For Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) players, websites that display server status, like the Lodestone World Status page and third-party trackers, are invaluable tools. These sites offer a quick glance at whether your favorite worlds are online, especially when connection issues arise. As someone with a background in database analysis, I appreciate the straightforward way these sites present complex data. However, recent experiences and community discussions have highlighted a gap in what these status indicators reveal, particularly when players face connectivity problems even when servers are reported as operational.
Discussions across forums and Reddit threads reveal a common frustration: players encounter a range of server disconnect error codes, from general server down messages to ISP throttling errors, all while official server status pages show everything as normal. This suggests that the standard server status checks aren’t capturing the full picture of potential issues, especially those related to individual player connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) networking nuances within FFXIV. These traditional indicators seem to miss problems that aren’t broad server outages but rather more specific connection pathway issues.
Let’s break down why this discrepancy occurs. Websites like Arrstatus and Worldstatus operate by establishing a connection from their server (let’s call their ISP ‘ISP@B’) to the FFXIV datacenter servers (ISP@C). This is essentially a ‘B to C’ connection. They also test the general internet connection by connecting from their location (ISP@A) to their own servers (ISP@B), an ‘A to B’ connection. By monitoring these connections, they can infer the general health of the FFXIV servers and broadly predict player connectivity, as they are measuring an ‘A to B to C’ path.
However, your FFXIV game client establishes a direct connection from your ISP (@A) to the FFXIV datacenter (@C) – a direct ‘A to C’ connection. This is a crucial difference. The server status websites aren’t testing the specific connection path your game client uses. This is visually explained in the diagram below:
The core issue is that current server status indicators don’t directly test the player’s in-game client connection path. They don’t account for problems related to specific port issues or the intricacies of P2P connections that might be affecting individual players or smaller groups, even when the overall server infrastructure is stable. While direct server pinging by every player would be impractical and potentially overload the servers, the solution might lie in utilizing an API.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are commonly used in database management to allow controlled and limited access to data without risking server overload from excessive or erroneous requests. An FFXIV API could potentially offer a way to manually check server status in a more nuanced way, reflecting the P2P connection complexities that players experience.
This leads to a few key questions for FFXIV data management and support teams:
- What is the actual data map or data concept diagram of an FFXIV datacenter like Aether? Is it structured radially or in a more distributed manner?
- Is there an FFXIV-friendly API available that could allow players to make out-of-game requests to datacenters like Aether or Primal for server status information?
- Ultimately, could we implement a system that allows players to manually request a server status update from a datacenter like Aether periodically, perhaps every 6-24 hours, to get a more direct and relevant status report?
Addressing these questions and exploring API solutions could lead to more accurate and helpful server status information for FFXIV players, especially when dealing with connection issues that go beyond simple server downtime.
