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FFXIV: World merge to take place after billing service starts
AmbrosiaAmor
Member Posts: 915
Hi, this is Producer/Director Yoshida here.
I understand your concern on the number of concurrent users.
Actually the world merge is currently in plan.
We will first analyze the number of players in the game after the billing service begins.
Based on that analysis, we will be running a simulation where the maximum concurrent access during the peak hours will become somewhere around 1500 to 2000 per World.
* The above number is provisional and not a finalized number.
And with the method on how the world merge will be done, it will not be done in a simple method where World A and World B will merge into a single new World.
In order for EU players to gather on the same server in a certain mass, we are planning to go with the method where the players from a World with a less population can designate the World they wish to transfer to.
With the details such as when and how it will be done, they will be announced once they are confirmed.
(I'm assuming that the next update should become available in mid-January.)
Comments
Didn't know that Yoshi was a 34 years old female from Miami, Florida...
You are so silly. I must of missed putting it in quotes. But yes this was posted on the official forums by one of the moderators after translation in the "Can we have a server merger after fee take place?" thread.
ZAM had a thread that was taking a population roll call for all the servers. It seems roughly most of them fell between 150 players and 650 players with only a handful going above that. This was mainly from NA/EU posters.
Considering that the Japanese population generally is higher than the NA/EU the numbers are definitely lower than it was when last posted around December of 2010 considering the game has somewhat improved over the past 15 months or so. Example of yesterday's numbers are as follows:
EDIT: Sorry seems the Japanese characters didn't translate from the copy/paste and instead the ?? showed up. ^^
22:58 1168 (??1,171) Selbina
22:50 1012 (??996) Gysahl
22:20 881 (??913) Cornelia
23:15 800 (??819) Figaro
22:59 766 (??815) Mysidia
22:43 676 (??692) Lindblum
22:56 594 (??620) Saronia
23:03 602 (??616) Besaid
22:20 589 (??609) Kashuan
22:51 549 (??602) Fabul
22:20 503 (??567) Palamecia
22:50 560 (??550) Trabia
23:00 539 (??542) Istory
22:44 436 (??506) Rabanastre
21:37 418 (??487) Melmond
22:32 409 (??428) Karnak
22:55 391 (??402) Wutai
22:49 381 (??382) Bodhum
The number in parentheses are the populations from the day before yesterday, while the numbers after the military time given are the populations from yesterday. One of the few reasons why people kept at it back in the day, even though there was very little content was the fact that leveling up took up a considerable amount of time (compared to now, so there was some sort of "goal"). However now you can get all 7 classes DOW/DOM to level 50 in under 2.5 weeks which leaves people with very little to do. After 15 months to give you an idea this is pretty much what you can do (unless you just want to craft HQ's):
Quoting myself here from the BG forums:
"Any sort of competition of MMOs or games in general is not good in any possible way, a problem that Final Fantasy XI didn't have to go through with as much as XIV is (at least for the NA/EU population). With the current console games that just came out and add to that SWTOR, Diablo 3, Tera Online, Guild Wars 2, Archeage, Blade & Soul, and whatever else that may come this way, there are some games that can easily compete with a player's time (granted people that only play Square Enix games, or mostly only Square Enix games are excluded).
Without sugar coating, at the current time the only 2 "endgame" contents for level 50 really is either Batraal's room(dungeon does not count since you just skippity hop it) and Ifrit's arena of fire. So after almost 15 months that the game has been out... we pretty much have 2 rooms that are currently considered "endgame" The NM's that pop out are barely noting as endgame, such as Dodore... you just stand there and wail away. Same thing with the gold chests in the stronghold areas. For example the Kobold stronghold, just kill the main boss, wait for the right time when it uses its only 1 special move(as it is with most mobs in the game) in this case calling out the golems, shoot off sentinel and win. And considering that most if not all the gear got replaced with the use of materia, then the only "endgame" spot that most people go for these days is Ifrit. So after 15 months there is 1 popular room to fight an easy boss that takes less than 10 minutes to kill, and if you are good at it less than 5. Which still shocks me that the official forums still hail this as a challenging fight (considering I got down the patterns after my 3rd fight). Bad connection non-withstanding, I know quite a few people who have lag problems and have left the game frustrated over this. Outside of Ifrit there is very little if anything that poses a serious challenge of any sort. As far as higher level content from level 41-49 is concerned you have the 2 non repeatable main mission storyline, you have the 2 non repeatable quests that are rank 45(outside dungeon quests). Company quests you have 2 NPC's for each region which pretty much give you 2 types of quests, either stand there next to a helpless NPC and protect it for 15 minutes or kill as many mobs as you can within a certain amount of time. Everything else got replaced by materia socketed gear to make it even remotely worthwhile."
And considering that the JP population numbers now mirror the NA/EU populations from December 2010 that is definitely a bit shocking. I was expecting them to be a little bit higher. So practically all NA/EU server populations are below 800 and only 3 out of the 18 servers have JP populations that are near the 1k mark or above.
my god that threw me for a loop as well.
It'll be nice if 2.0 turns out to be good. they did so many things right with ffxi it's a shame they didn't keep the good stuff and try to improve form there.
Ok here is a roll call from a couple of the Japanese forums, mainly from Logsuku and Awabi.
The number in parentheses are the populations from the day before yesterday, while the numbers after the military time given are the populations from yesterday. Note if any of the characters are changed to ?? it is because it didn't get copy/pasted correctly.
23:00 1152 (??1,137) Selbina
23:04 1006 (???982) Gysahl
22:37 890 (???896) Cornelia
22:33 857 (???862) Figaro
22:52 734 (???766) Mysidia
22:51 682 (???686) Lindblum
22:54 624 (???634) Besaid
22:30 601 (???633) Kashuan
22:28 592 (???585) Saronia
22:53 542 (???575) Fabul
22:25 526 (???571) Trabia
22:25 517 (???550) Istory
23:00 478 (???524) Rabanastre
22:18 503 (???511) Palamecia
22:28 482 (???485) Melmond
22:45 373 (???393) Bodhum
22:57 401 (???387) Karnak
23:03 361 (???370) Wutai
Note that these numbers during Japanese prime time are actually lower, these are global
numbers. If you were to take the numbers by language you would have for example in Mysidia:
JP:640?EN:76?FR:19?DE:2
Which adds up to 737 from a different poster around the same time, which is very close to the
734 population given above. They have also posted 2 charts one showing the entire history of
FFXIV showing the trend in population while the smaller one shows the current trend in
population starting around the end of November. Note that there are some tiny upward spikes
most likely due to weekend numbers and/or updates that the game has received in the past 15 months which is no surprise since a good portion of MMOs do give updates to make their games better as time goes on generally, but very rarely if ever shows an influx of returning players to stay for the long term).
And yes the charts does show comparison to J-TERA but these were the only charts that I could
find. On a slight note from 4gamer.net it seems J-TERA is going to have a pretty big server merge come January 25th.
FFXIV Population History Trend:
FFXIV Population Recent Trend:
Ok here is a roll call for January 4th EST. I went and created a character and logged on the 2 least and the 2 most populated servers. You cannot just log on and do a search. You have to log in the new server, do the tutorial, fight the fight and finally go to the Adventure's Guild and activate the NPC Link pearl before the entire menu opens up to you to do a search. I stamped the times I took the population for each server. The time frame was from 9 p.m. EST to 10:15 p.m. EST. During this period there were 3 servers with 1 Chocobo, 11 servers with 2 Chocobos, and 4 servers with 3 Chocobos. The list is ordered from the least populated (on top of the list) going down the list to the most populated server (on the bottom of the list).
Kashuan was 18th, Saronia was 17th, Mysidia was 2nd, and Selbina was 1st in population. I did Mysidia 1st and I did a repeat after doing all the other servers to see if the numbers were more or less the same. Practically the numbers were almost identical from levels 1-49 one hour apart. Here are the search conditions I used: (except for Selbina I had to break it up some more)
Search Conditions
Online Status: All Status
Class: All Classes
Region: All Regions
Grand Company: All Grand Companies
Language: All Languages
Level 1-1
Level 2-39
Level 40-49
Level 50
Mysidia @ 9 p.m. had 3 Choco symbols and was 2nd on the list
6
173
90
149
TOTAL: 418
Kashuan @ 9:30 p.m. had 1 Choco symbol and was 18th on the list
10
158
63
121
TOTAL: 352
Saronia @9:45 p.m. had 1 Choco symbol and was 17th on the list
3
179
70
132
TOTAL: 384
Mysidia @ 10:15 p.m. had 3 Choco symbols and was 2nd on the list
6
175
90
169
TOTAL: 440
Selbina @10:05 p.m. had 3 Choco symbols and was 1st on the list
1 to 1: 11
2 to 29: 195
30 to 39: 126
40 to 49: 108
The above 4 searches were done with the search conditions stated above.
For level 50-50 range I had to break it up into 2 parts as followed:
50 to 50 JP + FR + DE: 140
50 to 50 EN: 127
TOTAL: 707
Since the servers are listed from lowest to highest, and since each Chocobo symbol has a range threshold before going to the next, it is probably safe to say that 17 of the 18 servers have around 350-450 folks logged on in that snapshot, with only 1 server having a population hovering around 700. Japanese have a similar trend (albeit with higher numbers) in that 16 of the 18 servers have around 350-850 and 2 servers around the 1k mark. So for those people that are enjoying the game but find the low population a hindrance, make sure when the server merge happens you select one of the top 2 servers (when you log on and the times that you normally play). Since this is free of charge, take the opportunity to do so because the next time this is done may or may not be till Version 2.0 comes out... and chances are they may or may not charge you $25 to do so like in FFXI.
These number are low, very low and that is before billing started, I can't wait the to see the numbers. I read on the official forum there are some populations under 300 consistently.
I don't know what SE expected honestly, they might as well close the servers till 2.0 with such low pop.
Why? So they can make no money at all, compared to even one person playing making them more than before?
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
Yeah the numbers are quite low but it was expected (more so from the NA/EU population which are lower than these ranging from 350-450 in most servers the week prior to billing). Square Enix was already prepared for this. According to Wada he said:
"This decision will not be popular, but it is a necessary step in building upon the foundation our fans and development team have made together and to realize the full potential of FINAL FANTASY XIV."
Chances are he got together with the supervisory board committee/executive team members maybe even some key shareholders/investors (these folks usually choose people in the supervisory board that share and promote their interests) and ended up with this as the only possible solution. I think the folks giving Wada his paycheck would not budge for anything else i.e. this is the only thing we are offering to you on the table: no more extensions and you may not use money from other projects/departments etc. Hence why he said this decision was not going to be popular, had he other choices on hand, he would of probably taken it.
Both the FFXIV Population History Trend and the FFXIV Population Recent Trend were down for some time yesterday since they were being updated. The color scheme changed and as you can tell they added the red color signifying the population of FFXIV as of January 6th and onward. If you check the bottom of the 2nd chart (from the a couple of posts above) use the slider to go to the right and it will show you the current population trend. They already added the red dot for yesterday, but I am not sure if in the future they will change the color scheme again or just use red dots. Throw more dots more dots.
There is a much more detailed version of this in a new spreadsheet that I will update in a few minutes. It will show you the graph as well as the time these population snapshots were taken and compare them to the day before as well as last week and its rate of change.
Ok here is the updated spreadsheet I talked about in my previous post. (Note that you can change between all 4 tabs by changing the last digit to either 0 1 2 3 on the address below)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsRBPKP4ZpxJdGxJRllOeGthVVhTM1NZSHJ2WDFWdGc&hl=ja#gid=0
This is the main tab, it shows you the entire FFXIV Population History Trend and if you scroll at the bottom the FFXIV Population Recent Trend. If you notice on the bottom left there are 4 tabs you can choose from or change the number like I said above.
no...
shut off the game, that means no server fee's and everything related to it, not having to spend time and put people on building crap like storys and content for the crappy 1.0 version of the game.
Its probably the best solution right now, that are barely making anything with how little people they have playing right now.
Sorry, that doesn't jive with me. I'm playing the game and I'm paying them. We already know if only one person is playing the game, they'll keep the servers up until 2.0. I'll keep playing and paying for XI and XIV thank you very much.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
But we all know how biased mmorpg.com and most of its members are against FFXIV, not seen any news on v2.0 from mmorpg.com but loads of news bashing it, hmm wonder why.
Why anyone would want ANY game to shut down just boggles the mind. Let the company be concerned if they make money or not. And let the players who play have their game, no matter how few they may be. Why would you want to ruin it for those people? What possible reason could you have?
So only selfish reasons that effect other people but not you, cool. Just like the people who play XI hate on XIV and think XI is suffering because of XIV. There is no reason for them to shutdown anything if they said they will do their thing and release 2.0 and give 1.0 content. Sounds fine to me. Don't see what the problem is.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
It doesnt matter, did you even get what i posted? Its only logical that not having to make content for 1.0 = more people and money on 2.0, which means it would get done faster. Leaving up servers that COST THEM MONEY that cant be payed for by the tiny community that pays =/= sense. They are merging for a reason, most servers barely hit 400-500 people in prime time....its embarassing.
its a bussiness, not a charity.
Server upkeep costs are negligible. The current trend shows that the game has what, 50k active subscribers (a conservative guess)? That easily pays for the upkeep especially after merges AND the extra vanity content leading up to 2.0. It hasn't been exactly mindblowing but it's a nice gesture and more will come.
It's a business, not a charity. That's why the sub fee is in place, to make the service worth THEIR while. If ceasing the service gets them to same point (break-even) then what's the point? You piss off those who play your game to please those that don't. Even suggesting something like that is embarrassingly ignorant.
At worst, there is the challenge of logistics. Granted, if they handle this phase well, they should have no trouble when it's only 2.0 they will have to take care of.
So you think that shutting down the servers and putting everyone on 2.0 won't be detrimental to the process? Just like those topics on the official forums that if you just hire more people, it will instantly decrease the dev time by half or something? Too many cooks working on the soup. I guess they could just fire everyone else that isn't working on 1.0 anymore and can't help with 2.0. They already have as many people as they need for 2.0. If they didn't, they would make sure that would happen. You know they are sparing no expensive on this.
I don't know why how many are on the servers matter, and the fact that they're merging. So basically, that will cut their costs right there and then they will have enough people to cover the cost of the server... They're giving us loyal subscribers content and such to play with until 2.0 comes out. I don't see your reasoning to shut down jack for the time being. If it was an actual beta, no problem there, but it's not so there is no point.
This new dev team seems to actually know what they're doing and have these things planned out. Remember all that time when there was pretty much nothing going on for a few months until March? Yeah, that was them laying out all their plans. They would have made that decision then. It's not going to happen, so quit saying it should. It doesn't need to and it shouldn't. Just because you don't enjoy the game and have to harp on every little thing, doesn't mean everyone feels the same, and sees it the way you do. Nor should they.
2.0 isn't going to come any faster. I have no problem giving them my business in the meantime.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
I think it's pretty hilarious how some people are twisting the total subs to be lower than they actually are. The information so far shows simultaneous logins during peak times, and that does in no way tell how many active players the game has.
Even XI in the best case has around 45k simultaneous logins at time, but it is apparent that the game has at least 200 000 active players, not 45 000. WoW on the other hand has what, 2 million or so simultaneous logins during the highest peak times? Their total sub numbers are much, much higher.
With 10k~ simultaneous logins 50k active subs might be an overstatement, but 40k should be close enough. With the current payment fees that translates into 400k+ cash every month. That easily pays for server upkeep, 7th era content, GM salaries and so on. Keeping the service online is the best approach they can take, because it is far more likely that they are making more money out of it than if they shut the service down until 2.0. Meanwhile nobody that doesn't like the game enough to play it isn't affected, and those who like the game were given more than a year's worth of playtime for free.
There is a small update regarding the world merge that is currently planned. According to one of the threads on the official forums labeled "World Transfers" one of the community representatives answered back saying that they are going to be watching the numbers for the month of January. And once that is done they will proceed from there. (This may mean they may wait longer/go with the merge sooner/or continue to run the simulations). There will be a delay to when the merge will happen and they will give us further details as soon as they can. One of the things they are taking into consideration is duplicate names and how they will handle that.
Ok here are the numbers from yesterday. It seems population has dipped to around 11.5k during weekends and for the first time in FFXIV history, it finally dipped below 10k players logged in during weekdays. Again these numbers are a snapshot during Japan evening prime time hours. This time they separated them by language which usually does not happen.
I am a bit confused but I have seen a couple of recent threads on other forums with people stating that there are around 17k folks logged in simultaneously and/or that to find parties in FFXIV should still be "relatively easy" below level 40. I am not sure if they are just trolling or blindly guessing with absolutely nothing to back them up. I can understand folks still want to stay optimistic (if that is their true intention) but to help new players who are asking for population advice, they should tell them more specifically to join one of the top 2 most populated servers or join theirs, if the shell is willing to help. Or if possible wait till the server merge to happen.
Note in one of my old posts (if it was posted here previously)I talked about why the Chocobo strength symbol when selecting a server is not accurate, so take this into consideration please. The only "incomplete" population number was from Rab. We are not sure if that was the total population or just from the Japanese language. The purpose they used the "star" symbol (if it does show up from copy/paste) is to "line up" the columns.
Time Total JP EN FR DE
22:57 1169 *936 *155 65 13 Selbina
22:46 *952 *836 *114 ** *2 Gysahl
22:17 *949 *871 **77 *1 *0 Cornelia
23:05 *846 *751 **86 *5 *4 Figaro
23:15 *760 *620 *125 12 *3 Mysidia
22:42 *702 *448 *197 *8 49 Lindblum
22:30 *624 *495 *120 *8 *1 Kashuan
22:50 *622 *493 *113 11 *5 Trabia
23:00 *606 *456 *146 *8 *7 Saronia
22:51 *603 *429 *146 20 *8 Fabul
22:50 *593 *550 **39 *2 *2 Besaid
22:00 *534 *451 **70 *7 *6 Istory
22:30 *530 *398 *121 *6 *5 Palamecia
22:43 *516 *439 **71 *2 *4 Melmond
23:05 *500 *500 **** ** ** Rabanastre
22:47 *408 *232 *150 22 *4 Wutai
22:37 *404 *248 *144 *7 *5 Bodhum
23:02 *397 *360 **31 *3 *3 Karnak