Sales figures (Japan) for ARRFollow

After the server capacity upgrades, each world now holds 7500-7800. So 50 * 7,800 = 390,000 max. Plus, if you add the new servers, it would put them just over 400,000.

Edited, Sep 4th 2013 3:24pm by OnyxFFXI

Indeed, the question on everyones mind (other than will Kiera Knightly marry me) is did SE have access to the figures to expect almost 200,000 Japanese players? And no, Keira Knightly will not marry you, she wants to marry me :D I wish :(

I mean the new "worlds" that they added (ie Pandemonium) - In addition to adding capacity to the current worlds by adding servers. Each world is made of several servers which is why you will notice problems with only certain zones at times. Its because a specific server that controls that zone is having trouble, while the other servers are fine.


Edited, Sep 4th 2013 3:38pm by OnyxFFXI

Respectfully, I don't think so. Think of a server as an individual large computer. To increase server capacity would be like buying a bigger hard drive for the computer to hold more stuff. If you needed more space on your PC at home, you would not buy another computer and interlink them in some confounded way, you would instead just buy a bigger hard drive. Thats what they did to increase server capacity, just bought bigger hard drives for all the servers. And then they bought a three more servers with the same new capacity hard drive to each run a world. And I believe they bought another server to handle the duty finder load (those three are shared). I could be way off, but that is how I envision the process.

But that's all Japanese sales (doesn't include NA/EU) so you would expect the majority of those people to be trying to connect during JP prime time, then you get 1.0 users who didn't buy the PS3 version on top of that and that becomes a fair few Japanese players trying to log in during JP prime time.

They really should have had the details on their desk of how many PS3 clients had been sold/pre-ordered, my best guess is that the server infrastructure was finalised before P3 started, it takes a while for everything to get organised so they set it up for 50 servers and left that as the plan during P3 and P4 rather than push back the release date to put in more hardware etc.

although we don't know how there servers are set up, yes this can be possible. think of it like this:

1 server is for the gridania region, 1 fr ul'dah, 1 for limsa. Thats 3 servers controlling 1 world. I'm not saying this is how it is, but this is how it can be done.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/73680-Further-Details-on-Access-Restrictions

Were not saying they replaced the servers. They increased the capacity ( not hard drive capacity but population / concurrent connection limit) by adding more servers to the cluster. The way most MMO's work is that one realm or world cannot possibly be handled by one single server. So, they use clustered computing which makes several servers work together to run the services necessary to create the online experience.




From Yoshi-P: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/73680



Were so used to referring to worlds as servers that we tend to picture it as just one "black box" somewhere in a data center. But in reality, it is several racks of these black boxes. When WoW updated their servers recently, they auctioned off all the old server blades: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3710218

Edited, Sep 4th 2013 5:42pm by OnyxFFXI

This is the way all modern networks work. Distributed computing may not make sense to you, but it is how most large networks handle huge amounts of traffic. It INCREASE the efficiency to divide the tasks up between different servers because they all handle their tasks in parallel.

No, this is more confusion due to the use of the term "server" when he means "world". So the increased cap per world is 7500-7800.

It's similar to how we have multi-core processors and dual/triple channel memory.
One of the common metaphors is a highway. If you need to get more traffic through a highway, you don't make it longer or increase the speed limit, you add more lanes. This way if a car is broken down in a lane, or there is just someone really slowing it down, the rest of the traffic can still flow.

I'll post here something I said on the official forums...

"OB registrations mean nothing. Secret World attracted a ton of players for beta but that did not correlate to sales. What was it? One million beta registrations that led to somewhere around 200k sales at launch or shortly thereafter."

If you're really interested in network architecture, look up virtualization and load balancing.

I'm the lead architect for a very large ecommerce site, and the principle is the same as a game server. You have an endpoint ( we'll call it a world) which is a load balancer, and behind that you have 1-n number of servers. Your end point splits the processing load upon all the servers as evenly as possible. These aren't high end PC's, it's an entirely different world. As far as hard drives go, they probably aren't even attached to the servers directly, it'll be in something called a storage area network (SAN). Given the throughput that's the only way they could handle pushing that much data back to the storage medium that fast.

So what Yoshi is really doing (and I don't mean that in a disrespectful way to you) is dumbing it down so that non technical people can try to relate. In reality it's a very different setup than what most people are picturing. If you're interested in an example, look up blade servers. They run on the low end $3K each, and you fit 8 in a row, 6 rows in a rack. SE probably filled 20 extra racks with their servers to keep up with demand.

-j