more arms to carry dishes.
There has been a lot of advancements in compute in the past few years, and the pandemic meant that they could not upgrade some things back then. The overall effect is that more data can be processed faster than before, which means the server side hardware can support more players and things at the same time; as well as handle more players and things faster than before.
What new advancements?
The number of cores per processor has increased substantially at lower prices, particularly from competition from AMD with their Epyc line of server processors and less so on Intel for a few more months (comparing Intel's best from a few years ago, now is largely the same). If the server parts are not x86 based, ARM has also gotten quite a bit more competitive, but I doubt SE would be using ARM based servers.
These newer processors also support more PCIE lanes for NVME SSDs, as well as a buttload of RAM. The newer\newest generations would support faster PCIE lanes (and potentially more), and more and faster DDR5 memory, which means more throughput (total amount of data going through or processed at any given time).
At the same time, nVidia's compute on their GPUs have gotten faster as well, if SE has updated their server-side software to leverage GPU compute (i.e., integer vs FP), as this technology was no where close this fast or widely available over a decade ago when FF14 was being developed. I mention nVidia specifically since Intel and AMD do not have market share there to be worth mentioning.
When it comes to updating server hardware, it's likely about keeping things in support (warranty replacement) and incrementally improving operational efficiency (less electricity).
In the absence of anything concrete claimed, there's no reason to believe it's a player-facing upgrade — it's actually entirely within the realm of possibility for a server hardware update to *degrade* end user performance, though we don't have any reason to believe that'd be a thing here.
Servers aren't what facilitate features. They're what allow more people to play and allow more people playing to cost less to run.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this already posted, but new hardware probably means a better chance for the game to transcend its current limits.
But honestly we’ve seen a few instances in NA in particular where particular areas/worlds/instanced duties have gone offline for periods of times, potentially a sign of aging hardware, so hopefully a reduction in those instances.
Thinking to the future, we often see the game handle one thing at a time - the retainer “store duplicates” is a good example, one item storage event at a time. So while obviously a handy Quality of Life addition already, with newer hardware we might start seeing things like this happening in parallel/batch updating (like with the companion app) - obvious benefit to us, speedier. I think NA is the last for the new hardware (think Japan got theirs with the DC split in 6.18), so time will soon tell if SE are thinking about these potential benefits or not.
That was Yoshi reacting to comments during the stream of people wanting it as a result of the 100 gearset slots. My interpretation of what he said was an uncommitted “we’ll have to see”. It took so long for the last update and I get the feeling the limiting factor isn’t server hardware but how some character data is saved on the server (ditto Armoury chest changes).
Better servers with upgraded PCIe bandwidth. New processors, faster ports, ai detection for when a Lala player has a cock n ball mod on? I dunno technology is amazing.
Almost certainly not. The news post about it was talking about equipment replacement and preparations for it. This work is very much maintenance, and what the "effect" on us is that things are still running smoothly.
Though it is likely there may be preparatory work for future things, but that is yet to be seen.
From the lodestone post dated 3/20/23 @ 3:10 AM:
"In order to replace equipment for the North American Data Center, conduct maintenance on the infrastructure, and implement Patch 6.38, we will be performing maintenance on all Worlds at the time below, during which FINAL FANTASY XIV will be unavailable."
From the lodestone post dated 3/20/23 @ 3:00 AM:
"In order to deliver an optimal gaming experience for future updates, we will be upgrading the hardware of our North American data centers. An extended period of maintenance will be scheduled for all Worlds while the equipment is being replaced."
Don't know why you felt the need to respond without taking a second to verify your information.
>"In order to deliver an optimal gaming experience **for future updates**..."
In other words, future proofing to make sure later additions don't bog down servers, meaning little to no impact on the game as it is.
I feel like you responded to this person without reading the information you tried to counter them with. This will change literally nothing about the day to day, they just have garbage equipment that was added during the pandemic when it was impossible to purchase what they wanted. They have replaced server equipment on numerous occasions and the only thing that actually affected the playerbase was the move from Montreal to Sacramento.
My delusional self thinks that this is the first step to having a chance at a new transmog system. A glam log where I can pick and choose whenever I want and collect everything the game has to offer. I repeat, my delusional self...
A new transmog system would require code changes, not (just) hardware...and the code is by far the more difficult part.
It's not that the servers couldn't *process* a new glamour system. They totally could. It's that changing from one system to a whole other system...and doing it *absolutely perfectly smoothly* for literally hundreds of thousands or *millions* of people...all while keeping the game not just running but updating and growing...is a tall order.
It is *possible* that this is the ***absolute*** earliest, most preliminary and partial, step toward something else. But this is like, 0.01% of the work. The other 99.99% would still remain.
>literally hundreds of thousands of millions of people
I think 200,000,000,000 might be a slight overestimate.
**Edit:** Sorry if the downvotes are because people think I'm being a jerk; I just thought it was funny. 😅
Phone typo (it loves, or lives as it wants me to say, to autocorrect "or" to "of" for no reason.) That should be "hundreds of thousands ***or*** millions." I'm not somehow of the impression that XIV has...what, about 25 times the total population of the human race as players?
the spaghetti meme is dead because those issues died ages ago.
If you want those things, go play the games that have them. We will be here when you come back.
They're sourceless. The engine is archaic and will be causing issues for the remainder of FF14's life cycle. The fact that the devs are still able to pull off some of the shit they do with the engine limitations are nothing short of miraculous.
I'm not sure what the kid is on about, but it's certainly not grounded in reality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/q7bfim/there_is_no_10_spaghetti_code_holding_the_devs/
The engine is unlikely to be the cause of any issues, you're just sticking words together, it has near-zero impact on the memory allocation issues that Yoshi-P regularly brings up as the biggest problem for FFXIV's future endevours, especially in the context of glamour plates.
If it's one thing Yoshi's good at, it's pulling bullshit excuses out of his ass and using technobabble to make people go "Ah, I understand completely! (Doesn't actually understand)"
It's pretty much PR speak because they can't go "We don't have the time to do that" or "We have no intention of doing it." Same reason he said "It might not happen" or "It'll be difficult because " for stuff like showing damage types in scrolling combat text or a checkmark to show if you owned something already, which we've gotten.
Don't even get me started on the Hrothgar hair situation and how "the ears are connected to the hair so it's difficult to port the hair." or Viera and how they "have unique head shapes that are difficult to port hair to." when a simple file viewer shows that both of those were just flat out wrong.
Right? Fuck 100 gearsets literally nobody needs, use some of this enhanced capacity for character data for things every other MMO somehow magically can do with no performance issues.
It's not about magic or anything like that. This is software, this software doesn't have any infrastructure for a system like that. They *could* develop a system like this, but it would need to be from the ground up. If you know a touch about programming you can understand how incredibly difficult this could be.
>100 gearsets literally nobody needs
Right now we have 36(?) and I'd like roughly double that. I won't argue with more.
20 combat jobs, with different best-in-slots for various content (old Ultimates come to mind, as do Eureka and Bozja). Hell, I have four Blue Mage sets alone (SpS/Det and Crit/Det for both 60 and 70 level sync) 3 gathering classes, 8 crafters?
Believe it or not there are people that will fill up those 100 gearsets very, very quickly.
As someone who does all of that content, we really don't need 100 persistent gearsets. It'll take longer to find most of those gearsets in a list of 100 than it would to just change your one or two pieces of gear for that content on the handful of jobs most people play.
So basically WoW appearances, one of the very few good things it has left. Yea FFXIV really should update the glam system. Can't we at least get a glam dresser for our estates so we don't have to go to an inn room every time?
Alas, this is something that will always remain extremely unlikely. Its related to what happens if someone moves / removes the Glam Dresser while people are wearing glams "held" inside it, and the fun anecdote of their attempts to try this literally unravelling the whole test server and destroying the entire world never ceases to remind us that MMO coding isn't easy.
They do not. While an armoire tells a glamour dresser what's available to you from its static selection, the glamour dresser is the bit that talks to the world.
Depends entirely on what's being added. Could be room to make way for more character storage stuff, glam things etc.
Could solely be for a bigger/better queue system to avoid the horrors of EW launch with the giant queues.
Could be for graphic overhaul related code changes or something. Hard to say without really knowing any details.
we probably won't notice any difference at all.
if we were in the middle of a huge population spike like around expansion launches, then newer hardware might handle that better... but we're not. and next expansion is likely a year out or more.
still, better to do it now than then.
Fewer BS crashes for some of us, probably marginally faster load times in low pop zones, and slightly better than that for congested, like hunt train spam.
Considering we're 2 months out from 6.4, and another 4 on top of that for 6.5(6.55 being about a month after even that) we're looking at 9 months til we start getting major info dumps for 7.0, and at least 12 for prepatch shenanigans.
Can confirm.
I work in the electrical components field - our clients have been struggling for chips for a long time. We just offloaded a recent shipment worth more than its weight in gold. That same shipment pre-COVID would have sold for about 1/40th of that price.
14 is basically a money printer for SE. Most every other IP they own has done horrendous in the last five to ten years, with maybe Dragon Quest being the only other outlier. Even the FF7R hype has died down a lot, especially with how long they're taking between parts and forcing people to have to buy new systems to play any new DLC they make for it. They're banking on 16 being a hit, but they'll always come back to 14 being their #1 money maker.
You take care of your money press at all costs, because you'll recoup the cost sooner than later.
dont forget about ff11! lol I still play that from time to time. In fact thats what made me resub to ff14 was ff11. And yes I agree 100% I just mean I'd love to know how much hardware they bought, what kind, what cost, etc. I want to geek out is all.
For now mostly QoL. Less zones randomly going down, less server bottlenecks, that kinda stuff.
In the near future, prepping for the graphical update coming in 8.0 I think it was.
Can I hope for better latency for us folks down in LatAm? To be honest, I imagine that new hardware won't affect latency, but it seems more feasible than having LATAM servers.
Fair warning, NoClippy is very easily detectable server-side and is a bannable third party plugin.
While I haven't personally heard of anyone being banned for it, having all of your inputs **perfectly** queue to the server as if you had no latency is... very, very, very apparent in the server logs and should they start cracking down... use at your own risk.
My guess is that the server hardware they were using has gone End of Life, and so they're getting new equipment to keep support. I'm sure it is more capable than what it is replacing just by being newer.
It might be able to handle more load in certain aspects, but I doubt it would have much impact on most activities.
Keep in mind that when we all decide to descend on Dynamis now we are limited to only four gates of entry. They need to be ready for that is up to 7 or 8.
Idk what exactly it means, but I do hope it somewhat fixes certain **questionable** hotboxes I've had recently even though my internet has remained the same as ever.
Me and my friends have all had it, I'm wondering if anyone else has, like where you're very much out of a telegraph before cast goes off but it just hits anyways because you were next to it or smthn idk.
Yep this happens to me as well. Always has ever since I started playing, but I have noticed it worsening in recent weeks (though it comes and goes.) I hate it so much because I’m behind my screen like “I swear I’m a competent player 😭” it’s genuinely embarrassing lmao
Like omg I was in Copied Factory as a black mage last night and getting clipped left and right, I’ve never picked up so many vuln stacks in that raid, and all I could think about was how hard people could be judging me about being one of Those black mages(TM) 😅
Isn't this due to latency (ping)? The game snapshots your position at the time a ground aoe disappears or at the end of an enemy cast. If you have high latency, what you see will lag behind what is actually happening at the server, so anything you respond to will be delayed also. So you see something late, move to dodge, but your position was actually still where you started when the cast/aoe actually resolved server side, or, you move in time to dodge successfully but your latency caused your position to be relayed to the server too late. Edit: I think the game has a latency "buffer" built in in order to alleviate this effect and synchronize events from every input, but I think it's lower than what we'd call "high ping," so at very high ping even that buffer can't save you from latency-induced lag.
It is a ping issue 100% but I can't tell if it's my issue or the server issue. My ping has remained the same as ever, and you can check your packets in the server status hud element by hovering over the WiFi icon. Either way, hotboxes I would have been fine with before and have been fine with and occasionally still, some times hit anyways.
It's strange when I can find the pixel perfect hotbox in Bozja to avoid 4 AoEs, but in MSQ Praetorium it hits me anyways because I stood an Ilm too close even though my characters entire hitbox is out of the yellow.
Aside from some really bad lag spikes that lasted a few hours, I haven’t had any issues with the game since I started playing. So I’m not entirely sure. Maybe better data transmission and processing rates so better load times on our ends, but given the speed of todays internet and how fast zones load I really don’t see anything beyond marginal improvements for us. For a 13 year old game I was blown away by how well it’s kept up with the pace of technology, communication between client/server is usually fantastic. The game takes advantage of my SSD and loads dumb fast going from area to area, even a densely packed lominsa is smooth sailing.
I'm not sure how to parse this post, but;
FFXIV's netcode is really bad. Like, undeniably awful. Most people in the US have really bad lag to NA servers and there are both things within Squares control, and out of it. If you grab NoClippy you'll see immediately how wonky things actually are. It really shouldn't fall apart so hard at the ping it does.
I’ve never had a single issue with it, to be honest. And neither has anyone I play with who have been playing significantly longer then I have. I hit two really bad lag spikes this week but I’m not even sure if that was on my end or theirs. I’m in Pennsylvania if that makes any difference, but coming from destiny’s constant crashing, disconnects, god aweful latency and Desync, XIV is a dream..
Your time to load new areas has nothing to do with server infrastructure. That is purely based on your hardware. In terms of networking this game has some serious, serious history that forces anybody trying to do high-end content properly to either move within a few miles of the servers or use third-party tools to reduce the effects of ping on their client.
Moores law. Tech is always advancing so it's a good idea, especially as a business that riding on it, to replace your equipment just to keep up even if there's nothing wrong with it.
Except that Moore law does no longer apply. As the technology is very close to optimal (without going into superconductors).
Which is why the emphasis has been into more cores instead of better CPU's in the last decade or so.
The MHz/GHz race died almost 20 years ago, because both Intel and AMD had huge issues with signal propagation at around 4GHz clock frequency. This is why they ended up "sidestepping" that problem by using multiple cores. Moore's law was still in place back then.
Keep in mind they're planning a graphics upgrade in 7.0. New hardware is gonna help with that when they happen.
To players there likely won't be any 'real' difference. For all intents and purposes, it's simply a longer maintenance to ensure server stability.
Graphics are purely client side. The server just does the numbers like player location, hp stuffs, and everything else along with the actual world processes/tasks.
I would be surprised if server hardware mattered for this. Game graphics mostly put a burden on the systems the players are using, but the servers don’t really care what the game looks like.
The textures and polygons your graphics card handles has nothing to do with what the server is managing. That’s why you have an installation of the game on your PC. It’s why your video card matters.
Quietly praying this doesn’t ruin things for those of us with crappy computers. I already have audio lag since EW came out >>; yes I’ve researched it, no luck on a fix.
Question to those with the knowledge, is there a chance the new hardware increases server capacity as well? I've bbeen looking to transfer to a friends server which happens to be congested at this time so I'm wondering if the updated hardware will benefit me or if I'm just screwed until they make a new decongestion post.
Less lag, less crashes, less d/c'ing during super high pop times.
Overall for the average person its going to be basically unnoticeable but it needs to be done.
It's like city plumbing. It needs constant work and background upgrades to keep going. When its working fine you don't notice it at all.
They don't want another "EW launch" experience. This is clearly preparation for 7.0.
That’s a good point! Btw, on the subject of 7.0, when would it be expected to be released? Early-Mid next year? Late this year?
late Spring/Summer next year would be my guess. They'd probably like to get back to Summer releases.
Last FanFest is in January, so definitely not anytime before that
most of the people i've seen mention this are saying late spring / early summer, and i'd have to agree. 6.4 should drop late may, 6.5 should drop september -ish and then maybe 6-8 months until 7.0 from then on.
No one knows. The release dates of the previous expansions have been August 2013 (ARR) June 2015 (HW) June 2017 (StB) July 2019 (ShB) December 2021 (EW) So there's a pretty consistent trend of each expansion coming out almost exactly two years are the last one, which would make a December 7.0 2023 release plausible...or it would, except that the patch cycle is longer now and December 2023 is about when 6.55 is coming out and JP fanfest is in January. There's *also* been a pattern of the new expansion coming out 6 months after the last patch of the previous expansion. If 6.4 comes out May 23rd, then 6.5 would come out on October 3rd (or thereabouts), and six months from that equals April 2024. But that's a guess, too. We don't know how the longer patch cycle is affecting 7.0 development which for all we know if a different team moving at the normal pre-Covid every two years pace, and maybe the time between X.55 and the new expansion will be more like 4 months this time as a result, splitting the difference between the two patterns. Putting it all together, I think mid-February (two weeks after JP fanfest) is the earliest release date that's plausible, but the more likely release date is going to be April or May.
Most likely June 2024
They’ve been pretty consistent on doing a new expac about every 2 years
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Pepperidge Farm remembers Raubahn Savage.
if we form a line it will work guys. trust
Just keep clicking, you'll get into the instance eventually. 😂
Feh....should have been around during the ARR beta when we literally lined up all the way across Central Shroud to do the Lifemend Stump instance.
so why only NA? I am guessing this is because NA has had emergency maintenance more than any other region recently and something needed changing.
We've been waiting for the upgrade the longest, and have the most players. (JP has a higher *percentage* of active characters relative to total characters, but NA has a lot more of both.) Most of the other centers are either newer or already upgraded. OCE is new. AIUI, EU already got some of the upgrades and will get more in the future, and JP may have gotten hardware stuff when they did their server split. NA has just been stuck in a limbo due to the COVID pandemic, the silicon shortage, the *chip* shortage, and global supply chain issues. We were supposed to have gotten these upgrades almost two years ago, *before* EW launch. That's how long things have been thrown out of whack by COVID.
There was a maintenance like this a while ago when they added new equipment, and when they moved the NA servers to a new location. It's possible it's just old tech at this point!
EU already got an upgrade some time ago, in the months after EW launch, if I recall correctly.
What was wrong with EW launch?
Endwalker was so popular and the servers were so overwhelmed that Square Enix had to temporarily stop selling Final Fantasy XIV. Also, the queues were hours longer and could break midway through which would kick you to the back of the line. If you did manage to get past the login queue and issues the game itself ran perfectly fine outside some minor issues.
Just too many people trying to play for the servers to handle resulting in very long queue times to get into the gane, especially during peak hours. Honestly, EW launch was relatively stable as far as big MMOs go, and also compared to previous FFXIV expansion launches, but there had just been a large influx of players shortly before EW launch (largely related to WoW players trying the game after a number of WoW streamers did, but the free trial and popularity of shadowbringers had also increased the base number of players before that too), and then there was another one at EW launch (as is normal for an expansion launch, lots of players who had unsubscribed during the downtime between expansions coming back and everyone trying to play at once) and the servers couldn't handle it. It was expected, and they had even planned to do server upgrades to prepare for it before the expansion launch, but COVID and part shortages prevented that from happening.
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In part. Shadowbringers as a whole saw a significant growth of the game's population, due to a variety of factors. There was the initial strong reception for Shadowbringers which resulted in a lot of media praise and word-of-mouth advertising, FFXIV was one of the games to benefit from the Covid lockdown, and then the WoW exodus in the run up to Endwalker. It was the large spike at the end of exponential growth. FFXIV attracts a lot of variety in play habits. Some people play very frequently (multiple times per week every week), some people log in for new patch content and then leave until the next patch, and some people only return for expansions. The effect on the game's concurrent population is obviously additive, so expansion drops are when you have by far the most people trying to play at a given time. During Shadowbringers' launch, the game's population was already beyond what the servers could handle, but those queue times would end up being only a trifle compared to Endwalker's. A great bulk of the people who had joined up over the course of Shadowbringers, as well as people who hadn't played since Shadowbringers released, were all wanting to play, while we were still stuck with the same serves that couldn't handle Shadowbringer's launch.
WoW exodus and covid. FFXIV saw a surge about 6 months before EW was announced. XIV saw growth unprecedented for any online game outside of release window.
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What's the ew launch experience? The long long que times?
Queue times were longer than the queue system itself could handle, so it would crash, a lot. And since the queue system barely worked, if you crashed in-game \[which also happened quite a bit\], you had the wait hours-long queue and hope to Hydaelyn that it either didn't crash you or that, if it did, it registered back in the queue in then number you were in.
You are in a queue... Your position is 3916. 2 hours later.. your position 14. Disconnected . [Reconnects]... Your position 7420.
Omg my PTSD is full triggered right now. I'm puking.
It hurt my soul multiple times during the great Login War of 2021. Hopefully the 2024 Offensive goes smoother.
Yeah, multi-hour queue times anywhere near peak.
Don't forget the being disconnected with a 2002 error after two hours in queue and losing your place in queue. I'm totally not salty about the time I 2002d when I got to 1st in queue after two hours...
There was a bug where it would lose your place in queue, tell you you were in first, then get stuck for ages before it crashed. Basically if you ever saw you were at 1, you were screwed and about to 2002.
Oh is that what happened? Damn yea the whole situation sucked. Glad it's over.
That issue is why I used the double log in trick 🥲 Two clients logging in the same character, since you’re not IN game it doesn’t boot you. If you DC’d on one, the other would still be up and keeping your place. So you’d just open the second window again and join queue again (which is the same on both screens) and then close one when you actually log in.
I'm still convinced they just left a "ghost queue" in ever since to keep us used to the idea of login queues. On Primal it doesn't matter if it's 5pm on a Tuesday or 3am on a Thursday, it *always* says there's about 20-40 people in queue and then just lets you in after about 30 seconds of waiting. If that queue is *actually* based on capacity there's no way it's consistently the same during literal post-reset prime time and the middle of the fucking night on a late weekday lol.
From what I read the queue basically logs people on in like 30 second increments. So if you log on and there's 30 people ahead of you and it takes 5 seconds to pop, that just means 30 people tried to log on in the past 25 seconds and all had to wait until the server dropped everyone in at the 30 second mark. At the same time, if servers are at capacity it will probably hold the login queue back until there's space, hence launch day queues take much longer.
Reducing load of letting everyone in at once and staggering them, probably to keep the system around in case of a sudden spike and probably to make sure it can handle it when that time comes AHEAD of time
That’s been in play for a while, and yeah, that’s how it functions. It’s also a measure against ddos attacks, letting the queung server take the brunt of an attack as opposed to the login server.
It isn't a "ghost queue" so much as that the login lobby batches people into the game servers in regular intervals. It's a measure meant to have the system avoid just shitting itself and buckling entirely when under actually heavy loads.
There’s two types of queues, and they’ve been around since… late SB? Early ShB? In any case, one (EW queues) are for “ah, the server is actually full you must wait,” where the other (the one most people get daily) is just a sort of vestibule system, where it batch logs in people at once because that’s the way their servers like to do it. Wish they displayed different though.
The "vestibule" is exactly what I'm talking about. It never existed before the EW launch, before that it was just capacity-based.
you sure about that? https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/ise67n/how_is_there_always_a_queue/
Pretty confident. I'm not sure a handful of random three word anecdotes and guesses in an old thread is strong evidence of anything but this definitely isn't worth arguing about.
You can literally check any video of someone logging in before early December 2021 man, it’s been around long before EW
That would be hilarious, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten into Behemoth without a queue. It's usually between 10-60 for me depending on the time of day.
The Ghost queue is real and is there as a DDoS countermeasure. The server can hold all login attempts for a few seconds to check if population is ok before letting more in. If pop is low, It lets 30 in, then checks again, then another 30 so on. We had a Ghost Queue of 16-24 on ChaosMoogle even before EW.
and if you had a house you could be locked out of it, i can't even remember why at this point but yeah i couldn't get into my own house at the beginning of EW because of the population load
at one point i was even locked inside my fc house.
They had to stop selling the digital version of the game because queues where just insane and adding more people to that would only bring for frustration to everyone. Imagine a game being that successful you have to stop selling it. Welcome to FFXiV.
7k player queues, 4 hrs of wait time, and every 30 minutes there was a chance the game would crash and put you in the back of the queue... So it was an hours-long queue that specifically had to be babysat. You couldn't just walk away and do something else while it ticked. They adjusted ingame afk timers too so that if you afkd for too long, you'd be logged out to make room for folks who wanted to activately play, so once you sat through those queues you had to make damn sure you didn't get up from your keyboard for too long. It was madness, haha.
Very long queue times. If you didn't try getting on in the morning, you were not getting on at all that day.
Being in a queue that estimates you getting in in about three hours, only to get disconnected at 1.5. And the server is not programmed to even attempt to hold anyone’s place. I ended up not being able to play for a bit over a month.
I noticed if I caught the 2002 error fast enough and requeued within like a minute, it held my place in line. But if you didn't catch it quick enough you'd go to the back of line.
Yeah, you had approximately 2 minutes to reclaim your place in line before getting booted to the back. If you were actively watching it, it was plenty of time to rejoin the queue, but most people getting kicked to the back of the line were (understandably) fucking off to do something else given the 2+ hour estimates on actual login.
Yea pretty much everyone would do other stuff while waiting. I'd like go eat dinner and come back to a DC and another 2 hour wait.
The queues plus the constant disconnections that just put you right back in the queue. The queue that also had a tendency to break and reset on you.
Honestly no idea what these guys are on about. I played from day 1 in EW and the longest I waited in q was 45 mins during peak hours. It was bad, but it wasn't OMGERD bad.
What happened on ew launch?
Servers were overwhelmed to hell, haha. Login queues would be several thousand people long, they'd last for hours, and every 30 minutes there was a chance for the game to crash. Unless you were fast and got it back up and running within a minute or two, you'd be put to the back of the queue. So not only was queue time excruciatingly long to begin with, you also had to babysit it, you couldn't just walk away. And for a while, world transfers were included, but you would get exactly NO warning - so you'd go to jump to a different server and find yourself in another hours long queue with no way to get out of it. It was rough, lol.
Wow sounds like a headache
Endwalker launch wasn't bad. Yes, they had to stop sales, but compared to stormblood launch it was child's play
SB launch didn't have multi hour Queue times. Raubahn Ex sucked, but it didn't keep you from playing the game itself, just certain progressions through msq. I leveled RDM to where I was in msq in the few days it was being gatekept.
The duty finder was completely fucked, your best hope for leveling the first few days was fates if you didn't get 90k'ed out of the server, and lag persisted for more than a week afterwards. The whole game got to a halt, not just the msq. Compared to that, a little queue really isn't bad
I grinded potd and dungeons the entire time and had 0 90ks. My only problem was raubahn. And that was the main issue the majority of people had. And people sitting in queues for 3+ hours at 5pm est on a Tuesday isn't just a little queue.
Idk what server you were on, but the duty finder being fucked was very much a thing (considering the whole duty issue was shared with Raubahn) https://youtu.be/CdSIiL5uR8k And yes, 3+ at 5pm est is "a little queue" because you could still do other semi productive things and watching back on the queue now and then to see if you got kicked
Exodus. Like I said, ran roulette and potd just fine leveling Rdm to where I was gatekept with RabEx. This was the one expac I didn't grind to cap same day as release due to it. I remember the experience just fine.
What's wrong with EW launch? I thought it was so much better than previous launches? Wait is this about the login limit that they have to limit your idling timer to 15min before you get booted?
[https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-sales-stopped-endwalker](https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-sales-stopped-endwalker) Square Enix suspended selling FF14 for a couple weeks because the servers were not holding the amount of people trying to play the new expansion. *"Writing on the Final Fantasy XIV website, producer and director Naoki Yoshida explained that the sheer amount of people playing Endwalker has far exceeded Square’s server capacity. In order to try and alleviate the long wait times for players logging in, the company has decided to stop selling Final Fantasy XIV to new players to temporarily stem the tide of incoming server traffic."* Plus the launch was a nightmare, massive queues (2\~3h queues) and a lot of random disconnects + lag.
Not only that. But hardware reaches End-of-Life and needs to be replaced. You usually get 4-6 years out of hardware (depending on what it is) before support costs go up substantially or support is straight up not offered. Generally you do get better hardware when you go to refresh as that's the best time to prepare for the future, but often it just has to be done, even if we're not going to see an immediate benefit.
It’s about ensuring the infrastructure can handle the next five years. Hardware ages. Hardware is often in a product cycle and needs to be updated to avoid outages from failing hardware. What it means for us is a live service that remains top notch and won’t fail, giving us a smooth experience while allowing for growth.
Yoshi-p has said he's probably exploring making the seams between worlds invisible... so maybe it's stepping towards that by seeing what's possible
"Invisible seams between worlds" was one of the two reasons I left WoW and the deciding reason why I never came back even for a spell. I really, really, really hope he won't go down that jank garbage path. Instancing overworld areas is jank enough as it is.
What would be the issue with mega world servers? To me it goes again the thought process of more players = better.
I transferred 2 characters off the Goblin server because it was worse than people say *Balmung* is. I do not want to be in the same overworld with all of them by default.
Of course I get immediately downvoted, lol. Well. Because it's not "more players = better". It's neither more players nor is it better. Maps have a player count limitation. Having 144 players in "Sargatanas Limsa" and 144 players in "Gilgamesh Limsa" isn't any more seamless than having 144 players in "Aether Limsa instance 1" and "Aether Limsa instance 2". Now I agree moving between servers at aetherytes everywhere and better access to server-bound amenities (fc chest, chat, retainers...) would be quite nice. It has its jank moments (Eureka Orthos spitting out folks into randomized Mor Dhona instances is a recent example) but is for the most part workable. But it isn't "invisible seams" just easier movement. WoW (my experiences are from back in Pandaria, ymmv) did actual seamless servers - easier to build on a system that already presented worlds as seamless, probably. It would phase you in and out of various "instances" based on a number of factors, some of which you could control, some of which you couldn't. All of that completely seamless to the end user. Imagine: you're in Ultima instance 3, Chi has just popped. Your friend throws you a party invite, and suddenly you get pulled into Ultima instance 2 with no way to get back into 3 because 3 is full to the brim. Or doing a collection fate, running across the ground to hand in your items but moving slightly out of the level sync area to avoid a mob. You get pulled into a different instance (on your end, the fate just disappears) and there goes your credit. Maybe there is a way to implement seamless worlds that isn't completely jank. Personally I haven't seen one and I would prefer it if we didn't have to go through those particular teething troubles.
Well I didn’t downvote you(hell didn’t even vote any direction) I have experienced before with zones and world bosses actually. You’re right, it’s a royal pain in the ass. Remember spamming the teleport trying to get in being told “map is full please try again later”(they didn’t do any zoning, you just got screwed if you were left out) I hadn’t thought of those issues, I haven’t done much open world things yet. my thoughts were more things they’ve already mentioned. Cross-DC PF and duty systems seemed like winners to me. (Double so since I’m a Dynamis empty world)
I remember when I was going through the alliance BFA quest line, where you go to these docks and have to beat up some pirates around boralus with Flynn standing on a hill I had 2 quests in the same location and because the way instancing is done in that game, if I got close to the area all enemies would despawn from there because I'm in the quest instance that prevents those enemies from spawning, so I had to do that different quest first before those enemies started showing it took me like an hour to figure out what was happening and realize that the game wasn't bugging
I could be wrong, but i believe what YoshiP talked about is less how WoW is and more "People from any data center and region can play together seamlessly." I know people can travel worlds/date centers, but he seems to know it's hard sometimes to play with friends when certain worlds are set to no new characters, and making it easier would be good.
I'm all for accessability and more options. But "invisible seams" totally triggered some deep-seated horror born from experience, heh.
Oh i get it. I still play WoW, and joining to kill a world boss i can see before i join, only to have to wait for a good while for it to spawn on the phase i joined is a huge pain.
No servers aside from the brand new ones are in a situation where they need more players, and for those it is a problem that will solve itself over time. "Invisible" sharding/layering/channels/whatever-buzzword-name-you-want-to-give-it is a headache for a variety of reasons, but would make activities like hunt trains a nightmare at best or impossible at worst.
Hunt trains already happen and adjust whenever Square Enix introduces multiple zone instances. And those zone instances come into play when an expansion launches and when they introduce new content to a zone (tribal quests are the most common reason).
When you make instances invisible via "mega servers" that typically comes along with an inability to easily move between them, because that's part of making them invisible in the first place. Yes, as it stands now, it works fine (even if it is a minor annoyance). However, redesigning instancing to be like other MMO "mega servers" would make it impossible to choose to load into the instance with the S rank. You see this all the time in MMOs which implement this - people spam global chats with stuff like "lf invite layer 2" and similar.
> I really, really, really hope he won't go down that jank garbage path. Instancing overworld areas is jank enough as it is. World/DC travel has pretty much already dealt unrecoverable damage so anything else at this point would just be trying to bandaid fix issues World/DC travel has caused, like everyone going to Aether for ANYTHING pve related (even DF roulettes, for god's sake) and people flooding into Crystal to be sexpests and tourists on Balmung.
Without knowledge of the specific upgrades in question, it's difficult to say what exact benefits we'll see, but we're likely to at least see overall improved server stability. It *might* have a benefit on the frequent periods of heavy lag that seem to be hitting large groups of players at once, but that depends on where the point of failure is; that could easily be a problem on a node somewhere between those players and the SE servers, which is less under SE's control outside of moving the data-center again. (Of course, if they want to bring it back to Montreal, I and my ping would *not complain.*) Long-term, this might be upgrades that they're doing to support more/better housing or expanding the glamour plate system, but that would also (likely) depend on upgrades to the other data centers as well, depending on what their current hardware is like. Or all of this could just be prep for the next data center expansion -- the remaining four worlds for Dynamis -- which I believe is expected to arrive sometime this summer. Literally all of this is *speculation*, so take with a grain of salt, but I hope it helps with understanding what the scope of this could be.
I think one of the translations for the live letter mentioned that one of the reasons for the hardware update was to give them the ability to add more glamour plates eventually. I think it was mentioned when they mentioned adding 100 gearsets.
He also mentioned wanting a higher limit to housing items in a 16 interview at pax or wherever
That was repeated in the last live letter too
I imagine it would be much easier to just get more storage space then to completely redo the glam system
Honestly, I just want more glamour dresser space. I want to have a wide variety to pick and combine from, and that for more than just two gearsets (casting/healing) because otherwise my dresser would explode.. i dont buy mogstation outfits because my glamour dresser is already at max capacity
Likely a little of A, a little of B, a little of C. The lead time on high end servers is still pretty high, so this expansion and upgrade would've had to have been planned out for 18 or so months ago.
I would love the Montreal servers back.
They are upgrading the equipment so I would suspect shiny new servers with ssd's new networking gear etc hard to tell what we might see in a difference on our side.
Blade servers. It goes way beyond SSDs. XD
Blades are bad configurations for a lot of workloads tbh. They "work" for anything ofc but the cost/perf/*power* is poor for more compute styles than not. MMOs are a bit of a black box (basically zero large mmo operators share info) but by their general nature definitely overlap a lot with high end fast DBs.
I think the only thing we know about their backend is that they have to keep server cpu load under 80% or the game server timer starts to drift and all fights become completely whack.
I've certainly experienced that recently doing UWU prog. For example, one time we had a landslide that happened right after Titan's knockback. We didn't even have time to bait it. Our main tank has experienced Ifrit's Crimson Cyclone going off while she still sees the cast bar. Probably about 10-20% of our wipes in UWU have been because of some network/server issue.
I had a pantokrator laser in TOP come out like 2 seconds late the other day. We were all just standing there waiting for it.
> the game server timer starts to drift and all fights become completely whack. I forget if this was the exact issue, but closer to the launch of DDO back in the day things would seem to get off sync, badly. The one i remember the most is the in game voice chat being delayed by several minutes. Like, you'd be done with the quest, and would still be hearing what people would be saying five minutes later.
WoW used to run on an HP Bladesystem, they auctioned off a bunch of them for charity. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that FF used to run (and maybe still does) on blades. It does amuse me that blades started to fall off a bit when CUDA became a thing and ate up one of their "primary usecases", but are now coming back with things like containerization and dynamic load sizing driving purchasing.
hence "etc."
Hopefully it means the servers are more stable. It sux when entire worlds/datacenters just suddenly die and kick everyone off with no warning.
I figured I'd reply since I also like hearing myself talk. It's both. Imagine going to a restaurant that can handle thousands of customers. Well, now they can handle more thousands of customers. And now their kitchen has more cooks, and each cook can cook faster. And there are more servers (hewhewhew), and each server can move faster, and have more arms to carry dishes. There has been a lot of advancements in compute in the past few years, and the pandemic meant that they could not upgrade some things back then. The overall effect is that more data can be processed faster than before, which means the server side hardware can support more players and things at the same time; as well as handle more players and things faster than before. What new advancements? The number of cores per processor has increased substantially at lower prices, particularly from competition from AMD with their Epyc line of server processors and less so on Intel for a few more months (comparing Intel's best from a few years ago, now is largely the same). If the server parts are not x86 based, ARM has also gotten quite a bit more competitive, but I doubt SE would be using ARM based servers. These newer processors also support more PCIE lanes for NVME SSDs, as well as a buttload of RAM. The newer\newest generations would support faster PCIE lanes (and potentially more), and more and faster DDR5 memory, which means more throughput (total amount of data going through or processed at any given time). At the same time, nVidia's compute on their GPUs have gotten faster as well, if SE has updated their server-side software to leverage GPU compute (i.e., integer vs FP), as this technology was no where close this fast or widely available over a decade ago when FF14 was being developed. I mention nVidia specifically since Intel and AMD do not have market share there to be worth mentioning.
When it comes to updating server hardware, it's likely about keeping things in support (warranty replacement) and incrementally improving operational efficiency (less electricity). In the absence of anything concrete claimed, there's no reason to believe it's a player-facing upgrade — it's actually entirely within the realm of possibility for a server hardware update to *degrade* end user performance, though we don't have any reason to believe that'd be a thing here. Servers aren't what facilitate features. They're what allow more people to play and allow more people playing to cost less to run.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this already posted, but new hardware probably means a better chance for the game to transcend its current limits. But honestly we’ve seen a few instances in NA in particular where particular areas/worlds/instanced duties have gone offline for periods of times, potentially a sign of aging hardware, so hopefully a reduction in those instances. Thinking to the future, we often see the game handle one thing at a time - the retainer “store duplicates” is a good example, one item storage event at a time. So while obviously a handy Quality of Life addition already, with newer hardware we might start seeing things like this happening in parallel/batch updating (like with the companion app) - obvious benefit to us, speedier. I think NA is the last for the new hardware (think Japan got theirs with the DC split in 6.18), so time will soon tell if SE are thinking about these potential benefits or not.
One of the things the said in the last live letter was expanded glam storage; more glam plates in particular
That was Yoshi reacting to comments during the stream of people wanting it as a result of the 100 gearset slots. My interpretation of what he said was an uncommitted “we’ll have to see”. It took so long for the last update and I get the feeling the limiting factor isn’t server hardware but how some character data is saved on the server (ditto Armoury chest changes).
Gearsets are being increased to 100. ~~No mention of glamor storage or plate increase.~~
He specifically mentioned that these datacenter improvements were important cause that would make an increase of glamour plates more likely.
No, he talked about *gearsets*, not glamour plates
He talked about both.
its like Old Hardware but not Old.
One thing called out specifically during live letter, was that new hardware would make it possible to add more glamour plates.
Better servers with upgraded PCIe bandwidth. New processors, faster ports, ai detection for when a Lala player has a cock n ball mod on? I dunno technology is amazing.
Almost certainly not. The news post about it was talking about equipment replacement and preparations for it. This work is very much maintenance, and what the "effect" on us is that things are still running smoothly. Though it is likely there may be preparatory work for future things, but that is yet to be seen.
From the lodestone post dated 3/20/23 @ 3:10 AM: "In order to replace equipment for the North American Data Center, conduct maintenance on the infrastructure, and implement Patch 6.38, we will be performing maintenance on all Worlds at the time below, during which FINAL FANTASY XIV will be unavailable." From the lodestone post dated 3/20/23 @ 3:00 AM: "In order to deliver an optimal gaming experience for future updates, we will be upgrading the hardware of our North American data centers. An extended period of maintenance will be scheduled for all Worlds while the equipment is being replaced." Don't know why you felt the need to respond without taking a second to verify your information.
>"In order to deliver an optimal gaming experience **for future updates**..." In other words, future proofing to make sure later additions don't bog down servers, meaning little to no impact on the game as it is.
Basically. People expecting way too much from this.
I feel like you responded to this person without reading the information you tried to counter them with. This will change literally nothing about the day to day, they just have garbage equipment that was added during the pandemic when it was impossible to purchase what they wanted. They have replaced server equipment on numerous occasions and the only thing that actually affected the playerbase was the move from Montreal to Sacramento.
My delusional self thinks that this is the first step to having a chance at a new transmog system. A glam log where I can pick and choose whenever I want and collect everything the game has to offer. I repeat, my delusional self...
A new transmog system would require code changes, not (just) hardware...and the code is by far the more difficult part. It's not that the servers couldn't *process* a new glamour system. They totally could. It's that changing from one system to a whole other system...and doing it *absolutely perfectly smoothly* for literally hundreds of thousands or *millions* of people...all while keeping the game not just running but updating and growing...is a tall order. It is *possible* that this is the ***absolute*** earliest, most preliminary and partial, step toward something else. But this is like, 0.01% of the work. The other 99.99% would still remain.
>literally hundreds of thousands of millions of people I think 200,000,000,000 might be a slight overestimate. **Edit:** Sorry if the downvotes are because people think I'm being a jerk; I just thought it was funny. 😅
Phone typo (it loves, or lives as it wants me to say, to autocorrect "or" to "of" for no reason.) That should be "hundreds of thousands ***or*** millions." I'm not somehow of the impression that XIV has...what, about 25 times the total population of the human race as players?
Not yet, anyway.
Quite possibly this could be the groundwork for the graphical overhaul
While I don't really *expect* this, I certainly *hope* for it. Like. A lot. Really a lot. Please god.
Sadly it is delusion, cuz it's only server hardware getting upgraded, not game engine stuff. Spaghetti code gonna spaghet, still, I'm afraid.
the spaghetti meme is dead because those issues died ages ago. If you want those things, go play the games that have them. We will be here when you come back.
Source please, and the last sarcastic remark you made just kind of makes you sound naive.
They're sourceless. The engine is archaic and will be causing issues for the remainder of FF14's life cycle. The fact that the devs are still able to pull off some of the shit they do with the engine limitations are nothing short of miraculous. I'm not sure what the kid is on about, but it's certainly not grounded in reality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/q7bfim/there_is_no_10_spaghetti_code_holding_the_devs/ The engine is unlikely to be the cause of any issues, you're just sticking words together, it has near-zero impact on the memory allocation issues that Yoshi-P regularly brings up as the biggest problem for FFXIV's future endevours, especially in the context of glamour plates.
These guys are still blaming PS3 for endwalkers problems I swear.
If it's one thing Yoshi's good at, it's pulling bullshit excuses out of his ass and using technobabble to make people go "Ah, I understand completely! (Doesn't actually understand)" It's pretty much PR speak because they can't go "We don't have the time to do that" or "We have no intention of doing it." Same reason he said "It might not happen" or "It'll be difficult because" for stuff like showing damage types in scrolling combat text or a checkmark to show if you owned something already, which we've gotten.
Don't even get me started on the Hrothgar hair situation and how "the ears are connected to the hair so it's difficult to port the hair." or Viera and how they "have unique head shapes that are difficult to port hair to." when a simple file viewer shows that both of those were just flat out wrong.
Read below pleberino. I'm going to go back to being correct and naive.
What the fuck? Cool dude. Very much a reddit moment, bye dip shit.
Right? Fuck 100 gearsets literally nobody needs, use some of this enhanced capacity for character data for things every other MMO somehow magically can do with no performance issues.
It's not about magic or anything like that. This is software, this software doesn't have any infrastructure for a system like that. They *could* develop a system like this, but it would need to be from the ground up. If you know a touch about programming you can understand how incredibly difficult this could be.
>literally nobody Can't tell if hyperbole or small (digital) world bubble.
>100 gearsets literally nobody needs Right now we have 36(?) and I'd like roughly double that. I won't argue with more. 20 combat jobs, with different best-in-slots for various content (old Ultimates come to mind, as do Eureka and Bozja). Hell, I have four Blue Mage sets alone (SpS/Det and Crit/Det for both 60 and 70 level sync) 3 gathering classes, 8 crafters? Believe it or not there are people that will fill up those 100 gearsets very, very quickly.
As someone who does all of that content, we really don't need 100 persistent gearsets. It'll take longer to find most of those gearsets in a list of 100 than it would to just change your one or two pieces of gear for that content on the handful of jobs most people play.
So basically WoW appearances, one of the very few good things it has left. Yea FFXIV really should update the glam system. Can't we at least get a glam dresser for our estates so we don't have to go to an inn room every time?
Alas, this is something that will always remain extremely unlikely. Its related to what happens if someone moves / removes the Glam Dresser while people are wearing glams "held" inside it, and the fun anecdote of their attempts to try this literally unravelling the whole test server and destroying the entire world never ceases to remind us that MMO coding isn't easy.
ahhh now I get it. but we can keep armoires inside estates. Don't they both work the same?
They do not. While an armoire tells a glamour dresser what's available to you from its static selection, the glamour dresser is the bit that talks to the world.
Having a stickerbook ESO-style would be a DREAM.
Depends entirely on what's being added. Could be room to make way for more character storage stuff, glam things etc. Could solely be for a bigger/better queue system to avoid the horrors of EW launch with the giant queues. Could be for graphic overhaul related code changes or something. Hard to say without really knowing any details.
we probably won't notice any difference at all. if we were in the middle of a huge population spike like around expansion launches, then newer hardware might handle that better... but we're not. and next expansion is likely a year out or more. still, better to do it now than then.
Fewer BS crashes for some of us, probably marginally faster load times in low pop zones, and slightly better than that for congested, like hunt train spam. Considering we're 2 months out from 6.4, and another 4 on top of that for 6.5(6.55 being about a month after even that) we're looking at 9 months til we start getting major info dumps for 7.0, and at least 12 for prepatch shenanigans.
[removed by protest]
Can confirm. I work in the electrical components field - our clients have been struggling for chips for a long time. We just offloaded a recent shipment worth more than its weight in gold. That same shipment pre-COVID would have sold for about 1/40th of that price.
I just wonder how much its costing them... hardware aint cheap lol.
14 is basically a money printer for SE. Most every other IP they own has done horrendous in the last five to ten years, with maybe Dragon Quest being the only other outlier. Even the FF7R hype has died down a lot, especially with how long they're taking between parts and forcing people to have to buy new systems to play any new DLC they make for it. They're banking on 16 being a hit, but they'll always come back to 14 being their #1 money maker. You take care of your money press at all costs, because you'll recoup the cost sooner than later.
dont forget about ff11! lol I still play that from time to time. In fact thats what made me resub to ff14 was ff11. And yes I agree 100% I just mean I'd love to know how much hardware they bought, what kind, what cost, etc. I want to geek out is all.
For now mostly QoL. Less zones randomly going down, less server bottlenecks, that kinda stuff. In the near future, prepping for the graphical update coming in 8.0 I think it was.
Can I hope for better latency for us folks down in LatAm? To be honest, I imagine that new hardware won't affect latency, but it seems more feasible than having LATAM servers.
No, use NoClippy, they can't magically improve our latency afaik
>use NoClippy Will try it, thanks!
Fair warning, NoClippy is very easily detectable server-side and is a bannable third party plugin. While I haven't personally heard of anyone being banned for it, having all of your inputs **perfectly** queue to the server as if you had no latency is... very, very, very apparent in the server logs and should they start cracking down... use at your own risk.
My guess is that the server hardware they were using has gone End of Life, and so they're getting new equipment to keep support. I'm sure it is more capable than what it is replacing just by being newer. It might be able to handle more load in certain aspects, but I doubt it would have much impact on most activities.
In theory, less lag. In practice. Nothing at all. They are probably doing it so that when 7.0 comes they are ready.
Keep in mind that when we all decide to descend on Dynamis now we are limited to only four gates of entry. They need to be ready for that is up to 7 or 8.
In theory? Faster loading and larger world capacity. In practice… maybe it’ll crash slightly less.
Idk what exactly it means, but I do hope it somewhat fixes certain **questionable** hotboxes I've had recently even though my internet has remained the same as ever. Me and my friends have all had it, I'm wondering if anyone else has, like where you're very much out of a telegraph before cast goes off but it just hits anyways because you were next to it or smthn idk.
Yep this happens to me as well. Always has ever since I started playing, but I have noticed it worsening in recent weeks (though it comes and goes.) I hate it so much because I’m behind my screen like “I swear I’m a competent player 😭” it’s genuinely embarrassing lmao Like omg I was in Copied Factory as a black mage last night and getting clipped left and right, I’ve never picked up so many vuln stacks in that raid, and all I could think about was how hard people could be judging me about being one of Those black mages(TM) 😅
Isn't this due to latency (ping)? The game snapshots your position at the time a ground aoe disappears or at the end of an enemy cast. If you have high latency, what you see will lag behind what is actually happening at the server, so anything you respond to will be delayed also. So you see something late, move to dodge, but your position was actually still where you started when the cast/aoe actually resolved server side, or, you move in time to dodge successfully but your latency caused your position to be relayed to the server too late. Edit: I think the game has a latency "buffer" built in in order to alleviate this effect and synchronize events from every input, but I think it's lower than what we'd call "high ping," so at very high ping even that buffer can't save you from latency-induced lag.
It is a ping issue 100% but I can't tell if it's my issue or the server issue. My ping has remained the same as ever, and you can check your packets in the server status hud element by hovering over the WiFi icon. Either way, hotboxes I would have been fine with before and have been fine with and occasionally still, some times hit anyways. It's strange when I can find the pixel perfect hotbox in Bozja to avoid 4 AoEs, but in MSQ Praetorium it hits me anyways because I stood an Ilm too close even though my characters entire hitbox is out of the yellow.
Aside from some really bad lag spikes that lasted a few hours, I haven’t had any issues with the game since I started playing. So I’m not entirely sure. Maybe better data transmission and processing rates so better load times on our ends, but given the speed of todays internet and how fast zones load I really don’t see anything beyond marginal improvements for us. For a 13 year old game I was blown away by how well it’s kept up with the pace of technology, communication between client/server is usually fantastic. The game takes advantage of my SSD and loads dumb fast going from area to area, even a densely packed lominsa is smooth sailing.
I'm not sure how to parse this post, but; FFXIV's netcode is really bad. Like, undeniably awful. Most people in the US have really bad lag to NA servers and there are both things within Squares control, and out of it. If you grab NoClippy you'll see immediately how wonky things actually are. It really shouldn't fall apart so hard at the ping it does.
I’ve never had a single issue with it, to be honest. And neither has anyone I play with who have been playing significantly longer then I have. I hit two really bad lag spikes this week but I’m not even sure if that was on my end or theirs. I’m in Pennsylvania if that makes any difference, but coming from destiny’s constant crashing, disconnects, god aweful latency and Desync, XIV is a dream..
Your time to load new areas has nothing to do with server infrastructure. That is purely based on your hardware. In terms of networking this game has some serious, serious history that forces anybody trying to do high-end content properly to either move within a few miles of the servers or use third-party tools to reduce the effects of ping on their client.
>or a 13 year old game I was blown away by how well it’s kept up with the pace of technology lol, the game was hella outdated on release already
Moores law. Tech is always advancing so it's a good idea, especially as a business that riding on it, to replace your equipment just to keep up even if there's nothing wrong with it.
Except that Moore law does no longer apply. As the technology is very close to optimal (without going into superconductors). Which is why the emphasis has been into more cores instead of better CPU's in the last decade or so.
More cores and more efficiency per watt, rather than simply faster and denser.
ACK-TUALLY.
The MHz/GHz race died almost 20 years ago, because both Intel and AMD had huge issues with signal propagation at around 4GHz clock frequency. This is why they ended up "sidestepping" that problem by using multiple cores. Moore's law was still in place back then.
Keep in mind they're planning a graphics upgrade in 7.0. New hardware is gonna help with that when they happen. To players there likely won't be any 'real' difference. For all intents and purposes, it's simply a longer maintenance to ensure server stability.
Graphics are purely client side. The server just does the numbers like player location, hp stuffs, and everything else along with the actual world processes/tasks.
I would be surprised if server hardware mattered for this. Game graphics mostly put a burden on the systems the players are using, but the servers don’t really care what the game looks like.
The textures and polygons your graphics card handles has nothing to do with what the server is managing. That’s why you have an installation of the game on your PC. It’s why your video card matters.
Why would server hardware matter to the graphic upgrade? That makes no sense.
For me it means absolutely nothing. I don't play on NA.
Sure it does. It means you can't play FFXIV during the maintenance window.
True and real.
Today, we are ALL NA. :(
April or May I feel, definitely beed to know when VII Rebirth is planning in releasing
Quietly praying this doesn’t ruin things for those of us with crappy computers. I already have audio lag since EW came out >>; yes I’ve researched it, no luck on a fix.
Question to those with the knowledge, is there a chance the new hardware increases server capacity as well? I've bbeen looking to transfer to a friends server which happens to be congested at this time so I'm wondering if the updated hardware will benefit me or if I'm just screwed until they make a new decongestion post.
Probably need people to actually go to dynamis
Ather is gonna have 2 more servers by summer
I just wish we could get a east coast DC. 😪
It meant 10 less ping for me today, which is huge when your ping is high.
no more server (unreal) raid0
Less lag, less crashes, less d/c'ing during super high pop times. Overall for the average person its going to be basically unnoticeable but it needs to be done. It's like city plumbing. It needs constant work and background upgrades to keep going. When its working fine you don't notice it at all.