The Cloud Experience

Final Fantasy 14's cloud data center test just finished up and if you aren't excited for it yet, you should be! If you weren't aware, there was a week long stress test with the cloud technology that they've been working on for years. I spent a lot of the week playing on it and there is a lot of cool stuff to talk about.

From performance, queue times, and the experience of having everybody from around the globe on one server, there is a lot to talk about. Let's go over what this means for the future (hopefully) in Dawntrail!

Sonicrida flying in the Sea of Clouds zone

The Test

The biggest question you probably have is "What does it even mean to be on the cloud?". While we don't have a perfect answer yet, I'll do my best to give insight based on my experience working with cloud servers in the past as well as the little that Square Enix has told us.

The cloud data center test was pitched as a login cap stress test. In other words, they wanted to see how the queues would perform as well as how many players could be logged in at once. They made it really enticing to try out too. Everybody who made characters on the cloud data center were given Level 80 Job and story skips so you could basically try out any job you wanted and do content up to the end of shadowbringers. They also gave people 50 million gil, and the ability to instantly buy homes once you had your grand company ranked up. No grinding the beginning of 2.0 here. This created a lot of unique experiences.

Server Performance

As far as the performance itself, it’s kind of hard to tell how well things worked. I can say that queue times seemed much faster than before. Normally when I’m in queue, I usually get in when my queue counter is around the 20s or 30s. On the cloud, I actually got in when I was around 100 so it seems like the login speeds will be way faster. Normally when I’m in queue, I usually get in when my queue counter is around the 20s or 30s. On the cloud, I actually got in when I was around the low 100s so it seems like Square will be able to let more people in at once leading to much faster login speeds.

It's worth mentioning that after the test had launched, they actually changed the queue speeds since people had to wait a while to get in early on because of all the hype. I'll talk about this more later in the article but it's important to keep in mind.

As far as the networking related features go, this is no doubt the most important part of the test. Why? If you played during the Endwalker launch, you might remember what it was like to wait for hours to login. We can only imagine how many players quit the game because of how bad the queues were especially for new players trying to jump in on the hype train at the time.

Faster queues means more people stay around to play which means more subs. It’s pretty simple to see the benefits here. In the same vein, having more people being able to stay logged in is also critical here. I don’t know what the cap is but it’s probably a safe assumption to say that worlds on the cloud can hold more players online at the same time.

Could you imagine if certain worlds that always seemed congested were to open up or at least give players more chances to make characters there to be with their friends? I know that many would be happy about this....although some limsa plazas may get a little too crowded.

Ping and Packet Loss

Then there’s the talk of the ping which is a little trickier because at least in North America, FFXIV doesn’t always have the most stable connection. Within the last month, I’ve seen many incidents where players had connection issues where they had to use a VPN to play. This is really bad and it mostly has to do with how the game is hosted.

Haven’t you ever noticed when the game felt laggy or had a moment where you were disconnected while the rest of your internet using applications were having zero issues? A swap to the cloud could fix some of these issues simply by using modern and more well maintained architecture instead of the old setup that they are using now.

One very important detail is that the cloud data centers were hosted on the East Coast instead of the West Coast. This was a pretty big deal with a lot of players feeling like the game was much more playable and responsive. If you play on the West Coast, you didn’t gain anything but for players closer to the East Coast as well as a lot in South America and even Europe, a lot of people had a great time with the data center being much closer to them.

If you aren't aware of how much ping affects you, it’s basically the delay between what happens and how you experience it. Most people learn timings for things like castbars and AOEs in a way where they dodge in time. The worse your ping, the earlier you have to dodge. Less ping means you have more time to react to things. Even if it sounds like it’s not a lot since we’re talking in milliseconds here, it can make a big difference in how the game feels especially for faster jobs like monk and machinist as well as for anybody playing pvp.

We don’t know if the final release of the cloud servers would also be on the east coast and while I certainly wouldn’t complain since I personally benefit, it would be an interesting experience because a lot of west coast players would be losing out a bit there.

This brings us to the topic of what the cloud data centers even look like when they release. I think that a lot of people have an unlikely expectation that these would be new data centers. It’s much more likely that the existing data centers would be ported over to the cloud instead. In a perfect world, the change is seamless other than a maybe longer period of downtime than we’re normally used to.

As far as the test experience itself, it was great. I had fun being able to try every job easily at 80 since I only have 5 jobs that I've put much time into leveling. I have a few around 30 only to play in PVP. Many others were trying out alt roles as well. I also got to experience and witness a ton of player run events. There were many attempts at various world firsts from Ultimates to things like the Baldesion Arsenal and Delubrum Savage. The Bozja and Eureka events were especially notable for trying to recreate an expertience similar to the launch of these zones where people were starting fresh instead of being super strong with the various duty actions and buffs you can collect in Bozja or everybody being the same elemental level in Eureka.

Tons of people also ended up grinding hard to unlock home purchasing since homes on the cloud test servers were first come first serve instead of a lottery. This meant that we had actual designer homes, studios, and venues in the cloud! It was awesome seeing what people were able to come up with.

Likewise, the PVP community organized queue sync events where players from around the world game together to queue up for frontlines and rival wings. These were a blast but I will say that I’ve never been hit by that many dragoon limit breaks in a row before in my life. It was brutal and I bet a lot of people were trying out some of the more meta jobs since they had easy access to them with the job skips.

The Final Fantasy 14 subreddit organized a few different events like this end of an era party which attempted to recreate a mount wall just like players did at the end of 1.0 and it was incredible. I also checked out the Gilded Mikoshi mount tower in Mor Dhona which…..I’ll just let you see for yourself because it was pretty wild. I love seeing stuff like this. The community coming together is my favorite part of any mmo or multiplayer game in general.

The Future

Where does all of this lead us? Remember when I mentioned early on about how Square was able to literally speed up the login queue in real time. That’s the beauty of cloud architecture. Modern cloud servers are especially known for being easily scalable. This is great for a game with fluctuating popularity like an mmo. When dawntrail comes out, if we’re on the cloud by then, they can easily scale up the servers to meet the demands of everyone trying to login at launch. Then, once things have calmed down a bit, they can simply scale things back. Without the cloud, companies like Square would have to buy more servers to handle the player surge which kinda sucks the moment you don’t need all of that extra hardware because it’s just wasting money to have servers sitting there doing nothing for you.

That’s why the cloud is so convenient. Imagine not having to have afk kick timers either. Now don't get me wrong, the game will still be held back by the limitations of the engine itself but it’s safe to say that there’s a ton of room for improvement with the servers. Let’s imagine for a bit how this could impact other things.

Being able to spin up servers more easily means they’d have an easier time testing new features. Imagine a region wide pvp hub where you’d be able to match up with players on different data centers. All of the pvp queues could be improved with a larger pool of players to match up with. It would be the best thing for rival wings outside of having it added as a daily roulette which we really need by the way.

We could even get new housing wards that don’t take months or even years to be added because they don’t have to purchase new server hardware just to run them.

Considering they were specifically testing zone capacity as well, we may see fewer or even no instances in zones in the future which might be a little messy for people trying to select an npc or join in on a hunt train. Despite that, it adds a lot of fun to the mmo experience of being around other players as you play.

As far as the topic of ping is concerned, while that wouldn’t be an intent of the cloud data center specifically, I think that Square definitely will have noticed all of the feedback especially from South American players talking about how much better the game felt for them. I’m hoping that Square adds a server for players in that region to enjoy the game with better ping like the rest of us.

There’s a lot of potential here to improve the game and from the sounds of it, the cloud test was a huge success. I can’t wait to see the follow up report from square and I’m hoping that we see the cloud implemented before Dawntrail. Let me know your thoughts on Discord and take it easy!