Eternal Bond = Mission Impossible

Hello there.

1st of all, the Eternal Bond is really a nice idea. My friend and me got really excited bout it. So we both bought ourselfes the gold plan, cause we didn't feel that platinum one will give us more than we need.... cause we didn't knew diffrent plans will have diffrent times on making reservations.

But why... WHY only one instance for it. Its really pretty f***** u*. Not that platinum would have changed a bit, cause both of us just can't make it to be online fridays @11am (thats for my timezone. platinum/gold/free - 11am/12am/1pm).

I had some hopes during the holidays to get a reservation, but it just didn't worked out. So now - without holiday - it looks like this:


1st: Can't make it to the times reservation opens. At best I am home @3pm. 2 hours later then free plan ppl can do reservations.
2nd Last reservation slot on a day is 6pm (WHY?). Monday to thursday I could manage to be at home @5pm and fridays @3pm, but I'm working in craftmanship, so it can be past 6pm easily. For my friend its even impossible to be there @6pm on every day.

So it leaves us with only a few slots - that ofc - everyone wants to have (saturday/sunday).
Its really not a fair system. tbh, its bs.

I would have less complains, if SE had described that whole reservation thing in detail before. But no - I guess SE thought its better to let all ppl throwing their money at them. By the time ppl will recognize how things really work, they already have the money in their pockets.

For some ppl (including me), not telling bout such really important things, is the same as lying! Its a really cheap move.

SE needs to overhaul this complete mess of the reservation system. More time slots a day, maybe instances. Could shorten entry times to 1 hour too, as I read from others the ceremony hardly goes longer than 50min.

I don't really understand why SE took the timeslot route that they have. If the official (moogle or whatever) was a GM it would make sense I guess, but its not. theres is no reason why this cant be instanced.

It's kind of crappy that people are paying money for this and then having to fight for a slot like its a Black Friday sale. It needs to be looked at again and changed.

I agree. Also, from what I've heard, the ceremonies aren't that long. So, a couple has an instance reserved for 2 hours for a ceremony that might take about 30 minutes. As much as I defend SE, they really didn't think this one through.

I had to reschedule mine two weeks ago, reschedule time doesn't open up for 3 hours after platinum plans get access to time slots, by time reservations opened up for me, there were still 20 time slots available. Can understand frustration of not having the ideal time slot open up, but can sort of understand why SE did it this way. Right now it's new content and everyone is doing it, but I'm sure in about a months time, majority of time slots won't even be taken during any given week. Why create all that server space for an instance that after the initial rush, will hardly be used?

It's poorly thought out, but it'll also work itself out once the initial rush has ended. People aren't going to get married multiple times so eventually it'll be easy to get a slot.

Again, none really knew how, how this will work before. SE let ppl buy ceremony plans in good faith they can have their ceremony anytime and thats what pi**es me off at most.
I paid too, to have our ceremony asap, but now it turns out we have to wait like 2-3 months before we can have ours.

This is just bad business! I paid for a service and now 1 month later I have yet to receive my service. SE basically took my money and said good luck sucker! SE really knows how to suck the fun out of this game. I find myself playing less and less each day.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gardthorne

It's poorly thought out, but it'll also work itself out once the initial rush has ended. People aren't going to get married multiple times so eventually it'll be easy to get a slot.

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Why should we wait months later for a service that we paid for? They got our money right away and didn't have to wait months for it. Why should we have to wait months for a paid service? If they had said pay up front and you will receive said service a few months later I wouldn't have paid any money.

I paid for me and my wife to get platinum bands, we had our wedding last week at 1pm pst (I've been meaning to share some of the screens, I should get around to that). That being said, we used 1 hour 30 mins of our 2 hour time slot.

Its almost like none of the people who implemented this system had any intention of using it. As someone who codes / works in IT the time I leave the office let alone fully shutdown and can enjoy my evening gaming varies everyday. To lock people to specific times is a poor choice and paying giving more options really doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling that the game is going more towards a micro-transaction model where you can do what you want in game in a very small window that will never be convenient but if you want to actually do it you have to pay.

I do agree that SE didn't think this through. For our RP purposes, my partner and I decided to go with the Platinum plan since I work an 8-5 and we needed to select a time that would allow our friends to attend. So many people were applying under Platinum that even though our preferred time slot said "available", by the time I clicked it and the system processed, someone had already gotten that spot, and we saw "that time has already been reserved". We tried the minute our clocks read 4 am. EST.

Sorry for any misspellings / grammar mistakes.....4 a.m. came very, very early.

To make matters even worse for us, my partner has a lot of friends joining on Gilgamesh, so we were planning to transfer there to start a new FC. Problem is: we're unable to transfer until we either A: complete the ceremony (probably months from now with only 80 couples every 7 days at most, less for the best time slots), or B: toss our promise wristlets away and be out $40 (I paid for both of us to make sure we had the same plan).

Talk about a rock and a hard place....

@Saviin
Wow thats really sad ._. But maybe if you were able to make an reservation at the times you want to and don't want to throw out another 40 bucks: You could use Twitch or steam broadcast (needs steam beta, but its just one checkbox in steam to get). Steam works even if you register FFXIV as "non-steam-game" (you have not a bought FFXIV via steam). Its not as nice as having all your friends in the actual ceremony, but it might be an option.

It's like Barney Stinson designed this system.

What i don't understand is not only why they don't instance it (actually i DO understand that part since the servers can't generate that many instances at once, especially ones designed to hold 80 people at once) but why there's only one venue...there are plenty of churches out there in the game...
Definitely something they'll prolly be adding in 3.0, though, since Ishgard is religious.

Reduce the time reserved to 1h, at least it should have been like that from the start and later you can increase it back to 2h.

The only way this changes is if more and more folks give SE feedback on it. I personally went with platinum with my partner, and since we are stationed in Japan, I kept frantically checking the NPC in the hopes that I could get the time slot I needed so our NA friends and family could attend and we or they didnt have to be up at some crazy hour to take part in the event. I was lucky enough that I got the slot I wanted but only out of sheer luck. When I made it to the NPC there were several characters camped out around the npc waiting for the reset to happen so they could jump on a time. Luckily for me, it was late for them and they were all afk. I managed to grab the slot I wanted.

I agree though that this system is unnecessary considering the whole affair is done by npc and no actual live GM's are involved... I may have been fortunate, but for every person I see getting married there are a ton of others waiting to get a decent time.

...wait, one reservation is for two hours? That's so insane x_x was only a guest in one (it's what my new year started with, literally, at midnight xD), and that one was done in like 25 minutes - and that's with a few people showing up some minutes late too. Platinum, mind you, without it even being rushed. Def doesn't need two hours reserved, from what I've seen.

What a bullshit system, especially since it's just a bunch of cinematics cut by some free time running around in the church. For a grand total of 20min spent. With an AI. WTF were they thinking?

I'm glad I didn't buy a platinum wristlet (since the one I wanted to marry ditched me lol).

What they should have done is make it so you can't buy off the mog station once a set number have been sold each week then there is no reason for you not to get a slot. The way they are doing it is making their wallets fat and their customers unhappy which in the long run can lose them money. They really need to think this stuff out better, the wedding system is beautifully done as is so many other things in the game. Where it all gets lost is in the way they execute the stuff.

It would have been nice for the resets to have been set to prime time in the respective zone of the server rather than universally set to Japanese prime time. The result is NA users have to get up at 3 in the morning to reserve their slots, pretty ridiculous.