About 2500 threads rolled into one

Square Enix,
Your customers have flooded your boards and countless other boards and FB pages with comments and opinions on FF14 Relaunch. Here is what I have seen.

1) Very few debate the fact that you have indeed rebuilt a fantastic game. The game itself is fun, refreshing and a joy to play with very few bugs and glitches; or at least nothing "Game Breaking". Congrats.

2)The problems start with gaining access to this game. Claiming you are surprised and patting yourselves on the back for your success at your launch party and subsequent interviews while a large percentage of your customers can not even gain access to their product is poor public image.

a) Yes folks have been told to go play on the JP servers but why invest time to an extra character when all you want to do is play and enjoy this marvelous world with friends, guild mates and family?

b) Your communication with your customers is another problem. Yes, I have read the posts made, but telling your customers you are aware of the problem and are going to further limit access, close creation of characters and get around to a fix next week is not productive to your Public image. Even threads by players offering credible solutions receive either no response or "We will look into it next week". This leaves a lot of people feeling like they are looking at the couch potato watching the Sunday football game, ignoring the rest of the family as they are asked to "take out the garbage" or "Drive Jr to his practice".... "Yeah.. Yeah.. <wave> I'll get to it later..

The exact number of subscribers for World of Warcraft is somewhere around 5 million. (some say 10mil some say as low as 3mil). At 15$ a month, that is a 75,000,000$ (I will let you figure out the yearly approx. income). They are the only other functioning Subscription based MMORPG to compare. Your fan base does not want to see this wonderful game fail but every hour you allow this to continue costs you future revenue. A flourishing company has the resources to produce high quality future additions! Haven't you spent enough time struggling?

Thus far, you have given the players a game they can support and enjoy.. but you have failed to provide the means in which for them to do so. (Removed Ques.. given us the dreaded 1017..closed worlds to creation, failed to provide sufficient server space, and provided poor communication to your customers.

Personally, I don't want to see Yoshi sipping champagne and toasting his success.. I want to see a photo of him screaming into his cell at his techs to resolve this Launch. Once all of his customers and fans can log in and play when and where they want.. Hell, I'll carry him on my shoulders myself singing his praises!

Thank you.

I completely agree with your post, sadly I do not think anyone who can do anything will care. I'm guessing the big thinking upstairs is that they can take as much time as they want to solve the problem and when they do get around to fixing it they'll just toss out free goodies at people and everything will be fine :D!

Even F2P games like GW2 or just completely free games like NeverWinter are still bound to meeting the needs of all their players. Where there is an issue, especially one of this magnitude, you need to admit that there is problem first off and then keep the player base up to date as much as possible. If you actually want to charge a subscription to play your game then you better make damn sure you go even further than that, over prepare for problems and situations and don't leave the vast majority of your players sitting around wondering if they just got screwed out of the cash it took to buy the game in the first place.

But that's why I suspect that in spit of having such a vast number of players for launch this game will be forced to go F2P in 6-12 months given that their community management and customer service is just garbage, on top of all the other issues.

This should be stickied until the 1017 super boss has been destroyed.

/agree 100%

I am amazed at how much they put into this game, and yes I'm impatient to see and explore more of it, but if they could produce this lv of a game while struggling.. image what they could do with half of Blizzard's monthly revenue!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Duranos

/agree 100%

I am amazed at how much they put into this game, and yes I'm impatient to see and explore more of it, but if they could produce this lv of a game while struggling.. image what they could do with half of Blizzard's monthly revenue!

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Design is great, the game is enjoyable when we can play. The problem is they should have at least double the servers they currently do and in 6 months they can merge them if necessary and use the other to start on the next project and test servers.

Whats actually driving me more crazy is that per the announcement...they've disallowed new chars to be created on 18 of 19 NA servers...
So if you had issues getting in and making a char (I made one on an EU server just to be able to post...) like oh, the servers always being full you're now effectively walled off from any other server even if you got the game and are all set to play with friends, there is quite literally not even the hope of slipping into one of them if things lighten slightly.

Many people who play MMOs want to play WITH people, and rolling on EU or JP servers not only separates them from people they know, but also can create things like language barriers that become other hurdles to overcome to being a social gamer.

I agree with this post but (if you think im white knighting just dont read because im not) Server issues can be tough work to resolve. I didn't play much of the beta save the start of phase 2 until the end of phase 3 but this 1017 error has clearly baffled their tech support at the moment. Honestly if they just brought in a queue things would settle down a bit but I honestly hope they do NOT pull a SWTOR and just create a bunch of new servers out of their rear. We need a queue and maybe the current servers limits raised. The little bit of time ive gotten to play i really enjoyed alot. I mean hell Arcanist is the first mage class I have ever had fun with playing as in an MMORPG.

But yeah Rick(Dev team) needs to do some stuff and things to get this server going.

I agree with you as well. Rebuilding the Que system and adding a way to remove the Afkers has been suggested multiple times in multiple threads. Even the idea of rebooting the servers at low times each night to make room for other players has been talked about. None of them want to risk facing the dreaded 1017 Boss Mob again! I certainly don't expect them to make new servers magically appear, but they Built Buckingham Palace and only used a "Doggie Door" to let folks in. Sure folks are upset.
Hindsight is always 20/20 but SE needs a better PR team than what most have seen thus far. Telling their customers to wait a week with little other info isn't making these forums calm down any.