Your Customer's Trust, Confidence and Loyalty

[ClaireBear]

Yes Remilia I played the Beta 3 and 4 and despite the issues I liked the game that's why I preordered. I want this game to have continued support. I think that I speak for most everyone in this regards: I am not asking SE to refund my money back I just pray that they are putting it to good use and will adequately compensate everyone for the frustrations.

It left a bad taste in my mouth when I learned that some people got their money back AND a free complementary copy of the game just because they could not get into three days of early access when a better choice could have been made that would benefit all. But what's done is done.

[ClaireBear]

This particularly goes out to the apologists and people who say "its an mmo launch, what do you expect?"

If we, collectively, stopped making excuses for companies, and instead held them to a higher standard, no one would ever say "its an mmo launch."

Because mmo publishers would know that even on day one, their customers wouldn't put up with this mess. Have your servers and data centers in place, and stress tested for longer than 3 days before any start of early service.

Excellent point.

[ThePassport]

Exactly.

As a network engineer, you think my bosses would say "It's his first day here, cut him some slack" if I am not able to fix a connectivity issue that impacts the entire company?

Hell no. They would fire me and hire one of the millions of other network engineers in the world looking to fill my spot in a second.

[Rionaheart]

IT wont be long before NA/EU goes F2P with a cash shop to screw more money from us all.

It will never be F2P as FFXI has been going now for what 11 years and that's not F2P so don't think for one moment that this game will be if you want F2P mmo go play dcuo or some other game ok rant over.

[ClaireBear]

If this game becomes Free to Play then the level of service we have seen so far will be even worse.

[Irishone]

Sad that now it is based on a first come first serve status in order to play a game that everyone pre-ordered the same way. SE is really letting a lot of people down and it is almost like they are throwing in the towel and saying to us "deal with it". How can we go from have a server queue to none and just getting kicked out of the character screen? How is it that every time they go to fix a problem they mess up something else that was fine in the first place? Do these people not know what they are doing? They knew the amount of people that pre-ordered and had access to play the early access. How they are not ready for this is beyond me. SE better fix their shit or they will be refunding a lot of money back to people that expected it to be in release mode for us. This is worse than beta... Game releases in 2 days here in the states so I suggest they hurry up and fix it. As of now I am telling people to wait until buying it.

[ClaireBear]

As of now the only time when server is "fixed" is when there's no one left or willing to log on to it.

[aikab]

Clearly someone is messing up on the NA/EU department, I don't see any JP server issues.

The exact number of players logging in to early access of FFXIV:ARR is 100% known by SE, so why are we getting issues due to congestion?
Are we not paying money upfront for a well serviced game? This is turning out to be a Diablo 3 Launch, I am afraid.

FFXIV:ARR is a great game and I will play it, but I had really, genuinely, hoped for a launch that lives up to SE and FF reputation.

[Remilia_Nightfall]

but I had really, genuinely, hoped for a launch that lives up to SE and FF reputation.

Really?

Because people here were hoping for something that DIDN'T live up to SE reputation :P

[Papamax]

This particularly goes out to the apologists and people who say "its an mmo launch, what do you expect?"

If we, collectively, stopped making excuses for companies, and instead held them to a higher standard, no one would ever say "its an mmo launch."

Because mmo publishers would know that even on day one, their customers wouldn't put up with this mess. Have your servers and data centers in place, and stress tested for longer than 3 days before any start of early service.

^^^
This. In spades. To the nth power.

If software developers/publishers made cars, they'd all ship with flat tires, no batteries, and only one spark plug.

To say that it's "normal" for software to be released this way is completely unacceptable.