Against "Simultaneous Logout Measures"

Ima laugh hard if this is still happening when the new raid is released. It'll be a forced break during planned raid times! Don't have time to pull before auto log out? Too bad. Time for a 20 minute break. But wait...now you're stuck in an hour+ queue to log back on...right after you battled the lobby server error in order to select your character. #byeraidtime.Then there will be those groups that forget about it and get logged out just before a (first) clear. Etc. Mmmmm I can taste the annoyance and utter disappointment in SE already...

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Originally Posted by Serret

In any other online service subscribers would have been COMPENSATED by now.

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Nonsense. Have you played other popular online only games during expansion launches, during launches in general? Where issues can last for months and its a normal thing? Nobody is going to get "compensated" for a thing they personally could have avoided. They warned people about this a million times. Especially people on balmung that there WILL be "extreme login issues" among some other issues.
This is why they gave people a chance to change servers to something smaller and even went out of their way to reward players who did so.
So you are saying that people should be "compensated" for their own inaction and their own stupidity? Puuuhleeease.

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Originally Posted by Freyar

That's assuming that FFXIV's server architecture has that kind of scalability.

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Well if they dont then what will happen in the future? I mean comparing the numbers of FF14 players to WoW its still away from that and yet they have problems. They are doing lots of advertisement and stuff that makes it easier for new players to join, so it seems that they want to have more players. But at the same time the servers cant handle them. What if people enjoy the expansion and most will stay? Will a long waiting time become normal?

If you lose someone because they are done with the content and are bored you might get them back with new exiting content but I am not sure if you will get someone back that went away because they could barely play the game and felt that the Devs dont do enough. That is some kind of negative point that might stick with the person so they might not want to come back at all.

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Originally Posted by iluvOP

Nonsense. Have you played other popular online only games during expansion launches, during launches in general? Where issues can last for months and its a normal thing? Nobody is going to get "compensated" for a thing they personally could have avoided. They warned people about this a million times. Especially people on balmung that there WILL be "extreme login issues" among some other issues.
This is why they gave people a chance to change servers to something smaller and even went out of their way to reward players who did so.
So you are saying that people should be "compensated" for their own inaction and their own stupidity? Puuuhleeease.

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Oh there is a MMO called WoW that did compensate its playerbase after the WoD launch with free playtime. And the same MMO managed to do a nearly perfect launch of Legion. A business that wants to be on the top cant go around and look at those that do it worse or the same and say that they are better than that and so it should be enough. No they should look at those that are better than them and try to get there too. And if you are the best you should try to stay that too since in a competition you can always be kicked from the top by someone else if you stay as you are and believe to not do anything.

Also Omega the new server also had waiting lines of 1000 people or more for some so its not like this is only a Balmung problem.

You have nothing but the fellow (selfish) player to blame.

All it takes is one self-centered miqo'te to punish one hundred innocent midlanders.

I like how everyone is talking as if they know how this measure is going to pan out.

I agree the idea of getting booted out for 10 minutes and possibly queueing up again (even though afkers will be kicked as well and will not log back in right away) is annoying, but we don't even know at what time the boot will happen.

On first glance this seems to be a good temporary solution to go against all the afkers. I imagine the best time for that would be morning times to be honest, while everyone is off to work/school/whatever and barely anyone plays anyways. I hope they'd take time regions into consideration, otherwise this measure wouldn't make sense to me.

Can we please wait and see and then complain about it? I swear, this is the WHM threads all over again.

The thing I'm mostly worried about is the timing of the forced logout given that we have multiple timezones across the playerbase.

At best this would happen during the morning or early noon so it catches the people who went to work cheating the afk timer.

At worst this is going to happen in the evening just after people made it through the usual queue to be met with another queue after a few moments in the game.

At it's most ineffective it's going to happen in the middle of the night when there's no queues on a lot of the servers to begin with, under those circumstances it wouldn't even change anything about the status quo.

My faith in SE actually monitoring login queues and accounting for server specific timezones (which admittedly is easier for the EU servers than it is for the others) instead of just doing a disconnect across all the servers at some arbitrary time is slim.

Wonder if is possible to code a pop up where you have to type a confirmation that you are not afk. Therefore people who are afk can't type it and they are the only ones logged out

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Originally Posted by Kuutamo

Wonder if is possible to code a pop up where you have to type a confirmation that you are not afk. Therefore people who are afk can't type it and they are the only ones logged out

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I dread the days of captcha anti-afk methods.

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Originally Posted by iluvOP

Nonsense. (...).

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In fact, other SQUARE ENIX online services have compensated their users for even 1 hour longer than predicted maintenances ^^
But puuuhleeease, let's settle for less and accept a bad service as being the new "normal" :3

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Originally Posted by Serret

In fact, other SQUARE ENIX online services have compensated their users for even 1 hour longer than predicted maintenances ^^
But puuuhleeease, let's settle for less and accept a bad service as being the new "normal" :3

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Indeed, as much as I am one to think we don't deserve compensation, it's a cultural thing that if things don't go as expected, and it negatively affects the customer, the Japanese go out of their way to try and put things right. Their culture and way of doing things is frankly fascinating. They are very much honour bound. Kugane for example seems to reflect this well.

I could essentially write a white paper on why this is a dumb idea, so the short version is that this is only going to eliminate exploiting players that are logged in at the time of the mass-logout. Within an hour or two, new players will funnel in an take their place, and you're back to square one. Unless you're doing this every two hours or so, it's not even a band-aid of a fix. It's just a random outage for virtually no benefit compared to the outages it creates.

Also, I'd hate to be the guy on Balmung who waits two hours to get in, gets randomly logged out 20 minutes later, then has to wait two hours to get back in because everyone is funneling back into the server.

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Originally Posted by Kuutamo

Wonder if is possible to code a pop up where you have to type a confirmation that you are not afk. Therefore people who are afk can't type it and they are the only ones logged out

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Those don't work. That's why most captchas are just "click if you're not a robot" boxes now. What it does is send a challenge-respond thing so that bots can't simply use the API to activate it, it has to actually do some calculation before it says OK. Though most machine-on-machine virtualization makes this not meaningful either.

The most direct approach is to just boot players that are exploiting anti-AFK measures (eg walking into walls, or running in circles, in instances like the inn, apartment, undersized dungeons, GC recruits room, etc) It's easy enough to see that they haven't left the instance in a reasonable amount of time.

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Originally Posted by Serret

This is becoming insulting quite frankly.

Videogame or not, this is an online service and people are paying a subscription along with all the extras from the cash shop.
Some scheduled vacations for the launch of Stormblood only to be greeted by a mess and endless queues.
Then a majority of players who gets home from work and can only play during prime time are also greeted with queues, laggy housing districts, malfunctioning dungeon finders along other issues.

And now to further add to it, SE wants to punish paying subscribers further by implementing FORCED boot out of the game for all players(ironically now that queues are slowly stabilizing...).
I am expecting the log in servers to be flooded after the 10 minute sit out and a new queue problem making the experience for everyone considerably worse. I really hope that I am wrong about this though.

In any other online service subscribers would have been COMPENSATED by now.

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Those issues you're complaing about?

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Then a majority of players who gets home from work and can only play during prime time are also greeted with queues, laggy housing districts, malfunctioning dungeon finders along other issues.

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That's what happens with all the afk players hogging up the server resources...
All those people trying to hide from other players so they don't get reported?
In their housing/apartment...


This is a step towards trying to rectify those issues.
It's an easy step to take, requiring no...

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Or they could do the logical thing and, ya know, patch the exploit so that the afk timer kicks them out properly.

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Development time and testing time, which would likely put a fix too late to make any difference for the current issue.


Still needs to be done though...
Manage the symptoms, while working on curing the problem.

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Originally Posted by Chrallmal

-snip-

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Agreed. Even my little sister could have come up with the idea to just pull the plug and stick it back in, ala "first come, first serve" login, so everyone gets to play once a day. Looking at it long-term, this measure is obviously doomed to fail - the only explanation for coming up with something like this is to buy time for a proper fix, otherwise I'll fail to understand their decision making I'm afraid. You could of course make the argument that people are logging out and in all the time and it'll even out somewhat, but as long as the SB hype is strong this will be just wishful thinking.

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones to fill up those instead. They obviously know the reasons by now, hence why they have said that they were planning on implementing plot compensation and to help with moving whole FCs to new servers, but I haven't heard anything new about that lately.

Those 10 Gold Chocobo feathers are not going to cut it for everyone obviously (apart from the fast login on lower pop, but too many people on the congested servers have too much to leave behind), so I really hope that they think of something better with the time they are trying to buy here.

Upgrading the servers comes to mind of course, but let's be honest for a second - from a business standpoint, this would be a risky (in terms of server maintenances and stability issues which always come hand-in-hand with physical upgrades), expensive and time consuming investment while they don't even know for how long the SB hype will continue and inevitably die down. I can guarantee though that they won't spend one single thought on a server upgrade idea until at least a couple months after expansion release. Instead they will try to deal with this issue with what they have available at the moment.

I am however somehow looking forward to how this measure is going to affect our gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Japtor

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones to fill up those instead. They obviously know the reasons by now, hence why they have said that they were planning on implementing plot compensation and to help with moving whole FCs to new servers, but I haven't heard anything new about that lately.

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That only covers one reason why people play on the big servers. There are also a significant number of people who want to play there just because they like seeing lots of other people around.

This is a horrible idea. Punish everyone because 1 or 2 servers have issues? Mind-boggling in its short-sightedness!

Pony up & force split the server(s) causing the issue. Comp some time to the people affected by the split(s) & angry. Don't wreck things for everyone on every server. [Disclosure: I'm on Gilgamesh, so could end up one of the people 'affected & angry' - I still favor forced split over messing up everyone else!]

Heck, even if you're dead set on mandatory log outs, don't do it like this & flood the log-in server. Set a maximum x hours played before mandatory log out per character instead - maybe 8 hours. Most folks wouldn't even be affected by that on weekdays, & probably only once on weekends. Pop-up reminder at 7 hours so people could decide 'do I want to just do this now & log voluntarily, or am I in the middle of something & need to push close to the limit?'. The re-logs will be spread out throughout the day that way, but you'll still be knocking out the perma-AFKers.

If their goal is to discourage people from logging on in the first place to reduce strain on servers they've succeeded. already thinking of what other games I could be playing today. I have no desire to be logged out mid dungeon.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

That only covers one reason why people play on the big servers. There are also a significant number of people who want to play there just because they like seeing lots of other people around.

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True, that is definitely one of them. The big variety of issues players have with moving to new/lower pop servers is why SE has trouble to find a solution that works for everyone, I imagine. The challenge SE is facing right now (or should be facing) is to clear all of these problems in one shot and make a server transfer into something people understand as a positive thing for them. As long as this is not the case, everyone will want to stay packed on servers like Balmung and Gilgamesh like a can of sardines and always look for a way to bypass the login queue. I can already see people figuring out the server restart times and start afking as soon as they are up.

put balmung with low pop servers on a new data center shrug :/

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Originally Posted by Japtor

SE has to tackle the question, why people are so incredibly keen on to keep playing on heavily congested servers and how to move them to low-pop ones ...

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They remain where they are because, aside from a two-week period this summer (so far), they've enjoyed every bit of play time on that congested server. That enjoyment does not come from the Fantastic Storyline alone. It comes from playing with friends and, as time goes on, family. No one wants to lose that.

No one wants to lose that house they've had in the Goblet for the past X years, with all of its contents and memories, either.

At some point, there will need to be a way to encourage entire Free Companies to move as a unit. Cost will need to be zero for each member, and housing will need to be one-for-one between the current and target worlds. The logistics behind such a thing are not going to be resolved easily.



In the meantime, a judicious unscheduled "maintenance window" of 10 minutes duration, scheduled at a time when most AFK folks are not going to immediately log back on, will relieve some of the pressures. I suspect SE already knows when it would be best to perform that downtime, and, no, it won't be during prime time in the evenings.

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Originally Posted by Sylvina

If their goal is to discourage people from logging on in the first place to reduce strain on servers they've succeeded. already thinking of what other games I could be playing today. I have no desire to be logged out mid dungeon.

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It's a good thing you'd get an hour notice then! If people are clever enough to start a dungeon with only a short period of time remaining, that's on them.

Someone suggested to make Balmung its own datacenter but, joke aside, could it be possible ?
I mean, the mega servers used as datacenter must be really big and powerfull to deal with all those informations, could we apply the same power and make Balmung a mega server ?

This is one of the few times I've seen SE use a cannon to kill a mosquito. What are they thinking?

If there are players using "methods to circumvent this automatic logout" then they should be handing out temp bans to those players to "encourage" them to play fairly.

"Simultaneous Logout Measures" is a baffling response considering SE's track record.

So where are the, "I pay my sub. I've dealt with the queue. Now why am I being forced off because of Balmung/Gilgamesh enduring high login queues?" folks at? I know there are some out there. On topic, if SE had better planned for this, given they have access to all data, they would not be having to implement a "forced log off" across all servers. Instead they, SE, think the transfer incentives would be enough. I say just dissolve Balmung/Gilgamesh transfer everyone off to random servers and grant them 1 free transfer to a world of their choice. Problem would be solved, albeit alot of players upset, but if it solves the issue at hand, then so beit.

While I am against being forced to logout at least they give a warning and to be honest I will gladly take the hit to have those who just stay idle for hours just because they have something to do and are being greedy not allowing other to play. Yes it may seem unfair at first, yet once again they did state "Once a day" and key words a " temporary measure ". Not sure how everyone sees their conscious, but lets face it MOST players go idle to avoid being kicked out or having to log back in. Once most people have minimum cleared SB things will most likely die down. For now it's a waiting game.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...771.1498659259

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Originally Posted by Velisra

This is one of the few times I've seen SE use a cannon to kill a mosquito. What are they thinking?

If there are players using "methods to circumvent this automatic logout" then they should be handing out temp bans to those players to "encourage" them to play fairly.

"Simultaneous Logout Measures" is a baffling response considering SE's track record.

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There is no obvious difference in me repeatly pressing my crafter macro (which is allowed to do 24/7) or my keyboard doing that on his own by keyboard macro (which almost every 30 bucks keyboard can do).

http://www.sidehustlenation.com/wp-c...urce-smart.gif

The amount of hatred towards Balmung in this thread is insane

But I do have to agree with some posts I have seen these types of methods were asked for, some were content knowing overs in MULTIPLE servers couldn't log in, my charecter on Gilgamesh and tonberry have had both long queues that range on absurdity.

If this helps I welcome it, if it dosnt then se will think of another plan.

And for people saying why not kick crafters / people afk using the bell, last I remember is they don't want people to lose items and forcing a disconnection server side with those two situations may cause the items to be lost.

I'm not quite sure why so many people on non-congested servers are having a hissy over this. So you have to log out for 10 minutes a day - if you're even online at that time. It is only a minor inconvenience, and temporary. You'll be right back into the game once the servers are up. Yes, ideally they would have figured out a way to have this be done on only the affected servers, but SE does weird things at times.

With that said, I've gotta say this does amuse me slightly. For quite awhile now, the forums have been full of people blaming the players who refuse to move, which is BS. If you truly cannot comprehend why people have an issue with randomly uprooting their characters to help SE out, perhaps it's time you rethink why people play an MMO vs. a single-player title.

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Originally Posted by DracotheDragon

And for people saying why not kick crafters / people afk using the bell, last I remember is they don't want people to lose items and forcing a disconnection server side with those two situations may cause the items to be lost.

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If your referring to crafting items to be lost, most afk users would use junk unless they really lack common sense. As for using the bell, it will not effect it unless they are transferring items at the time which still would be about a 0.001% chance of them losing an item.

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Originally Posted by NoxLumina

You say that.
You'll promptly change your mind when you see the 2-3k player queue my friend.

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That and you log in...queue for 1 hour dungeon queue as DPS and see the message ~30min in - then you have to pray the queue pops within the next 15 minutes and you have a group that can finish the dungeon in time before being auto kicked.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

It's a good thing you'd get an hour notice then! If people are clever enough to start a dungeon with only a short period of time remaining, that's on them.

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You're right! Why didn't anybody else just think of this? Why, the solution to this is just to deal with it! I'll log-in to the game right now and tell all my fellow 60+ minute queue DPS mates that we should just suck it up when we're 30 minutes in to our 60 min and up queues, and the little "BTW my dude, you have one hour to get in to the duty, and then whatever time is left over to finish it!". That way we can just go "Oh, shoot! Looks like we're out of luck boys. Haha, pack it in, and try again later!" and log out, so we can START OVER AGAIN when we're allowed to get booted, sit through a QUEUE TO LOG-IN, SO I CAN SIT IN A QUEUE FOR 60+ MINUTES AGAIN!

Brilliant!

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I'm not quite sure why so many people on non-congested servers are having a hissy over this.

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Because I'm a DPS, not a Tank or a Healer, so I could very well get my ass kicked out while I'm waiting for my ridiculously long queue just so I can play the game. I don't care if it takes me 10 extra minutes to log-in, or if it's instant. It's stupid, and I'm being punished because everybody and their mother wants to play on Balmung.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

It's a good thing you'd get an hour notice then! If people are clever enough to start a dungeon with only a short period of time remaining, that's on them.

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There are plenty of situations that waste a LOT of time because of this. Imagine getting home from work, logging in, and queueing for a dungeon as a DPS. ~1hour queue time - oh well, time to make some dinner while you wait. 20 min into the queue you see the message "servers will be taken down in 1hour for auto kick!" So...do you risk it and stay in queue and hope you can get in and out of the dungeon before auto kick? Do you decide not to take the risk and go do something else (that you didn't want to do) instead? Either way, it just ruins someones playtime (potentially) because of that 1.5 hours of "wasted" time. Just because you get a warning doesn't mean it isn't extremely disruptive.

I believe that clarification is needed more before judging if this is a good idea or a bad ide. The community is split both ways on how this is being said:

1. Its going to be either the extreme version by logging EVERYONE off the DC in a 24 hour time frame and I mean Everyone even if you been logged on for 30 minutes to 3 hours...


OR

2. It just means that Only the Players that have been on for 24 hours cheating the 30 minutes AFK log out timer get booted for 10 minutes...

I can see the best course the News could be would be the 2nd option and that a 2nd announcement needs to be made to clarify what they means... Hopefully the Community Team are on top of this right now for clarification.

Getting upset over this is a kneejerk reaction. They are trying to fix server congestion, let them try it. People have been abusing being able to stay permanently logged in for far too long. If they wipe the server and THEN it still takes you over 15 minutes to log in, then complaints can be valid. Otherwise id like suggest that people calm down.

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Originally Posted by Redgate

You're right! Why didn't anybody else just think of this? Why, the solution to this is just to deal with it! I'll log-in to the game right now and tell all my fellow 60+ minute queue DPS mates that we should just suck it up when we're 30 minutes in to our 60 min and up queues, and the little "BTW my dude, you have one hour to get in to the duty, and then whatever time is left over to finish it!". That way we can just go "Oh, shoot! Looks like we're out of luck boys. Haha, pack it in, and try again later!" and log out, so we can START OVER AGAIN when we're allowed to get booted, sit through a QUEUE TO LOG-IN, SO I CAN SIT IN A QUEUE FOR 60+ MINUTES AGAIN!

Brilliant!

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Nice post, not sure if there was enough sarcasm.

Anyway, it's a temporary measure. If you happen to be an unfortunate DPS in this situation, it is still your decision to enter a dungeon or not once you see that message pop up. You have the choice to cut your losses or try and push your luck. If you push your luck, then that is all on you.

And to clarify - yes, I understand it is frustrating and disruptive. It's annoying to set out with a certain goal in mind for your day, and then have to potentially change it - but it is what it is at this point.

Err my server doesn't have long queue times even though it's one of JP most populated server. So why is this a thing for the rest of us who are not having this issue..?

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People have been abusing being able to stay permanently logged in for far too long.

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To be quite honest, being kicked from a game for being idle is something I'd expect out of something F2P, like RuneScape... not something I pay a monthly sub for.

I'm at least thankful that the idle kick is something that only gets put in place when it's actually warranted and that it's not something hard coded into the game at all times.

While I understand where they're coming from, I wish they'd test it out fist on balmung.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Nice post, not sure if there was enough sarcasm.

Anyway, it's a temporary measure. If you happen to be an unfortunate DPS in this situation, it is still your decision to enter a dungeon or not once you see that message pop up. You have the choice to cut your losses or try and push your luck. If you push your luck, then that is all on you.

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"You have the choice to try and play the game you pay for, or wait even longer so you can wait to play the game, just so Balmung can log in easier, despite their log-in queues not effecting you in any manner whatsoever."

Yeah, riveting. I can see why this idea goes over so well with everybody not on Balmung.

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Originally Posted by Redgate

"You have the choice to try and play the game you pay for, or wait even longer so you can wait to play the game, just so Balmung can log in easier, despite their log-in queues not effecting you in any manner whatsoever."

Yeah, riveting. I can see why this idea goes over so well with everybody not on Balmung.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Yes, ideally they would have figured out a way to have this be done on only the affected servers, but SE does weird things at times.

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Let me post this little gem for you. You're barking up the wrong tree.