Why no new servers? Not just this launch but the last 8 months?

If they could not get the hardware together, why not compensate players who play during this period instead? I'm so disappointed in Square Enix and honestly I'm tired of seeing YoshiP apologise and crying on live streams etc, Square Enix is not getting any more sympathy for me at all and I don't believe the official excuses either.

I think this is among the worst levels of disrespectful treatment of the player base. And it surprises me that there are people who think this is ok.

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Originally Posted by Naiw

If they could not get the hardware together, why not compensate players who play during this period instead? I'm so disappointed in Square Enix and honestly I'm tired of seeing YoshiP apologise and crying on live streams etc, Square Enix is not getting any more sympathy for me at all and I don't believe the official excuses either.

I think this is among the worst levels of disrespectful treatment of the player base. And it surprises me that there are people who think this is ok.

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Funny enough.... they kindof did if you're on PS5 or 4. They sent out a letter when the delayed happened and said if you're unhappy about it you can get a full refund before the 6th I believe. But either way.... people need to remember shit takes alot longer to do and react to then they think. Trust me.. they were not and could not have been prepare for the out pour WoW and Asmongold brought to the game. If they did plan around that we'll still be waiting for the release of the game. 2 weeks wouldn't have been enough time. Shit be lucky the game is working AT ALL. We could be having new world >.> and that's backed and made from AMAZON!

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Travel was much more open for business between Japan and USA. Not ideal, but who knows when it will ever be. And if SE says it wasn't possible they are lying. Business travel has happened for many people. Again some shitty hoops to jump through. But that might be the cost of doing business going forward.



The question would be more logistically could they have moved them from OCE to USA. Also it does show that SE can get hardware, they just have to wait. They predicted poorly and now the player base suffers. It is the same for other industries as well though, companies predicted poorly and are unable to provide a decent product. The customers have to live with it. It just shows until they had actual people playing, someone at SE did not believe in the growth potential of 14.

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I think its a bit more complex and we dont know the entire story because of culture.

lets say SE went to company X (likely their preferred seller of hardware) and said, we need these servers, here is time frame. Company X says no problem. they had enough lead time, they were working on other things, then the crunch starts happening, and company X is finding it harder to source needed parts. they stall, because its a big order. by the time SE finds out from company X no way no how, SE is then scrambling to find the sever hardware even above market value... and cannot because of the shortages. I honestly dont think they had the server hardware to even move to the US at that point even if they wanted. they wont blame company X because of the culture.

the predicting, I am sure they predicted modest growth simple because you dont predict another company like WoW simply imploding. you cannot predict a massive influx of 2-300,000 active players over a couple month time span

I am certain they believed in the growth potential of 14.. just not the implosion and massive migrative growth of 14 in a short time span. not many could I think

yep. can't wait for "wholesome 100" yoshi-p to cry on stream again how they're "really sorry" while SE posts their best quarter in 10 years. Yep, they really love their players! Unlike evil WoW!

I just really wish I'd stop getting error messages and kicked to the back of the queue.

I'm not going to have much time to play during the week and I've been looking forward to this for a while. I don't care if I have to wait in a long queue, just make it so I can get in when I'm at the front of the queue and not randomly error messaged into oblivion.

I can only talk for the EU servers but the situation on EU was completly predictable.
The EU has only 2 datacenter with 12 servers, US has 3 datacenter with 24 servers and JP has 3 Datacenter with 32 servers... what did people expect from this?
There is NO suprise that the EU servers get clogget like a toilet with ques over 10.000 people and the "real" release is even still to come.
They should have give EU a third datacenter ages ago but instead we are doomed to play the "wait till its over" game.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

I think its a bit more complex and we dont know the entire story because of culture.

lets say SE went to company X (likely their preferred seller of hardware) and said, we need these servers, here is time frame. Company X says no problem. they had enough lead time, they were working on other things, then the crunch starts happening, and company X is finding it harder to source needed parts. they stall, because its a big order. by the time SE finds out from company X no way no how, SE is then scrambling to find the sever hardware even above market value... and cannot because of the shortages. I honestly dont think they had the server hardware to even move to the US at that point even if they wanted. they wont blame company X because of the culture.

the predicting, I am sure they predicted modest growth simple because you dont predict another company like WoW simply imploding. you cannot predict a massive influx of 2-300,000 active players over a couple month time span

I am certain they believed in the growth potential of 14.. just not the implosion and massive migrative growth of 14 in a short time span. not many could I think

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See if the believed in actual growth they would have ordered way before the WoW thing. some servers were already showing strain before WoW. They have been notoriously cheap with this game and pushed the consequences onto the customers. That is why lots of players are less likely to believe semi conductor issue. They have QoL punished players with poor servers since ARR(yes that includes the upgrades). Also the fact that the dev team said new worlds and not new data centre means they weren't willing to make the tough decision to break Aether again. The data centres need another re-balance sadly.

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Originally Posted by Shinjo

I can only talk for the EU servers but the situation on EU was completly predictable.
The EU has only 2 datacenter with 12 servers, US has 3 datacenter with 24 servers and JP has 3 Datacenter with 32 servers... what did people expect from this?
There is NO suprise that the EU servers get clogget like a toilet with ques over 10.000 people and the "real" release is even still to come.
They should have give EU a third datacenter ages ago but instead we are doomed to play the "wait till its over" game.

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What happen to all the players that were mad about the dilution of the PF? I am honestly curious. I remember EU players were quite upset with a second data centre.

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Originally Posted by Shinjo

I can only talk for the EU servers but the situation on EU was completly predictable.
The EU has only 2 datacenter with 12 servers, US has 3 datacenter with 24 servers and JP has 3 Datacenter with 32 servers... what did people expect from this?
There is NO suprise that the EU servers get clogget like a toilet with ques over 10.000 people and the "real" release is even still to come.
They should have give EU a third datacenter ages ago but instead we are doomed to play the "wait till its over" game.

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Its a completely calculated move, nothing to do with "semiconductor shortage" or "we just didnt see this coming.

The reason they can ignore EU is because most of gaming media is based in the US, also most vocal social media users /streamers/ twitter "influencers" are americans. Ignoring EU's problems is a completely calculated decision they decided to make, for one reason or another.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

See if the believed in actual growth they would have ordered way before the WoW thing. some servers were already showing strain before WoW. They have been notoriously cheap with this game and pushed the consequences onto the customers. That is why lots of players are less likely to believe semi conductor issue. They have QoL punished players with poor servers since ARR(yes that includes the upgrades). Also the fact that the dev team said new worlds and not new data centre means they weren't willing to make the tough decision to break Aether again. The data centres need another re-balance sadly.

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I think they really need to work on the login servers. I make zero excuses for those.

I have not had any real issues getting in, I know I am lucky that way. aside from my delusional phase early morning on the 3rd, its been pretty smooth. do I think thats an experience shared by all? not in the slightest. do I think they should have worked on the login servers a while back, most definitely.

I think a majority of people are pointing at the servers as a convenient target, the servers seem to be stable and fine from my experience so far.

should they have worked on the login servers ages ago, I am thinking yes. if they were buffering players in a 20-30 person queue for as long as I have played to make things smoother, that kinda tells me they needed to stop listening to the people saying more servers... and listened to the people saying things about the login process...

Supply shortages are an explanation, not an excuse. If you don't have enough of something to meet demand, you should stop selling it to people.

If you know ahead of time that you're not going to meet demand, but you keep selling the promise to something you cannot actually provide...that becomes fraud. Warning people not to expect what they pay for, literally at the same time as you take their money? That doesn't make anything better.

If they knew that they were going to have problems as early as June, they should have limited or even halted pre-orders. They didn't, though, because? That would have affected profits.

Your experience as a customer is less important to them than profits. This is unacceptable, and you should stop making excuses - y'all are honestly making me SMH here. You are paying customers who worked hard for your money, you deserve to be treated with respect.

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Originally Posted by Feron

Supply shortages are an explanation, not an excuse. If you don't have enough of something to meet demand, you should stop selling it to people.

If you know ahead of time that you're not going to meet demand, but you keep selling the promise to something you cannot actually provide...that becomes fraud. Warning people not to expect what they pay for, literally at the same time as you take their money? That doesn't make anything better.

If they knew that they were going to have problems as early as June, they should have limited or even halted pre-orders. They didn't, though, because? That would have affected profits.

Your experience as a customer is less important to them than profits. This is unacceptable, and you should stop making excuses - y'all are honestly making me SMH here. You are paying customers who worked hard for your money, you deserve to be treated with respect.

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Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

I think they really need to work on the login servers. I make zero excuses for those.

I have not had any real issues getting in, I know I am lucky that way. aside from my delusional phase early morning on the 3rd, its been pretty smooth. do I think thats an experience shared by all? not in the slightest. do I think they should have worked on the login servers a while back, most definitely.

I think a majority of people are pointing at the servers as a convenient target, the servers seem to be stable and fine from my experience so far.

should they have worked on the login servers ages ago, I am thinking yes. if they were buffering players in a 20-30 person queue for as long as I have played to make things smoother, that kinda tells me they needed to stop listening to the people saying more servers... and listened to the people saying things about the login process...

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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.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

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Weird my english must be off. "limited or even halted pre-orders" means shut the game down?

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Originally Posted by say0

yep. can't wait for "wholesome 100" yoshi-p to cry on stream again how they're "really sorry" while SE posts their best quarter in 10 years. Yep, they really love their players! Unlike evil WoW!

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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).

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

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).

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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).

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

See if the believed in actual growth they would have ordered way before the WoW thing. some servers were already showing strain before WoW. They have been notoriously cheap with this game and pushed the consequences onto the customers.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Japanese data centers are also a disaster area right now too it seems. I get COVID is a thing but lets not pretend other games and MMOs have launched in 2020/2021 with more then enough time to create a new server in each data center. My technical knowledge might be bad but literally everyone I talked to said this launch was going to be a disaster given the increase in population.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Roda

Creation magic hasn't been discovered on earth.

https://i.imgur.com/EcPpEXW.png

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Then they knowingly stole from people. You can't legally sell something you can't provide. Plain and simple!

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Originally Posted by RoaringDonkey

ooooo i wonder if they ever considered restricting the early access availability as they knew the servers were going to be a bone of contention........

crickets !!!!

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THIS!! RIGHT!! HERE!!!!

Who would they restrict it to? Free trial players are already locked out when the servers start forming hard queues.

Who would get in? Pre-orders only? Then people who paid a sub for the base game and haven't hit EW content yet would be unfairly locked out.

Us 1.0 veterans? That'd only be 30,000 players; the data centers would be comparatively dead.

SE is currently experiencing what the gym industry calls "Jan 2nd." A gym makes its money on memberships, but the expect most of their members to be there for like..... an hour every other day, at most.

Jan 2nd rolls around, and the gym has a sudden influx of people who made it a new year's resolution to get in shape. It goes from being at max capacity around 6PM during the week to suddenly being so overcrowded you can't even get a Stairmaster, let alone a bench. Once people realize they don't have the willpower to go to the gym for 3 hours every day after work, the Jan 2nd surge is over. People establish their routines, and some of them find a less crowded time to hit the gym.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Why no new servers?

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https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/02/hpe-...t-be-easy.html

For the last year and a half, there has been a global Semi-Conductor Shortage. It's hard enough to just buy one new server, not to mention the amount needed to run an MMO. Just try getting a PS5 or a new graphics card. Oh and New cars had to stop being made because they didn't have enough chips. It's kind of a big deal in global economics as the world hit a tech limit at the start of the plague, and it's going to be years before we can be free of it.

Want to try again..

Today, Guild Wars 2 reliability has increased since migrating to AWS. GW2 was never built for AWS and switches just fine.

FFXIV could as well it would just be a great deal of work, but they could do it. Be a huge pain in the ass.

Square actually has used AWS in the past so they have some level of experience with it. I don't fault them for not using it but it's definitely possible to do.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Can someone at Square Enix explain why in the last 8 months no new servers were added? Was there an expectation that the MMO's population would see a massive decline prior to Endwalker?

Was there not enough data provided to show this was not happening? Every single server is locked to creating new characters so even if a new person wanted to play FF14 right now they LITERALLY cannot in America.

At no point in time did anyone consider adding a new server? Is the trauma of 1.0 that bad at Square Enix that the most obvious solution was ignored?

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Why you cannot Provide Semiconductors?
Man iam so mad that you cannot Provide them out of thin air or Produce them or maybe use witchcraft or something or pull them out of your... You had months to Produce them and sell it to SE but you did not... why you do not provide Semiconductors?? WHY??? answer me please...

Srsly... some people are beyond imagination...