Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.
Yeah the server seems mostly fine. It was mostly fine in stormblood as well. It was a glaring design/software problem. The way it handles the lobby error is a design problem. Now they could throw more hardware at it. But that doesn't make the poor design. One I saw the login server could only handle 17,000 I was shocked. Since unless something has changed I was sure when Balmung and Gilgamesh were together they melted the login server. So 17,000 across a data centre seems like chump change. I have also played longer then I planned since I know login might not work. Which in turn increases the wait time. If I knew come back pop the que up wait 30-60 mins and be in. I would probably logout sooner yesterday. So let us hope that they work on fixing the software problem so they don't have a repeat of this in 2 years. Hopefully all the yes men on these forums convince them they can just ignore it again.
Weird my english must be off. "limited or even halted pre-orders" means shut the game down?
Most of that "best quarter" is due to Mobile Games, not specifically FFXIV.
WoW isn't evil, it's just that most of the upper management appears to be evil. That, and the game lost its focus after Legion. (I'm being polite here, that was about the time Chris Metzen left the company).
Yeah I've uninstalled Battlenet from my computer for the foreseeable future. It's a fine game but I can't support Bobby Kotick and his little board minions atm. I'll pick up BDO as my second MMO instead (and yes it's PTW at the top of the PvP ladder but it's very easily played as a solo grinding FTP game).
When your bar is full you don't let more people in, you don't shut it down. What I think he means is, if you're not willing to make more rooms in your bar, but you're taking money from customers in advance and promising them a place inside but have them waiting for over 8 hours outside, you're kind of mean to them.
Servers were fine before the Wow exodus. I've been playing since 1.0 and outside of their DDOS issues, I only recall 3 major issues.
1. 2.0 launch. They under estimated how many would play. They responded by adding more servers(which is what they would do now if they could actually get the servers)
2. 3.0 launch. Main issue I recall here is this was back when 2002 would completely kick you out of the game and you had to relogin.
3. 4.0/Raubahn ex.
Over the years they've added an EU datacenter and a 3rd US data center. Thats not being cheap. When it comes to capacity, it can be hard to predict when there are unknowns such as an exodus from a competitor. How was SE supposed to predict a major streamer would switch to FFXIV and bring a huge following?
There's people that work in IT. I'm sure they all know how hard it is to get approval when you ask for money for upgrades or expansion. They planned it out based on current use and expected growth. Then the wow exodus happened and all their data modeling/forecasting went out the window.
What if SE went to the other extreme? Let's say the doubled or tripled the amount of servers they had. Once the 6.0 spike goes away after a month, then you're left with empty servers and people would be complaining about that.
Other MMO's are launching with brand new populations and hardware to match. Expansions have ongoing populations, populations that return just for the expansion, and in this case a surge of new players for many months during it's content drought which is weirdly out of place in any MMO situation.
Did I say shut down the game? Please try reading more closely. Or, IDK, at all. I said stop selling preorders after you have reached the point you know you can support.
1) They know how many people can log in at once, and how many can remained logged in based on their server ability (allocation of resources), and
2) They knew that the expansion would drive a huge surge, especially on a weekend (risk mitigation), and
3) They knew that the early access/preordering would create even more surge on early access days, impacting not just these customers, but even customers who didn't buy the expansion (delivery of service).
This problem was 100% avoidable, and creates a bad experience for the customer. It's crappy project management. And everybody who says this "ALWAYS HAPPENS WITH ANY GAME!!" yeah it does, and it's crappy project management then, too. Why do they do it anyways? Money. They have your money right now. And they are not providing the service they promised right now. So basically you and hundreds of thousands of other people just gave SE an interest-free short-term loan.
SMH honestly with you folks.