Dear Square-Enix. Please preemptively stabilize servers.

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Originally Posted by Onikimaru

Yeah pretty much but SE have made major improvements to the servers since 2.0. The servers are generally fairly stable. Even with all that effort we will still probably see some issues, it just won't be disastrous like some people claim.

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Dunno dude, WOD release for WOW was pretty bad, blizzard had to reduce the amount of active players per server to retain stability because so many people tried to log in at the same time, FF14 is in my opinion the 2nd most subbed mmo and a good one at that, its gonna be popular, expansion releases are pretty big for advertisement in it self considering how many people have been shot pretty hard by the recent mmo releases like Wildstar and ESO, FF14 has been a good mmo to turn to from there if people did not want to try WOW.

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Originally Posted by Reinha

Indeed. If people just took it easy and lived their life as normal things would go a lot smoother. I reckon many have not seen what a popular game's launch looks like and genuinely believe that they are going to be on the front line of levelers having fun. Taking time off, stocking up on food and canceling plans etc... Those people will be really disappointed with how things go! Some of the frustration will spill on the forums too, even though SE can't do much to improve the situation. Just wait and see.

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The 19th is Midsummer here in Sweden which is a big celebration - I'm secretly hoping there'll be problems so my FC mates don't get too far ahead. XD

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Dunno dude, WOD release for WOW was pretty bad, snip

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WoDs problem is that Blizzard downsized, chopped and merged hundreds of low pop servers after the mass exodus of Subs during Mists of No-Content-at-all.

Then, when all those subs came back ... Well, we all saw the result.

XIV has actually done the exact opposite, server capacity is better now than it was at launch. So as i said earlier, Zero Hour instability, then smooth sailing. I'm not worried either way. Ill get to play when i get to play.

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Originally Posted by seekified

The 19th is Midsummer here in Sweden which is a big celebration - I'm secretly hoping there'll be problems so my FC mates don't get too far ahead. XD

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Same here in Finland. :P

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Originally Posted by raelgun

FF14 has been a good mmo to turn to from there if people did not want to try WOW.

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FFXIV might have even more appeal now that things are going south in WoW. Players have been asking for more things to do outside raids since about January and nothing is being delivered. Even leveling new characters is boring now. They recently announced a new patch, which brings a new raid and about 30 minutes of questing. That's it. And to add insult to injury, one of the lead developers announced that there will be no more flying in current content areas from now on. All of this tells me that there are a lot of dissatisfied WoW players looking for a new MMO (just have a look at their forums), and this one is just about to introduce flying and has a good record with the pacing of content patches. It would be amazing in the long run if this community could catch some of those MMO veterans, but Heavensward launch might end up worse because of it.

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Originally Posted by seekified

They have all the statistics they could ever want for how many people will potentially play, including how many pre-orders have been made and how many accounts usually are brought back online after a patch. This should be like any 2.x patch, just on a larger scale

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Well, see, the issue with that is they should have known how many of us preordered ARR and should have been paying attention to sales numbers proactively, not retroactively. ARR didn't launch worth a damn. Just seems safe to ask that they, you know, pay attention this time?

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Umm if blizzard can't do it, no one can, blizzard pretty much has the best servers in the business and WOD launch just was hard to log onto, this will be no different.

Nothing can be done, we just have to put up with it, I think only 1.0 launch went smoothly lol considering not a lot of people bought the game to log into.

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They forgot to release it on console like they'd been telling people would be happening for two years. Kinda hard to bomb a launch with only one platform out of the current 3 as an option.

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Originally Posted by Reinha

Same here in Finland. :P



FFXIV might have even more appeal now that things are going south in WoW. Players have been asking for more things to do outside raids since about January and nothing is being delivered. Even leveling new characters is boring now. They recently announced a new patch, which brings a new raid and about 30 minutes of questing. That's it. And to add insult to injury, one of the lead developers announced that there ♥
will be no more flying in current content areas from now on. All of this tells me that there are a lot of dissatisfied WoW players looking for a new MMO (just have a look at their forums), and this one is just about to introduce flying and has a good record with the pacing of content patches. It would be amazing in the long run if this community could catch some of those MMO veterans, but Heavensward launch might end up worse because of it.

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Agreed!

As for server stability, a glitch free launch would be awesome but tbh , I dont expect that from any game, but I hope it is as smooth as possible!

Here is my question. Getting on will be a pain in the ass no doubt about it. If we get on will we encounter any problems like constantly getting kicked out? I

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Nothing can be done, we just have to put up with it, I think only 1.0 launch went smoothly lol considering not a lot of people bought the game to log into.

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1.0 had its own problems. The servers were relatively stable, but that was because a lot of people canceled their pre-orders after 2 significant events:
1) People in beta reporting that it wasn't ready for release and/or was just generally terrible.
2) They actually "kindly" asked people not to post reviews for the game until they had a month to tweak everything (hint: nobody listened)

This mess actually lead to the 2.0 launch mess because they anticipated that they'd get fewer players than they did for 1.0.
Ignoring the fact that everyone in beta was saying how improved the game was.

There will be problems, guaranteed. Completely unforeseen random problems, it is impossible to stress test every single mechanic, instance and functionality improvement to the degree that it is going to get swamped with on early release. Nobody could of predicted the issues with the Duty finder on 2.0 release and they ended up separating them into different banks of servers (now there is, Gaia, Primal, Mana, Chaos, Elemental, Aether) In fact I believed in future that they would eventually get re-merged but the game was far more successful than they planned so they ended up having to make more to alleviate stress on the individual lobby servers.

If I had to make any estimations these events are most likely:

Lobby servers to make new characters (Au Ra + new comers) are going to be swamped at prime time periods of the day, if you intend to make a new character do so during the off peak time for your data centre.

Duty finder is also likely to be destroyed, use party finder, also expect a long wait to enter any dungeon, trial or instance, Because the instance servers can only hold so many instances at any time so expect even as tank classes that you will not be restricted by time taken to gather party members but restricted by time it takes for an open spot in the instance for your particular party. I imagine this will also be worsened by smaller parties being able to take up instance spaces in earlier dungeons.

Main story quests will be swamped, I remember on release that early main story quests such as "Kill 5 Ziz" took forever because everyone and their grandma was trying to kill them to progress those quests, I think square will have learned from this and likely provided story quest enemies with faster respawn times, less open world "farm" quests or larger amounts of them available but your best bet is to try and party up for these types of quests to reduce downtime and increase chances to claim/kill.

Some things will be more popular than others, so if you want to avoid the majority of server issues (instances, over populated zones) try and do something less popular. Levelling the new jobs should be ok because there is enough places for a level 30 to spread out to, I would also like to mention that queuing for a dungeon lower than level 30 is possibly a good idea as the majority are likely to be trying to queue Haukke/Brayflox and they are likely to be overpopulated so places like Toto-rak (everyone hates that place anyway) are likely to provide decent dungeon EXP but without a ridiculous wait time to enter, although I would expect Coerthas to be absolutely rammed within a day. Also earlier pre Heavensward instances and zones have already been stress tested and are sufficiently stable for people to play in. But I can't say the same for the new job quests.

Downloading the update even is likely to be a small problem for a lot of people, although their download servers are relatively good, unless you get the download quickly expect to have a lot of traffic slowing down the speed at which you can download.

And finally Definitely expect to see "the world is full" about every time you log in. Personally I would like to see square re-introduce auto log out back again for a small period of time to allow more people to log in.

Yeah I wouldnt get my hopes up about playing. SE isnt exactly very good when it comes to server efficiency. Unless youre in a low pop server dont expect very smooth gameplay. Otherwise prepare to get long queues from people cheating the AFK logout, lag, random drops, and even those lovely errors which plagued release.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Umm if blizzard can't do it, no one can, blizzard pretty much has the best servers in the business and WOD launch just was hard to log onto, this will be no different.

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Actually Rift managed to launch pretty seamlessly. I think it's still regarded as one of the best-handled launches in MMO history. I played in beta and I played on launch day and there was basically no difference between the two. The servers were rock solid.

Rift launched with about a million players.

That being said, this has definitely been the exception rather than the rule. And as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, Rift didn't manage that for their first expansion. That was apparently a disaster.

*insert video of hitler ranting about XIV EA here* :/

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Originally Posted by AnaviAnael

I have a feeling it's going to be like Walmart on Black Friday.

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As someone who has worked for Wal-mart in the past and on Black Friday to boot. I fear for your lives!!!

Don't even want to imagine the queues if you happen to get dc...

Lol. This rmeinds me of the launch of GTAV Online. What a mess it was.

Im sure SE will do all they can but sadly there's not much to do.

Even with the best servers money can buy, too many concurrent connections can cause bottlenecks. Amplify that by the number of people repeatedly trying to login, and you'll get a mess.

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Originally Posted by Hieral

A request that I'm sure a lot of people feeling the hype will agree with:

Please have the servers ready for mass logins during both the early release and formal release timeframe. A lot of us would like to actually play the game instead of spending 2 hours attempting to login.

Please be ready!

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Im 100% sure PSN will crash as soon millions of people trying to buy Heavensward! (We Europeans PS3/4 user are able to "Pre-Buy(?)" at 19th Lol)
Not to forget millions of people want to download the new BIG (15-20GB?) Patch at same time too!
Also many of them want to go to heavenswards new maps.
Its like S-Rank's! Countless people at same place(massive lag, 90k errors etc).. but not for minutes!- ...Days! <,<

Pretty smart for not letting us download the datas weeks earlyer to avoid all these issues.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Umm if blizzard can't do it, no one can

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Blizzard is notorious for crappy quality. Square Enix is generally not.

Servers get full. Expansions brings lots of people logging in at the same time. It's not rocket science and every MMO has this problem. The best Square can do is put server queues and attempt to stagger release (i.e. early access). Everyone's just going to have to be patient on 6/19, it's not a big deal.

I fully expect there to be issues on Heavensward's launch (early access & official launch). I expect server downtime as well as queues for the lobby and world servers. These things happen regardless of how much a company may try to prepare. All we can do is hope that any issues get resolved expediently.

I took two days off work for this launch.
Saturday and Sunday. No way do I expect a playable Friday lol.

In all honesty though I love the people who think SE should buy like 1000% extra server capacity to accommodate one period of a few hours or days.
I'm sure they would love to spend literally all of their money on that and give up any future hope of the game what so ever.

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Originally Posted by Marveth

I took two days off work for this launch.
Saturday and Sunday. No way do I expect a playable Friday lol.

In all honesty though I love the people who think SE should buy like 1000% extra server capacity to accommodate one period of a few hours or days.
I'm sure they would love to spend literally all of their money on that and give up any future hope of the game what so ever.

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For a game that's bringing in 4 million times $12+ a month in revenue, hardware improvements is chump change. Please! Unless you're telling me improved hardware costs $50 million. Even then, that's ONE month of revenue.

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Originally Posted by Hieral

For a game that's bringing in 4 million times $12+ a month in revenue, hardware improvements is chump change. Please! Unless you're telling me improved hardware costs $50 million. Even then, that's ONE month of revenue.

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Do you have a source for that subscriber number? Also you have no idea what their overhead is.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

Do you have a source for that subscriber number? Also you have no idea what their overhead is.

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Its 4 million accounts (not including free trials), not active subscribers. Though the number may have gone up or down since then.

Source: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...01c6348ab5d5e5

Gilgamesh crashed twice in two weeks. ]:

This does not bode well.

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Originally Posted by Radacci

Players can help reduce the problems by....going to work/school/sleep/your usual stuff, and playing at your usual schedule, instead of taking days off, and staying/getting up at 4am, to spam log-in.

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I am at GMT+8, meaning Early Access starts for me at 17:00 on a Friday. The world is round, you know. :3

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And that $12 per month isn't all profits. It goes into funding existing infrastructure, employees (devs/GMs/publicity/sales personnel/management), tax, operating costs (rent/office equipment/bandwith), interest on loans, and after all that you get profit, which needs to be used to fund company growth, stock earnings, etc....

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Originally Posted by Callinon

Do you have a source for that subscriber number?

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I figured both of these things were common knowledge since the "over 4 million subscribers" ads have been all over the place for months. This was almost 4 months ago, mind you, meaning the number has probably gone up and will continue to.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...01c6348ab5d5e5

As for account fees, figured it was also common knowledge; apparently not:

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/service.php

I'm sure about 1/4 or less of these are legacy accounts with the discount, but there's people who pay for extra retainers and the higher number if characters, too, so it evens out.

There's also a wonderful thing called a calculator. Plug in: 4,000,000 X 12.99 and you'll get the staggering number of: 51,960,000. A month. That's 623,520,000 a year. That's a lot of money.

I seriously doubt good hardware costs more than a few hundred thousand.

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Originally Posted by Hieral

snip.

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4 million accounts just means 4 million people bought the game, downloaded it, and subscribed at one time.
It's not indicative of how much they're actually making. Also, a metric ton of those are RMT accounts purchased with stolen information that had to be refunded.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

It starts at 2am not that many people will be on.

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I'll be on.

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Originally Posted by AnaviAnael

I have a feeling it's going to be like Walmart on Black Friday.

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The most wonderful time of the year!

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Originally Posted by Radacci

Players can help reduce the problems by....going to work/school/sleep/your usual stuff, and playing at your usual schedule, instead of taking days off, and staying/getting up at 4am, to spam log-in.

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I had to take my Vacation around this time or loose it. So the timing of the x-pac couldn't have been more perfect.





I might have issues :P

"Active" subscribers are probably still not over 1 million yet otherwise SE would proudly announce it to the world instead of hiding it. SE has only said that Final Fantasy XIV and Dragon Quest X "have been making favorable progress." 4 million is the number of cd keys purchased. If you look at your friends list and linkshell list, you can see the total number and look at how many are actually active, you could kind of tell what the turnover ratio is for this game.

This upcoming expansion looks very promising though. Maybe once the game has enough contents, it'll be able to retain and build up more subscribers.

It is never server issues that fully kills an expansion launch.

It is bugs. Loads and loads of untested or totally missable bugs. EQ2 had several expacs where it got so bad the server got put down for a couple days b/c you couldn't even talk to npc's XD

No one logs on for early access anymore. It's too crowded.

Soon, it's gonna be like Gold Saucer's congestion. And then, Emergency Maintenance.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Okay...how exactly can they do that?

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Server Localization and splitting.

NA/EU Server are in one Cluster somewhere in canada i think (last info i got). Split em. Relocate the EU Server into the EU. Split the EU Servers into "German Servers" "English Servers" and "French Servers" but let em DF together with the rule of english in DF, cuz English is international standard language.

Have every Language Cluster in the EU his own login centre.

Profit for the Players...

BUT you would need to invest Money in that. and they don't want too if i look up the last upgrades on servers so....

I would pay even 15 Bucks a Month if they would do that but oh well...

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Originally Posted by Hieral

I figured both of these things were common knowledge since the "over 4 million subscribers" ads have been all over the place for months.

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You might want to rein in the snark until you know the difference between "accounts" and "subscribers."

An account is created when someone registers a copy of the game and is then never destroyed.
A subscriber is someone who pays a monthly fee to play the game.

Since many people who've made accounts in the past no longer subscribe to the game, the number of "accounts" will always be far greater than the number of "subscribers."

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Originally Posted by Hieral

Blizzard is notorious for crappy quality. Square Enix is generally not.

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Eh, blizzard pretty does have the best servers in the business, have you seen the tech they use, its really quite good and theres no competition to it. Blizzard polish is one of the best in the industry and imo far superior to SE and I play both games.

SE has produced more shoddy work and are no where near polished in a ton of games. FF14 for one is the only SE made game that actually works on PC with no issue, that should tell you about SE quality assurance.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

Eh, blizzard pretty does have the best servers in the business, have you seen the tech they use, its really quite good and theres no competition to it. Blizzard polish is one of the best in the industry and imo far superior to SE and I play both games.

SE has produced more shoddy work and are no where near polished in a ton of games. FF14 for one is the only SE made game that actually works on PC with no issue, that should tell you about SE quality assurance.

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And yet I'd still, without a second thought, take ARR's launch over Cata's, MoP's and WoD's launch...

Least it's not like psu {phantasy star universe} anytime they had a update or the lol expansion ppl crash out and Segas fix was roll backs non stop

I have heard they are taking precautions and have some systems where they have a couple level 50 areas to relieve the stress and bottlenecking. MY PREDICTION is that Friday from 8pm to 2am EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE on ALL WORLDS. I hope I am wrong but if not I am not playing that day anyway...crossing my fingers that Saturday will be golden. Good luck everyone.