Do these servers really only carry 2000 players at a time?
Good God, no. They carry much, much more than 2000 players at a time. The 2000 number you're hearing are just the online ones I saw. I'm pretty sure even more players could log in if they wanted to: do there's no cap on login, only a manually enabled cap on character creation when the adminstrators are seeing the level of players ios getting a bit too high for their liking.
On top of that, as I explained in my (greadly modified) last message, the 2000 players online you might see proably reflect somewhere around 5% of the actual players on that server when you consider all the reasons a player might not be online right now. In addition, FFXIV servers have peak hours for most of the hours of the day, to get an idea for how their login peaks are likely to look, check out the last Vana'diel Census for FFXI (which does servers similarly).
Also bear in mind that right now all the players a currently heavily saturated near the starting areas. When you get down to the brass tacks of Internet communication, it looks something like this:
1 player = 1 kb/sec (only an example of an average data output, not actual) outgoing to server, when they move. Since they're alone, there's no incoming traffic.
2 players = 4 kb/sec, 1 kb/sec outgoing to server, 1 kb/sec going to each player, 2 players.
3 players = 9kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 2 kb/sec incoming (one for each one of the other nearby players)
4 players = 16kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 3 kb/sec incoming (one for each one of the other nearby players)
5 players = 25kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 4 kb/sec incoming (one for each of hte nearby players)
And so on.
Basically, what you have here is an expontential increase of data tied to the number of players. Thus, when you walk into Camp Bentbranch and 250 players are sitting around doing various things, that's 62.5mb/sec and that's pretty much impossible to pull off by most people's internet connection. The server itself is doing a lot more work than each individual player, in order to facilitate 62.5 mb/sec to between each of those 250 players, you're looking at ~15.6GB/sec of data exchange - if such an Internet connection exists, even for a server farm, it'd lkely put them out of business from the bandwidth costs.
Consequently, what happens is that there's various algorythms that cap the number of nearby players you'll get updates from, but even these algorythms cause some overhead (as you have to calculate who, out of the 250 players in the camp, belong on the list of ones you can currently see before you hit your cap). Fortunately, this is usually much reduced because chances are as soon as a player has walked a certain distance from you the server stops updating you about what they're doing. This is why distance between players makes a big difference, why we're going to see a lot more lag while everybody's hitting up the 3 camps outside of the major cities than later on when they're scattered more evenly across the game.
Games which use a lot of heavy instancing (e.g. Champions Online) can merge all the servers because, at most, you're only going to have ~100 players per zone anyway. However, this can have a major impact on the immersion that the FFXIV-style model does not, because you know that for all players involved on your server there's only one copy of that map. (With the exception of story instances, but those are rare exceptions versus the greater body of the game world.)
Ok seriously, I totally thought I was going to fail my first botany leve because of lag. It took forever just to swing the hatchet each time. I got it done with less than 5 minutes to go on the timer. On the plus side, I like seeing so many people. XDD
The game needs more optimization. That is a fact. Just because YOU can run the game fine doesnt mean that everyone who should be able to can. If YOU can run the game with little to no lag (staying above 30-40FPS the majority of the time) on maximun settings and resolution, then SOMEONE with a BETTER computer than you, and who can run any other game on high-max settings with no lag should be able to run FFXIV as well as you if not better. However, with my personal experience and reading dozens of posts about enthusiast computers having poor performance, we can conclude that the game is not well opitimized, but hopefully this will improve shortly over time.
Second...
I would like it if people would stop defending poor and lazy developer design choices by calling them unique, hardcore, not carebare or WOW-clone like. This mostly pertains to the UI and menus, escecially considering you have to pay a monthly fee for this game. For example, when I go bowling or something, do I have to setup the pins every time or run and get the ball back? No. You are paying to play, thats why there are coneniences that do that for you, so you can spend less time working, and more time actually playing/enjoying the game. Thats what a game is for. ENJOYMENT. I work and take college classes. WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I WANT TO WORK ON MY FREE TIME OR WHILE PLAYING A GAME? For those of you that like working in your games, do you even have a life outside sitting on your ass playing ffxiv?
Most of the complaints I see about the game are people who have never played a Final Fantasy game, or are expecting an MMO in the more usual vein. I'm not going to say it's more "hardcore" or anything, but ALL Final Fantasy games have menu based combat and actions. You never directly control your character in a Final Fantasy game, you always interact with the world through a series of menus and windows... You shouldn't expect anything else from this. If you dislike it, that's fine - most MMO's are moving in the opposite direction and making more action-influenced mechanics, taking cues from FPS games, etc. Not the case with Final Fantasy games. No jumping, sprinting, or really targeting to speak of.
That said.. I was expecting all of this. The only thing that really bugs me about the game is optimization, and I'm a bit worried that the storylines will fade out after the initial quests. There is a steep learning curve. All Final Fantasy games have that, too.
The game needs more optimization. That is a fact. Just because YOU can run the game fine doesnt mean that everyone who should be able to can. If YOU can run the game with little to no lag (staying above 30-40FPS the majority of the time) on maximun settings and resolution, then SOMEONE with a BETTER computer than you, and who can run any other game on high-max settings with no lag should be able to run FFXIV as well as you if not better. However, with my personal experience and reading dozens of posts about enthusiast computers having poor performance, we can conclude that the game is not well opitimized, but hopefully this will improve shortly over time.
Second...
I would like it if people would stop defending poor and lazy developer design choices by calling them unique, hardcore, not carebare or WOW-clone like. This mostly pertains to the UI and menus, escecially considering you have to pay a monthly fee for this game. For example, when I go bowling or something, do I have to setup the pins every time or run and get the ball back? No. You are paying to play, thats why there are coneniences that do that for you, so you can spend less time working, and more time actually playing/enjoying the game. Thats what a game is for. ENJOYMENT. I work and take college classes. WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I WANT TO WORK ON MY FREE TIME OR WHILE PLAYING A GAME? For those of you that like working in your games, do you even have a life outside sitting on your ass playing ffxiv?
ya...thats all for now.
I'm married, work and run/workout everyday and I have no problem with "working" in my games when it comes to MMO's, if I have to work towards an end I typically appreciate it more when I accomplish the task. I don't want to reach "endgame" any time soon, hell I don't care if I never hit endgame as long as i'm enjoying what i'm doing.
Everybody has different things they enjoy, this is not an instant gratification game as far as I can tell so it won't appeal to everyone. If you like it play it, if you don't.... don't.
like whats already been stated, the thread point is now moot... I've already cleared up my concerns with the game, and am still playing it every now and then to see how it ends up.
My OP was merely just a representation of what a newcomer is to expect when first entering the game... And the type of frustration you can encounter. Getting past the initial frustration stages, I've levelled myself to 10, but the game still seems rather dull to me, and perhaps it infact isn't for me.
There are people who enjoy chopped liver and spam. Someone buys those pickled cow tongues and pig brains they sell at the grocery stores. People eat chitlin but I guarantee you can't order it at any 4 or 5 star restaurant in the US. If we start saying that a bad game isn't bad because it's all a matter of taste then you can throw out all subjective critiques, be it movie,music, book or game reviews. A bad game is a bad game in the same way that the movie Show Girls will never be held aloft like Citizen Kane. Before you even factor in things like storyline or art direction, you are left with bad programming and lucky for us, the former two can be,and should be critiqued. Your post serves to provide a critique that potential future players can read before they plop down their money, the more the merrier.
I was going to stay out of this, but you had to cross the line and dis Chitlins. That is just wrong. I don't approve.
Not that I expect anyone to care, I am loving the game - Looks like a movie on my GTX460
I never played the beta, so this is just the experience of a fresh player... Ok
never playing FFXI, but playing the single player console games a kid. Alright
hardware cursor has been implemented, although i have a gamepad, and both work pretty well for the interface at hand... So you tested both mouse and controller right away?
Mouse lag is gone for good How can you compare, since you never played beta?
but the other issues with the interface are still there- Again, are you comparing this with reviews? Or did you play the Beta?
i logged into the game with my first character, a puligist, which i believed was the only duel weilding damage dealing class. I didnt exactly know what my role was, or what any of the statistics mean. the manual which came with the retail copy of the game just babbles on about installing the game and setting up a subscription. Considering you must have read a ton of reviews to know about interface/mouse issues etc, shouldn't a Puglisit's role be common knowledge to you by now?
the first cutscene and getting introduced to the very first characters of my story was quite enjoyable. Although, once i took control of my character, i realised the game was rather choppy and it was very clear it was in a low resolution and no AA was enabled.... which was kind of strange, because when i logged out and switched it to a higher resolution, and fiddled around with some graphics, i was able to make it run -rather- smooth... i say rather because the game is still very laggy and not nearly as smooth as alot of other mmorpgs out today. I'm not having any problems, and I didn't have any problems in Beta. I have a fairly decent machine, old video card, but the game runs great on "high, no aa, standard shadow" - fully smooth. But that's besides the point, you are comparing it with "other mmorpgs out today." Name me one mainstream MMO that had a completely smooth release? You're playing Age of Conan, the release for the game was terribad.
So, after i did this for another hour, watching my toon skip across the screen at 20 frames per second, listening to that sweet, but annoying final fantasy music... i decided to logout, write this post, and reload age of conan.
I'd like to eventually figure out what I'm supposed to do, but the lagging and loading times are making it unbearable... which is killing me, because the graphics are sub-par at best... and i play AoC on max settings lol.
Does anyone else not smell the troll? - Tell me, when did you try out the mouse and keyboard, during character creation? Or during your 20 minutes of game time, where you completed no quests or leves...
I never played the beta, so this is just the experience of a fresh player... Ok
never playing FFXI, but playing the single player console games a kid. Alright
hardware cursor has been implemented, although i have a gamepad, and both work pretty well for the interface at hand... So you tested both mouse and controller right away? yes
Mouse lag is gone for good How can you compare, since you never played beta? I've read snippets of complaints in forums.
but the other issues with the interface are still there- Again, are you comparing this with reviews? Or did you play the Beta? read above ^ i read a little bit of the gossip going on in the forums... interface issues were the major concern- hence why i bought a gamepad aswell.
i logged into the game with my first character, a puligist, which i believed was the only duel weilding damage dealing class. I didnt exactly know what my role was, or what any of the statistics mean. the manual which came with the retail copy of the game just babbles on about installing the game and setting up a subscription. Considering you must have read a ton of reviews to know about interface/mouse issues etc, shouldn't a Puglisit's role be common knowledge to you by now? as above.. only small peices... i wanted to go into the game with as little knowledge as possible, not basing my first impressions of the game on what others have said.
the first cutscene and getting introduced to the very first characters of my story was quite enjoyable. Although, once i took control of my character, i realised the game was rather choppy and it was very clear it was in a low resolution and no AA was enabled.... which was kind of strange, because when i logged out and switched it to a higher resolution, and fiddled around with some graphics, i was able to make it run -rather- smooth... i say rather because the game is still very laggy and not nearly as smooth as alot of other mmorpgs out today. I'm not having any problems, and I didn't have any problems in Beta. I have a fairly decent machine, old video card, but the game runs great on "high, no aa, standard shadow" - fully smooth. But that's besides the point, you are comparing it with "other mmorpgs out today." Name me one mainstream MMO that had a completely smooth release? You're playing Age of Conan, the release for the game was terribad. Youre talking about optimization and release stability here... 2 different things. AoC ran almost flawlessly on my machine, but ofcourse there were alot of crashes, and i so far commend FFXIV on a stable server considering the heavy load.
So, after i did this for another hour, watching my toon skip across the screen at 20 frames per second, listening to that sweet, but annoying final fantasy music... i decided to logout, write this post, and reload age of conan.
I'd like to eventually figure out what I'm supposed to do, but the lagging and loading times are making it unbearable... which is killing me, because the graphics are sub-par at best... and i play AoC on max settings lol.
Does anyone else not smell the troll? - Tell me, when did you try out the mouse and keyboard, during character creation? Or during your 20 minutes of game time, where you completed no quests or leves...
I've already cleared up your concerns with the proceeding posts ive made. It's not a troll post, just a genuine first hand experience of the game.
I'm actually still playing the game, and actually growing to like the feeling of playing in final fantasy world because i enjoyed the console versions... which is what this game feels like so far. Its definately not something I'd play on the PC.
My first impressions of live are that the posters who post negatively or trollish are still saying the same thing they were throughout beta. There is such a thing as feeling you are not being heard, so you repeat it a little louder, and repeat louder and repeat. Until you feel satisfied someone heard you.
Comments
Good God, no. They carry much, much more than 2000 players at a time. The 2000 number you're hearing are just the online ones I saw. I'm pretty sure even more players could log in if they wanted to: do there's no cap on login, only a manually enabled cap on character creation when the adminstrators are seeing the level of players ios getting a bit too high for their liking.
On top of that, as I explained in my (greadly modified) last message, the 2000 players online you might see proably reflect somewhere around 5% of the actual players on that server when you consider all the reasons a player might not be online right now. In addition, FFXIV servers have peak hours for most of the hours of the day, to get an idea for how their login peaks are likely to look, check out the last Vana'diel Census for FFXI (which does servers similarly).
They handle at least 2400, Gyshal was at that earlier when I logged in and there was no queue. It was laggy in the starter zones though.
Also bear in mind that right now all the players a currently heavily saturated near the starting areas. When you get down to the brass tacks of Internet communication, it looks something like this:
1 player = 1 kb/sec (only an example of an average data output, not actual) outgoing to server, when they move. Since they're alone, there's no incoming traffic.
2 players = 4 kb/sec, 1 kb/sec outgoing to server, 1 kb/sec going to each player, 2 players.
3 players = 9kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 2 kb/sec incoming (one for each one of the other nearby players)
4 players = 16kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 3 kb/sec incoming (one for each one of the other nearby players)
5 players = 25kb/sec, each has 1 kb/sec outgoing, each has 4 kb/sec incoming (one for each of hte nearby players)
And so on.
Basically, what you have here is an expontential increase of data tied to the number of players. Thus, when you walk into Camp Bentbranch and 250 players are sitting around doing various things, that's 62.5mb/sec and that's pretty much impossible to pull off by most people's internet connection. The server itself is doing a lot more work than each individual player, in order to facilitate 62.5 mb/sec to between each of those 250 players, you're looking at ~15.6GB/sec of data exchange - if such an Internet connection exists, even for a server farm, it'd lkely put them out of business from the bandwidth costs.
Consequently, what happens is that there's various algorythms that cap the number of nearby players you'll get updates from, but even these algorythms cause some overhead (as you have to calculate who, out of the 250 players in the camp, belong on the list of ones you can currently see before you hit your cap). Fortunately, this is usually much reduced because chances are as soon as a player has walked a certain distance from you the server stops updating you about what they're doing. This is why distance between players makes a big difference, why we're going to see a lot more lag while everybody's hitting up the 3 camps outside of the major cities than later on when they're scattered more evenly across the game.
Games which use a lot of heavy instancing (e.g. Champions Online) can merge all the servers because, at most, you're only going to have ~100 players per zone anyway. However, this can have a major impact on the immersion that the FFXIV-style model does not, because you know that for all players involved on your server there's only one copy of that map. (With the exception of story instances, but those are rare exceptions versus the greater body of the game world.)
In the end, it looks like they are handling the release correctly.
Multiple starting areas.
Head start.
Stopping people from creating characters on servers when levels get too high.
It'll help them control some of the spike that comes with launching an MMO.
Yay for the hardware mouse!
Ok seriously, I totally thought I was going to fail my first botany leve because of lag. It took forever just to swing the hatchet each time. I got it done with less than 5 minutes to go on the timer. On the plus side, I like seeing so many people. XDD
pie.
Ok First..
The game needs more optimization. That is a fact. Just because YOU can run the game fine doesnt mean that everyone who should be able to can. If YOU can run the game with little to no lag (staying above 30-40FPS the majority of the time) on maximun settings and resolution, then SOMEONE with a BETTER computer than you, and who can run any other game on high-max settings with no lag should be able to run FFXIV as well as you if not better. However, with my personal experience and reading dozens of posts about enthusiast computers having poor performance, we can conclude that the game is not well opitimized, but hopefully this will improve shortly over time.
Second...
I would like it if people would stop defending poor and lazy developer design choices by calling them unique, hardcore, not carebare or WOW-clone like. This mostly pertains to the UI and menus, escecially considering you have to pay a monthly fee for this game. For example, when I go bowling or something, do I have to setup the pins every time or run and get the ball back? No. You are paying to play, thats why there are coneniences that do that for you, so you can spend less time working, and more time actually playing/enjoying the game. Thats what a game is for. ENJOYMENT. I work and take college classes. WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I WANT TO WORK ON MY FREE TIME OR WHILE PLAYING A GAME? For those of you that like working in your games, do you even have a life outside sitting on your ass playing ffxiv?
ya...thats all for now.
MMOs Played: FFXI,Age of Conan, Aion, Rift, SWTOR, TERA, TSW, GW2
Playing:None
Waiting For: Wildstar, The Repopulation, Archeage, TESO, Warhammer 40K:EC, EQN
Most of the complaints I see about the game are people who have never played a Final Fantasy game, or are expecting an MMO in the more usual vein. I'm not going to say it's more "hardcore" or anything, but ALL Final Fantasy games have menu based combat and actions. You never directly control your character in a Final Fantasy game, you always interact with the world through a series of menus and windows... You shouldn't expect anything else from this. If you dislike it, that's fine - most MMO's are moving in the opposite direction and making more action-influenced mechanics, taking cues from FPS games, etc. Not the case with Final Fantasy games. No jumping, sprinting, or really targeting to speak of.
That said.. I was expecting all of this. The only thing that really bugs me about the game is optimization, and I'm a bit worried that the storylines will fade out after the initial quests. There is a steep learning curve. All Final Fantasy games have that, too.
I'm married, work and run/workout everyday and I have no problem with "working" in my games when it comes to MMO's, if I have to work towards an end I typically appreciate it more when I accomplish the task. I don't want to reach "endgame" any time soon, hell I don't care if I never hit endgame as long as i'm enjoying what i'm doing.
Everybody has different things they enjoy, this is not an instant gratification game as far as I can tell so it won't appeal to everyone. If you like it play it, if you don't.... don't.
I was going to stay out of this, but you had to cross the line and dis Chitlins. That is just wrong. I don't approve.
Not that I expect anyone to care, I am loving the game - Looks like a movie on my GTX460
I've already cleared up your concerns with the proceeding posts ive made. It's not a troll post, just a genuine first hand experience of the game.
I'm actually still playing the game, and actually growing to like the feeling of playing in final fantasy world because i enjoyed the console versions... which is what this game feels like so far. Its definately not something I'd play on the PC.
My first impressions of live are that the posters who post negatively or trollish are still saying the same thing they were throughout beta. There is such a thing as feeling you are not being heard, so you repeat it a little louder, and repeat louder and repeat. Until you feel satisfied someone heard you.
Go here in 6 days and be done with general consensus - http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/final-fantasy-xiv-online
Otherwise your opinion on why it sucks is just as valid as someone who likes it. It's a wash.
If the game is such a bother to you, start coming up with constructive ideas to fix FF14 and submit them here: http://support.na.square-enix.com/contacttop.php?id=902