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Tagged for wall of text and big imageNamely, the "World Selection" thingy at the character creation screen when you first make a character.



This screen is hugely inadequate and gives absolutely zero information.

Let's go back in time a bit to 2014, when Balmung was closed except for 2 AM character creation windows and transfers.

You're a new player, perhaps even a roleplayer, and you want to play on a relatively large and active server.

From this window alone, how do you know what server to pick to best suit what you want?

And the answer is you don't. You have absolutely no information as to a server's population or what kind of community it might have. World of Warcraft has "PVE", "PVP", "RP", "RP-PVP" labels on it, and very rough population indicators of "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Full".

And if you scroll down, you'll notice Balmung and Gilgamesh are closed to character creation, because they're full. You're bummed out because those servers definitely have the largest and therefore most active communities, but you can't get on there. No other indication exists as to whether a server has what a player wants, but Balmung and Gilgamesh have so many active people that they're full! So if I want to play on the largest community, I'd have to play on Balmung or Gilgamesh!

And then along the line, you hear that Balmung and Gilgamesh are open to transfers. So of course, since you want to play on an active community, you transfer.

Anyway, my point with all of this is that in addition to a new RP server, the World Selection screen needs better information so players have an idea of what they're getting when they're going to that world. Perhaps not total population because that's imprecise, but something like "Average Active Connections" or something.

Will that stop people from gravitating towards the largest servers and most active communities? Well, no. The only way to stop that is with something like the Balmung transfer restriction.

But people would be willing to play on other servers if there was some indication or guarantee that the server wasn't a ghost town. If Balmung is closed because it has 25k active connections at a given time, then a new player would be more inclined to play on a lesser populated server if they have a rough idea of what that population is. They might want to be on Balmung, but hey, Exodus has, say, 15k active connections! That's not as large, but it's still pretty large, so I will still have an active community! Or Cactaur has 12k active connections, that's still a LOT of people!

But still, the fact that players--especially new players--have to rely on stuff like unofficial censuses based on Lodestone sweeps is just a tiny bit ridiculous.

(06-28-2017, 11:32 AM)Val Wrote: While I get what they're trying to do, I don't think forcing everyone to log out once a day is going to help. For example, say they do it at... 6PM.

People that work will stay logged in and still back it up until 6PM. People that don't will try to log in and get a 1-2 hour queue, be able to play for an hour, then be forced back into another 1-2 hour queue. Others that already stayed logged in using the workaround will already be able to play when they get home.

What they need to do is remove whatever restriction is keeping the forced logout from working. I can't imagine it's an entirely difficult fix? I'm not sure how it's coded for them but it should be a fairly simple work around. ....Unless it isn't, and it's SE so it may not be. I can't imagine this is going to work out unless they do it in the middle of the day to force log out the people that go to work or whatever, and even then queues aren't awful at that point. They're bad at prime time, but it'll be screwing over people trying to legitimately get in at prime time.

(06-28-2017, 11:37 AM)Kage Wrote: It's probably a client-side based force and I'm not sure how well you can do work around it. Because your client is engaged, it gets the error and can't boot.

(06-28-2017, 12:28 PM)Gegenji Wrote: Also, I've been thinking. What will this mass-logoff actually accomplish?

If it's announced and the people are anywhere near or around where they can log back in... that just means there's going to be a "new wards added"-esque stampede as soon as the servers go live again. So there's likely to be just as huge of a queue then as everyone tries to flood their way in.

Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who loads up the connection fast enough to get in... but how long before it's back to being stuffed to capacity again?

(06-28-2017, 01:03 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: * Unnamed Mercenary swoops in with ideas and speculation

Booting off all the players for a world is a smart idea to get rid of people abusing the AFK timer. This is the laziest possible way they could have gone about doing it.

Seeing how the population issues aren't hurting the datacenter as a whole but specific worlds, refactoring the current worlds into different datacenters wouldn't solve the queueing issue at all. It could help with those pesky "reserving instance" issues if SE added a new datacenter to NA without removing any servers from the current ones, then balanced all three (or more) so that the average active populations were all about the same. (So split Balmung and Gilgamesh from being on the same DC. Sprinkle in the lower-populated worlds around. ...does Primal DC even have issues?!?!?!)

Again. We don't need more worlds. NA has plenty of low-population ones. Adding mroe worlds is just more stress on the Lobby server if they aren't on a different Datacenter, which means a different Lobby server.

NOW! Here's what they could have done to make this a whole lot less painful while also getting all the AFKers just as easily.

Go zone by zone and restart them individually. Do the same hour-warning. Do it again 15 minutes before. 10. 5. 1. Then boot anyone in that zone off. Then move on to the next zone. And the next. Restart the housing ward zones and their instances. Don't. Touch. Duty Finder. Instances. Those are clearly active players. (Now, this actually poses an issue because when you queue into an instance, you're still technically considered to be playing on whatever zone you were on previously. That how the server knows where to put you back. Yes, it's kinda stored in the database too, but that would make it S L O W if it had to retrive that kinda data every time someone left a duty. Bad idea.)

(06-28-2017, 01:09 PM)Lydia Lightfoot Wrote: ...or they could just make it so the existing afk-logout ignores player status (crafting, etc) and ignores repetitive keystrokes (so people can't just weigh down arrow keys and run in circles to avoid the logout). I mean your idea has merit too, but it seems better to just implement "no seriously, we mean it, AFK means AFK".

(06-28-2017, 01:03 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: * Unnamed Mercenary swoops in with ideas and speculation

Booting off all the players for a world is a smart idea to get rid of people abusing the AFK timer. This is the laziest possible way they could have gone about doing it.

Seeing how the population issues aren't hurting the datacenter as a whole but specific worlds, refactoring the current worlds into different datacenters wouldn't solve the queueing issue at all. It could help with those pesky "reserving instance" issues if SE added a new datacenter to NA without removing any servers from the current ones, then balanced all three (or more) so that the average active populations were all about the same. (So split Balmung and Gilgamesh from being on the same DC. Sprinkle in the lower-populated worlds around. ...does Primal DC even have issues?!?!?!)

Again. We don't need more worlds. NA has plenty of low-population ones. Adding mroe worlds is just more stress on the Lobby server if they aren't on a different Datacenter, which means a different Lobby server.

NOW! Here's what they could have done to make this a whole lot less painful while also getting all the AFKers just as easily.

Go zone by zone and restart them individually. Do the same hour-warning. Do it again 15 minutes before. 10. 5. 1. Then boot anyone in that zone off. Then move on to the next zone. And the next. Restart the housing ward zones and their instances. Don't. Touch. Duty Finder. Instances. Those are clearly active players. (Now, this actually poses an issue because when you queue into an instance, you're still technically considered to be playing on whatever zone you were on previously. That how the server knows where to put you back. Yes, it's kinda stored in the database too, but that would make it S L O W if it had to retrive that kinda data every time someone left a duty. Bad idea.)

edit: Where the fuck did we assume this is gonne be client-based? (THe idle AFK timer is, but that's not what they're using here). There's no reason for it to be client-based. They're gonna shut down the server for 10 minutes which will kick everyone off no matter what they're doing, including the Lobby server, so you can't get booted back to the character select screen. By then, your session will have expired on the login side of things so you can't sit on the start game screen unless you pick a different data center. (And let's just hope they aren't rebooting them all at the same time because that would also be really dumb)

(06-28-2017, 08:27 AM)Virella Wrote:

(06-28-2017, 08:21 AM)Kage Wrote: If I remember correctly, Balmung and Omega are the ones with these abnormal queues.

Not really, my friends from Cerberus have been 2k queues as well and taking 2 hours to log in.

(06-28-2017, 02:04 PM)AquiziTC Wrote: Looks like today's (and possibly all future occurrences of this) will be happening at Noon PDT.