World Login Errors and Resolutions | Hacker News Reader

World Login Errors and Resolutions

na.finalfantasyxiv.com

45 pointswallflower12 comments

Yoshi-P's status as the very public face of the team, even in difficult times, continues to earn my respect. Even more so to actually discuss the nitty-gritty of the technical issues they're facing, rather than just gesturing to vague "issues". It signals reciprocal respect for their players, in a way that too often feels absent when dealing with other studios.

Something I've noticed more and more following the gaming industry the last decade. Developers openly loathing it's end users. And if they're brave enough to speak about it publicly, who knows what they're saying behind closed doors.

Have you seen the entitlement some end users display towards developers? The vitriol hurled at them through twitter, etc?

Not that I think any of that is excusable but a lot of studios have been churning out garbage and expecting players to swallow it and say thanks.

Look at the infinite multiplayer debacle right now, probably the worst f2p monetization I've seen since the f2p model started taking hold like 20 years ago.

So many games release as barely working beta states right now and I think players should be angry. How they take it out isn't right and often who it's directed at is wrong but a lot of the times AAA and the like Game Studios are just putting out bad products and anger I think is a valid feeling to have when as a player, you see that.

Despite your guarded opening, I think your stance is overly equivocal. There isn't a strong "both sides" argument when one side engages in death threats and doxxing while the other merely produces subpar products. Would you consider your opinions reasonable if consumers targeted the same vitriol at the manufacturer of a faulty appliance?

I think telling someone they made a shitty product when they did is warranted regardless of industry, especially if you're paying or being manipulated into paying money. I don't think extreme behaviors are okay, which I said - but you're right it was maybe a bit ambiguous, so to note to be extra clear, death threats are a form of extreme behavior.

They're so strapped they decided to bring dev server's online to support the login process. OOOF.

The chip shortage and their own success is a really bad combo here.

But overall Yoshi-P's attitude keeps me playing and interested. He really loves this game and his community and it shows through their thoughtfulness and general open-ness and direct communication with the fanbase.

Does FFXIV use a dedicated server host that is implemented separately from the game client?

If so, I wonder if perhaps alternative architectures could be explored. I personally don't see much difference between handling an MMO client event and processing a FIX message on a financial exchange.

There are some exchanges that can do tens of millions of messages per second on a single thread... How many players would that be able to support in just one rack full of HPE/AMD capex? Perhaps we could steal some of these ideas for purposes of amusing ourselves?

One thing they’re not mentioning is the queues being unstable - being kicked out of the queue by their 2002 errors. I’d love to see them address this beyond “it’s likely a client networking issue”. Once you’re in the game it’s rock solid, which leads me to question the “client networking issue” explanation.

The large and unstable queues are leading to the use of mouse jigglers and such, so people can log in in the morning just so they can play at night. An interesting, but not helpful, emergent behavior.

I haven't verified myself, but [1] & comments assert that the client attempts to open a new lobby server connection periodically based on time or byte count, which causes your client to bump into the lobby server limit even mid-queue.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/r9r25a/error_2002_is...

My pro-tip here is to use the XIVLauncher (get it from github).

Logs you in much faster than the default launcher.

They brought in dev machines to address this. The issue is the queue is for your data center. And it maxes out at 15k. I think they're going to be operating at 17,500 now?

There's most likely some really long open socket connection with no retry logic. So anytime you get a hint of packetloss it's over. Polling would be better but would also require a lot more hardware? I'm not sure how I'd design a better system.

As soon as the queue hits 15k people get booted and you end up with about 2-3 minutes to get back in and keep your spot.

> Once you’re in the game it’s rock solid, which leads me to question the “client networking issue” explanation.

Could be different architectures between the "queue" and the in-game session.

Presumably with the in-game backends, the client gets told to connect to a specific backend (or through an LB with a sticky session), which keeps some of your active player state in-memory; and because of that, they'd want those backends to be robust to disconnection, allowing the client to reconnect and resume the existing backend session on the same server.

The queue, on the other hand, is the first-in-line protection for the game — equivalent to Cloudflare for an HTTP site. It has to deal with bots, DDoS attacks, etc. I would guess that they "solved" this by requiring a kind of proof-of-work — that "work" in this case being "keeping a socket open and responding to pings for the whole time you're in the queue."

If this were true, "client networking issues" would technically be the proximate cause of a client falling out of the queue and having to get back in line at the end. It'd be a problem the devs created for themselves, but it would indeed be the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com