Simple Solution To Traffic...Follow

So after another full day of not being able to get on, I found myself browsing the forums to see what kind of frustration this is creating worldwide. So, the question I have is:

Why not create very long queue lines to enter the server?

Those of us who played WoW remember the Vanilla/BC days where you would log on and find out "You are 1,129th in line, estimated wait time, 85 minutes". While waiting over an hour to get in wasn't terribly pleasant, at least we had a tangible estimate to work with, and could do other things while we waited for that queue to count down. This is a much more productive and customer-service-friendly method than having to spam our way in for over an hour, just to get a small queue, and 60 seconds later get booted out anyway. Not to mention the endless afk people that aren't being auto-booted from the server, and others who simply stay logged in at all times for fear of not being able to get back in, which I completely understand.

This mindless server-entry spamming is turning my brain into fart dumplings... I think I'm gonna go take a nap.

The reason they can't do this is that the login server itself is being overloaded and it sounds as if the duty finder uses this same server to match people from the whole data center. They can't have that many concurrent connections on the server. They have already announced that they are changing this and dividing some things amongst smaller pools of servers.

I think the simple answer is that if they make a queue of 8484839929 dudes then that many people have to logged in to the login server and then IT crashes.

So the server has a ~5k char cap and the queue seems to have like ~500 char cap. The rest get 1017 so that those 5500 people can be on the servers.

This is very possible Catwho. However, I'm not sure it will be required if SE expands the number of simultaneous users though hardware upgrades. The other reason why a significant upgrade to the lobby server isn't necessary is because once people are able to log in without these login/server full errors, the lobby won't be spammed by people trying to access it all at once anymore. The only time the lobby should take this much abuse(after the capacity upgrade) is following all world's maintenance. So I'm really curious how SE proceeds here. It would only be a good thing if they improved the que. I rather them not do it with software alone as it's my experience that more software programs on the hardware only slow down the hardware in the long run. I rather see a conventional hardware upgrade along with a dedicated que system with a good redundancy server if things get too bad.

Edited, Sep 1st 2013 10:41pm by ShadowedgeFFXI

FFXIV has a queue. They are shutting it down at times to try and limit the amount of hits their login server is taking. It wasn't set up for this many concurrent users. They are already aware of the problem and fixing it on Wednesday.

I thought that maybe to help the AFK'ing, they could cycle the servers once a day at the time of the least activity. That way you at least reset everyone's chance to get in each day. But knowing our luck so far, restarting the servers so often would probably break something

You know, I've been thinking about this as well. But surely it can't be that hard? I mean the queue system already exists, all they need to do is increase the number of connections it can handle. I also thought "maybe the servers can't handle a massive queue of people". but, I am willing to bet the login/lobby/whatever server is probably taking a massive beating, surely 100,000 people clicking the button every 3 seconds would put the servers under a lot more pressure than simply letting them queue. It must be possible, no?