My experience so far.....

Hello everyone. :)

There are individuals who take time off from work in order to play games. I am the opposite! I do what I can to have a "no days off" philosophy at the work I do. I was excited at the launch of Endwalker.

I came home. It was roughly 2:30PM and after settling down, decontaminating myself due to covid-protocols, I downloaded the patch and after struggling for a bit, I was able to play the game after around 30min - 60 min. I used that wait time to clean up, eat, etc.

So I got in, loaded up a main story quest scene, a few of them to try to get into the first field and i saw a black screen. The game did not quit on me, but it hanged. I waited around 10 minutes on a black screen hoping it would load me in and it didn't. That took me out of the game.

As I write this, I am unable to login.
Error 2002s everywhere and my queue for my world was around 5500 (my highest). The notice of course read 17,000 people logged in simultaneously pushes the server to hand out 2002s.

I find this to be unacceptable for an early access period.
The reason being because the following had been known:

~WoW's playerbase had a massive exodus into FF XIV.
~it was reported that Digital Copies SOLD OUT due to player capacity reaching max.
~Highly successful/popular streamers went to FF XIV and they are currently streaming.
~Many sites including first party did report that the population increased by massive numbers to the point that even in off-peak hours and minor patches, the playerbase was dealing with short login queues, but queues, nevertheless.

I do not consider the developers to be ignorant, idiotic, or any of the sort.. In fact, quite the contrary. It takes a lot of time, money, talent, and energy to get games like this off the ground, as well as hardware. Since I can't declare this to be an accident as intentions behind error 2002 had been made clear in posting, then the only logical conclusion to all of this (as many are trained in math and science, especially projections) is that this was executed intentionally and by design.

There, I said it!

Final Fantasy is about the story and music.
Not everyone is a raider or savage raider.
Many enjoy the MSQ and then leave until the next expansion comes out.

The fear is not FULL servers, but spending money on new data centers and servers just to find that many of those servers might be empty later on. In short, the costs of operating data centers and realizing that servers will be full only for a short while translates to "oh let the playerbase are back, they are in it for a month at least, we have time since it is a subscription-based game!"

At least that is how I feel.

I love this game and am happy at its success.
Just frustration that early access always feels like a shake-down phase that has the stability of a beta.

When they say there is a semiconductor issue they are not kidding.

Chip Shortage Costing Auto Industry Big Bucks

That's not even to add to the GPU problem. Or the fact that GPUs that were back in late 2020 going for about 350 cough rx5700xt cough are now going for far more then that. There are so many companies that need semi conductors and a company like Toyota, or ASUS, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Ford will be near the top for SqaureEnix.