Square Enix is testing the possibility of implementing cloud data center for FFXIV. This has been announced during the Fan Festival in London this October. The test will run from 20 November 7pm PST till 27 November 7 pm PST / 21 November 3am GMT till 28 November 3am GMT
You have to create a new character for the test and unless you are playing on a free trial account, you'll receive MSQ progression, lvl boost, gear and gil to give you a wider range of content you can do. All character data will be deleted after the test.
Full details about the test can be found here:
I think this is a super cool thing and I'm super excited about it. Why? Now let me tell you what I think where this is going based on what I know about cloud data centers from my profession.
Disclaimer: these are my guesses, we'll see if I was right if this thing gets implemented on the live servers one day :D
If you were around the start of Endwalker you will remember the long login queues of 3000+, instability of the login servers and poor devs trying to fix it all while Japan was still under strict travel restrictions after covid. With a physical data center you have as much resources as you have, and you need to make a decision depending on the fluctuating resource use how much money you want to spend on servers which are not always getting a constant traffic, there might be times that resource is not used to it's full potential and just sits there basically underused. And if you suddenly need more resourced it will take time to buy more hardware (if you can source any, back at that time SE couldn't physically get the hardware they needed due to the semi-conductor shortage), you have to shut down your servers until you install the new hardware etc. Obviously this is not ideal for a live service game, where traffic is fluctuating depending on the time of day, patch cycles, region, etc...
Using cloud data center at least for the login servers would be an excellent solution to this. You can quickly set rules for how to scale your resources based on demand and you only pay for what you use. So if there is a heavy load on the servers, they can automatically extend to cater for the demand and then shut down the extra resources once they are not needed. You can set rules and parameters for this, so don't even need to monitor them manually.
Also big data centers such as the Microsoft Azure data centers around the world have very good defenses so this would also help with the DDoS attacks which have been happening recently around patch days (DDoS is when the bad guys overload a service with exceptionally high requests, so normal users of the service will experience delays or complete unavailability. To put it shortly for games it means you will have very heavy lag if the server lets you in at all...)
Once again a wild guess from me, I wouldn't be surprised if this test and possible future cloud data center upgrade would be somehow connected to the closer connection between Square Enix and Microsoft after the recent deal to make FFXIV and other games in the future available for XBOX. (They didn't say obviously which data center provider they will be using but Azure is a very reasonable and possible choice.)
Any other IT/cloud service enthusiast here? Would love to hear your thoughts about this.
I will be streaming as much of the test next week as I can :)
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