Concerns for EW launch

Hey folks,

I'm happy to see the FF XIV community growing but at the same time I can't help think that with this many players coming to the game, it's going to be a mess with insanely high que times and server stability issues at EW launch. I hope everyone can enjoy it.

Aether is crazy during peak hours. It's nearly impossible to transfer servers. I think Midgard had over a 30 minute wait at one point if I saw correctly on the ETA.

Are there any plans or discussions about addressing this issue from the devs? I remember back in SHB release there were different instances. Do you think something like this would help?

This isn't a complaint thread but just reaching out on the forums and hoping to find answers that may put my mind at ease.

Hope everyone is having a good night/evening.

Thank you,

in my 15 years of WoW and my 9 years of FF14 if theres one thing i learned its never play during an expansion release, i plan to spend the first week either leveling my alts or playing other games till everyone is out of the starter zone then i'll creep my way into the expansion

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Originally Posted by WK74648

I think Midgard had over a 30 minute wait at one point if I saw correctly on the ETA.

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Had to go from Sargantas to Faerie after server hopping to advertise. Took 130 minutes. For those who don’t want to do math, that was 2 hrs and 10 minutes.

2 hrs and 10 minutes that I *couldnt log out and go to sleep.*

Just don't go in and expect everything be perfect(expecially this time around). Be patient, report bugs, (sadly)expect a DDoS attack and understand that this launch is going to be very chaotic especially on the busier servers, launch day is basically digital Black Friday.

No amount of testing and planning can predict what bugs my pop up when a metric ton of people trying to do the same content at the same time. Early Access will be a cluster and hopefully they'll have everything sorted out(except ques) by the 23rd

The sky is not, in fact, falling.

It'll be fine. Probably. They've handled launches increasingly well over the years. Still, an emergency maintenance or two should be expected.

They kind of hit rock bottom with Raubahn Savage in Stormblood and the way Aether used to constantly crash before the new data centers moved some servers off. They've made a lot of backend stability and design decisions since then to help mitigate load at launches. May see an issue or two that will need an emergency fix, but we'll probably be fine.

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Originally Posted by ryouma17

in my 15 years of WoW and my 9 years of FF14 if theres one thing i learned its never play during an expansion release, i plan to spend the first week either leveling my alts or playing other games till everyone is out of the starter zone then i'll creep my way into the expansion

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Same here. The experience of trying to play the newest content the very first day can also be bad for me since it make it laggy etc. and this breaks the immersion. So I will also probabaly maybe unlock the new jobs and play around with them till the population on the early content stabilizes. I remember in 5.4 the areas where the new MSQs are was so laggy for me lol. I do not think I have enough PC power to go along with the early crowds :)

Considering they just added the ability to straight up login your character to a different server from character selection to avoid queues and could conceivably add the same for the cross-datacenter play , I think they've been preparing pretty well.

Sure you can't do EVERYTHING.. but you can at least play and progress.

As with other expansions they'll add 3 instances to every zone and reinstate an idle timer so people can't afk all night. After SB they learned their lessons about instances and don't stick them in the beginning of the story arc anymore and they've made significant back end improvements, not the least of which was changing the DC structure to allow for more resources to be devoted to infrastructure stability.

There's no cure for having 10,000 people trying to log in at the same time, so you'll still have a queue when you log in but they've made improvements to make that faster and more stable as well. Queue times will resolve itself after the first week as people stop trying to rush the servers and go back to their normal routines.

Any MMO expansion launch will have its bumps but FF14 seems to handle it more smoothly than most.

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Originally Posted by WK74648

Hey folks,

I'm happy to see the FF XIV community growing but at the same time I can't help think that with this many players coming to the game, it's going to be a mess with insanely high que times and server stability issues at EW launch. I hope everyone can enjoy it.

Aether is crazy during peak hours. It's nearly impossible to transfer servers. I think Midgard had over a 30 minute wait at one point if I saw correctly on the ETA.

Are there any plans or discussions about addressing this issue from the devs? I remember back in SHB release there were different instances. Do you think something like this would help?

This isn't a complaint thread but just reaching out on the forums and hoping to find answers that may put my mind at ease.

Hope everyone is having a good night/evening.

Thank you,

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Unfortunately, world visit wait times appear to be an Aether specific problem at the moment due to congestion. We definitely haven't had the problem on Crystal and there hasn't been the two times I hopped on my Primal alt since the weekend. Hopefully SE is looking into why Aether specifically is having the issue.

YoshiP did say they have a multi-million dollar server infrastructure improvement in the works but it was not expected to be completed until after expansion launch. Perhaps with the recent surge in new players to NA and EU, they may try to get at least part of it done sooner.

I'm sure there will be multiple instances for EW launch just as there were for SB and ShB. Perhaps they'll increase the number from 3 to 5 or something similar. It won't help much with the initial log in queues but it will help smooth the experience once in game.

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Originally Posted by MilkieTea

Had to go from Sargantas to Faerie after server hopping to advertise. Took 130 minutes. For those who don’t want to do math, that was 2 hrs and 10 minutes.

2 hrs and 10 minutes that I *couldnt log out and go to sleep.*

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Why couldn't you log out? You don't have to log out on your home world. I've logged out cross world a few times.

I mean it's definitely a bad situation there right now but claiming you couldn't even log out to sleep is just plain false.

I've never experienced an FF14 expansion launch. But I have experienced several WoW expansion launches...

MoP: Okay at first but then terrible once questing got going
WoD: Horrendous even with new Oceanic servers, laggy to high-heaven, quests bugged up the wahzoo, queue times stretching to nearly a full day
Legion: Smoothest ever, I was present for the actual switch from WoD to Legion, and it is still the best ever
BfA: Don't remember much at all about this one, but I don't recall it being terrible
Shadowlands: Somewhat between BfA and Legion in terms of smoothness

With the recent influx of players to FF14, I could only guess how Endwalker's launch will go. I do hope that it happens without major (or even minor) incident.

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Originally Posted by ShasVa

I've never experienced an FF14 expansion launch. But I have experienced several WoW expansion launches...

MoP: Okay at first but then terrible once questing got going
WoD: Horrendous even with new Oceanic servers, laggy to high-heaven, quests bugged up the wahzoo, queue times stretching to nearly a full day
Legion: Smoothest ever, I was present for the actual switch from WoD to Legion, and it is still the best ever
BfA: Don't remember much at all about this one, but I don't recall it being terrible
Shadowlands: Somewhat between BfA and Legion in terms of smoothness

With the recent influx of players to FF14, I could only guess how Endwalker's launch will go. I do hope that it happens without major (or even minor) incident.

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BC and Wrath were both super laggy with people effectively lined up to kill quest mobs. Cata wasn't too bad. The rest of this sounds about right.

They always had issues first days of new expansions.
I think Shadowbringers was by far the smoothest one... I don't remember too many issues outside of long login queues and some area crashes.
But a Realm Reborn, Heavensward and Stormblood were a quite a mess a times...

But even if there is a sudden influx of players (WoW), it shouldn't mean that everyone will still be there by the time the expansion hit.
Let's hope they don't add instances early n the expansion... I think they learned from Raubhan so it should be fine...

In my experience it won't be as bad as ppl might fear. Maybe overcrowded servers like Balmung may get some problems, though ^^

While it won't be a normal day and there will be queue times across the board, I don't think it will be that bad. Shadowbringers launch was smooth as butter and they are making further changes to ensure people can at least log in.

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Originally Posted by Cortawraith

In my experience it won't be as bad as ppl might fear. Maybe overcrowded servers like Balmung may get some problems, though ^^

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An aside, but I'm excited for the next Lucky Bancho survey. Most of the new players joined Aether/Primal and queues have been skyrocketing. Meanwhile, Balmung still only has the bog-standard 10-30 person queue. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Balmung went to the #1 most populated server to down in the double digits in terms of ranking.

SHB was fine, since they learned a lot from SB release. I'm not worried. Sure it will be queues and minor stuff but that expected.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Why couldn't you log out? You don't have to log out on your home world. I've logged out cross world a few times.

I mean it's definitely a bad situation there right now but claiming you couldn't even log out to sleep is just plain false.

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I was stuck in queue. If I’d logged out I would’ve logged back in to the same situation of being stuck in queue. I needed to go to my retainers and reapply FC buffs, both of which I couldn’t do off my home world. If I could access my retainers I would’ve left once the queue got to hitting the 30 minute mark.

I’m autistic. I also have a log out routine that is very specific and if I can’t do said routine I get anxious.

^^^ That’s not SEs fault, that’s on me and my brain, but I still couldn’t log out as I was stuck in queue and would’ve just been stuck in queue had I tried again the next day.

I am expecting the initial server up login queues for EW to be in the high hundreds, if not thousands. After they are up, it will probably be a few hundred in the queue at any given time for around one to two weeks. They will also turn on the inactivity logout and EW zone instancing so that will help. So, once your on, you should be good unless the dreaded emergency maintenance shows it’s ugly head.

First week of a new expansion for me I just level my gathering jobs and crafting jobs to max.