Dev Tracker - Discussion

Should have just left it. These overpopulation problems of Asura didnt affect any other server. I wasnt affected on my small pop server. Any Asuran affected by the issues of overpopulation had the ability to go to another server at any time. Every Asuran that stayed on Asura accepted congestion as a consequence of being the heaviest populated server.

Instead SE decided to try to fix an optional problem that affected one server, and now the problem is affecting at minimum two servers.

XI has a bare minimum dev team now, Yohi-P simply will not give them enough staff to run the game properly. They are trying to spread the players out more because the game isn't designed to be the way it is, given how few staff they have this is the best you're gonna get. Close servers off from new players that fill up, and hope they move along to the next one. They will close Odin in the next few months I would guess too.

I wonder if their move to cloud instead of bare metal is causing a spike in operational costs when server populations exceed a certain amount.

It seems possible the servers would have a sortof baseline resource utilization that would scale up to a certain point and not dramatically increase resource utilization, but after a certain number of users begin to progressively increase. So spreading the user base out reduces this cost increase.

It just seems strange for them to all of a sudden care unless it was tied to money when the user experience problems go back a long time.

I don't recall a time when Asura was as high as it was immediately before the lockdown. Obviously, only highest matters much here.

Sortie participation is probably at the highest it's been on Asura, since it's a difficult piece of content and people gradually approach the ability to do it while those doing it don't really cap out. It's also an hour long, and you pretty much don't finish early.

The worst I can recall instances performing was during delve era all the way back in 2014. I suspect a large part of the reason we haven't gotten more substantial 18-man content is because of the problems there. Obviously, the amount of data sent goes up exponentially in a larger group since each player needs each other player's actions and position/health changes. Has there been any 18-man instanced content since delve and incursion?

Virtualization always has an overhead, so certainly a valid theory. But, it's not like the server never ran up against these problems before. I wouldn't have too hard a time believing that they avoided it this long by just avoiding the most demanding types of content (alliances in instances).

While their code is almost certainly garbage, cost should not even remotely approach the PR cost of moves like this. It's not like they're running render farms or big data. By my interpretation, any added users' sub fees far outweigh any cost if that was the only concern.

I firmly believe they left it as long as they could and it became apparent that they were approaching a threshold where play quality or stability would degrade substantially in some way. If the random disconnects on Asura are related to load, it's possible adding more players would exponentially increase them.

Vagary (not sure if this was before or after Incursion)
Dynamis
Omen

Dynamis is a good example, but we did see the same performance issues there in large groups [even outside Asura]. It also has a very long cooldown and 4 zones to reduce overlap.

Vagary and Omen didn't have the same incredibly high load, because you pretty much never had 6+ active full-haste melee wailing on a target like Delve or Dynamis (if you did, it died in seconds).

I think they should really *** with us and give us not only 18 man content again but give it with a three flavor restriction

Have to beat all three wings or something to challenge the mega boss
1st wing three types of close range damage slashing piercing blunt
2nd wing magic only
3rd ranged only

Mega boss staged version of all three

Force some annoyed job diversity on us

I have a feeling that server transfers are 99% used by RMTs and 1% by few hardcore players that server hop for supplies, and that actual players, including returners, don't really care as they just play with their friends that are all on the same server, while new players are mostly happy to just land anywhere and they'll find a group later eventually. SE probably has better metrics than we do if this was their choice. The general outrage of the playerbase is very likely not as big as we think it is.

Maybe this was SE's way to *** what could be the RMT population /shrug

For the most part, transfers are to accomplish rmt goals specifically without resorting to rmt.

You jump with goods to sell at a higher profit and bring back the stuff you can't get. You pay money to make more gil. Just rmt with extra steps.

Often enough used to simply go to the biggest server. I know personally of probably 200 that jumped to asura because their server was too small and they "couldn't" find a group. (they ALL quit after because the problem isn't your server, it's you... but they often don't listen)

It's just the game mimicing real life. Everyone hops on the metaphorical bus to LA to be a movie star.

I would love to see how many transfers do actually happen in a month/year etc. You can see posts of thousands of people over the years jumping to play on asura.

Odin is the high Japanese population server, right? So now they're playing a more dangerous game with the community that the devs traditionally actually tend to listen to more? Innnnnnteresting.


Stay the f away from Phoenix, everyone! You really don't want to come play with me.

I always wondered what % of the server transfers are for name-change purposes only. I imagine it's small, but they could add this as a paid feature without the rigamarole of server hops and creating alts to force name collisions.


I've said it before, Phoenix is a hellhole, don't come here.

I said this earlier, i dont think RMT will get as much of a strangle hold on Odin because SE is more keen on listening to JP feedback.

In order to better equalize populations across all servers, you have to give players a reason. If the developers hope that by closing servers it will magically fix the issue, they are shortsighted.

As soon as they open Asura again, many will flood back to it. The appeal of going back to what was a closed server will be massive. Same for Bahamut. Odin will likely follow.

I say this as someone on a smaller server. There is no motivation for people to jump to a small server unless they know a group is waiting to help them and suits their times. There are minimal merc services, so gilbuyers won't have a reason to move away. Same for endgame groups. You'd rather be on a server where there's choice and you can try them out until you find the right ones.

All this does is shift the issue. If SE wants to fix things, they have to address the gil buying and merc culture, along with finding ways to give incentive to players to join servers designated "small". They won't do this, because it means putting in some time and effort. Also, they don't want to scare off RMT because they make money from them.

Granted it wouldn't combat the merc culture, but if SE themselves just sold gil, I wonder how much money they'd make compared to the RMT. Though at this stage of the game I have zero idea how much gil is worth. Was thinking way way back to when Abyssea was shiny and new and the constant flood of Fen prefix names (I assume it was first 3 letters followed by gibberish on every server) spamming to sell gil for between $22 - $27 per mill. Right then SE shoulda/coulda been like *lightbulb* "Hey, let's add a gil buying feature on the SE Acct site. You can click the character's name and how much to add

They should just rip the bandaid off and sell K-Clubs for $300.

Player equalization across worlds is about as unrealistic as people assuming responsibility and turning off all of their mules and multibox so other people can play. SE is just patching the hole so the ship doesn't take in more water. We're not yet to the point that we need to throw people overboard so the boat doesn't capsize.


Panic when you see the announcement reviving Tetra Master so players have something to do while waiting in POL login queues, so they can then wait another hour in content queues...

I really enjoyed the game Queen's Blood!

Dunno about k.club but I do wish they'd experiment a bit more with ways to allow us to give them money for FFXI-related goods/services. Most r/e login point items should be fine in a cash shop, for instance. Special gold color palette versions of weapons/armor/mounts/furnishings, etc. Gold-trim unity shirts. If they wanna get fancy they can sell various kupons.

Hell, they could sell a more expensive "sustainer" subscription level and give those folks a fancy in-game nameplate badge.

They've got a bunch of low-effort options available to them.

Edit: they'd print money if they sold shadow lord head as a mount.

Don't worry, you can have chatgpt talk to you so you don't feel alone.

What is that Lakshmi? Cerberus?

At like super off peak hours? Still rough

There's actually a few furnishings they've never given us:

1) Magic Tome Set (not obtainable ever)
2) Blackhorn (not obtainable ever) --1st in the Pankration tournament.
3) Striplehorn (not obtainable ever) --2nd in the Pankration tournament.
4) Whitehorn (not obtainable ever) --3rd in the Pankration tournament.
5) Campfire (not obtainable ever)
6) Flowerpot (not obtainable ever)
7) Blacksmith Plaque (not obtainable ever)
8) Urn (not obtainable ever)
9) Gold Bed (not obtainable ever--save for a glitch in 2005)
10) Varistor Banner (never obtainable ever; no longer in the .DATs?)

Some of those MIGHT have been reused as something else but I can only find so much info on them. There's a bunch other that were either given away during random social media events. Of course there's still a few from Rank 1 & 3 Mog Bonanza (looking at you, Judgement Day).

These and other cosmetic items are about as low hanging fruit as SE can get. Luckily, they seem to have been doing a better job giving some of them out every month.

I'll have you know that Cerberus has a whole 305 accounts logged in right now, thank you. That's not our peak but it's pretty typical.