"A Letter To The Producer"

Dear Mr. Yoshida and whomever else this may concern.

Let me start this letter off by saying you have taken a previously absolutely terrible game and given it new life, kudos to you and your team. The game is quite enjoyable to play and has very much going for it. Beautiful graphics, both environmental and character wise, very high detail, Runs great, responds great, encourages players to both go at it on their own and at the same time interact with other players.

Now for the true purpose of my letter. Sir this launch, the open beta, and early access were all a complete joke in the MMO world. Yes I quite often hear the excuse that "these problems are normal" "This is the same as any other MMO at launch". To you and the people who make statements like this I have this question, Why do you want to look at FFXIV:ARR in the same light as any and every other MMO? isn't the purpose of releasing a new game to set higher standards, to provide experiences no one else can offer?

You are at the point in this software's life where it is now publicly released, and available to all, yet you can't even provide a reliable service to the supporters of your game to allow them to play, and experience your vision for them, or to allow your customers to enjoy the hard work you and your teams have put into reviving this game from its previously terrible existence.

I fear, no I know this letter will fall on blind eyes and go unnoticed or be flamed into oblivion but I care not. I am genuinely frustrated with the availability of this service, and the low standard of service which has been established and apparently deemed acceptable by the powers that be. You brought this game back to life, it seems like you've even set it on the road to being successful, but the current service, or lack thereof is going to crush peoples interest in this game... again.

I understand that you were ill prepared for the hordes of players who actually wanted to come play your game, I understand that it's difficult, no, impossible to be completely prepare for this kind of demand on your servers. But there are any number of steps you and your team could take to remedy issues plaguing your customers ability to log in after a hard day of work, and just relax and enjoy the game, either by themselves or a group of friends. I am speaking specifically to my frustration: ERROR 1017, "This World is currently full. Please wait until and opening is available and try again."

You have a number of things you can implement to soothe players like me, and help us get in to play. I have provided you a nice list of ideas below:

1. Implement and maintain a queue system for players trying to connect for all servers at all times. This is a standard in the industry and any other high traffic game these days, it is also a great form of communication. You're telling the player "Hey the servers full, wait behind all these other players and you'll eventually get in and be able to play" which is great! it's telling me what's going on, and handling my connection for me, instead of booting me back to the title screen with no other option, but to try to get in again manually. Meanwhile each attempt I make is traffic to every server and the lobby server as my client pings for available servers and queries information such as whether or not I have a character on the server.

2. Implement AFK log out timers that cannot be bypassed via a players client configuration. Too many people will remain logged in and AFK infinitely just to avoid having to try and struggle with issues such as 1017. Yet again this is a standard and good practice for any MMO host these days, you're clearing out room for the people who actually want to log on and play rather than hosting servers full of lifeless corpses. This is a good idea and shame you have not implemented something like it.

3. I've heard a rumor somewhere that you either made a statement or it a statement was misinterpreted to say that you asked "Why don't they just move to a less crowded server?" There are several problems with that statement. I began playing with several other real life friends, and in the time we have been able to get in and play, we've made progress, and bypassed many unskippable cut scenes which we have all experienced already several times before, and do not want to waste time sitting through them again, once a cut scene has been experienced on any character on any server, it should either be skippable or not play again without a prompt, but that's a discussion for another time. Long story short, my group and I do not want to start all over again, only to risk the same problem following us, never actually getting resolved. The second thing I would like to point out, just how exactly are we supposed to tell whether or not a server is high population, low or even medium population? We can't.

4. Due to your inability to prepare for such a massive influx of players and maintain reliable services, why not as a good gesture offer up character transfers to less populated servers for a temporary amount of time to ease the strain on different overly populated servers. I've heard the money grubbers at SE are afraid of investing more money into more servers for fear of losing players and no longer needing the infrastructure. Well if you're not going to give us character transfers, why not try reallocating system/hardware resources from less populated servers to more densly populated servers, of course i know very little about the actual functionality behind the scenes of an MMO and I can only venture to guess or offer my own opinions.

Needless to say I greatly enjoy playing this game, and i'm semi hooked, I haven't been excited about an MMO in quite some time, but I looked forward to playing yours, believe me it was a tough sell to even hook my interest in the first place. I wrote this letter purely to channel my frustrations and try to offer something constructive for a change instead of feeding the fire of rage and vulgarity I know I can sometimes be.

Thank you for reading,
- Mike

I posted something similar o this.. and just received a warning notice on my account and a notification that my post was deleted.. so rather than having their team fix issues they are spending it giving warnings to people because they are not satisfied with they customer service or the poor standards in which they have released their product to the world.

"At Square Enix Our Motto IS : Don't Ever Admit There's A Problem"

Candid views with many great suggestions. +1 to you Mike.

On that note. Im posting a petition regarding the horrible 1017 and login queue, feel free to sign it, maybe well have /warnings together LOL http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l-Queue-System

There is one simple thing every company in this industry should realize.

Your customers and your fans are the ones paying your bills, you should probably listen to them.

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Originally Posted by Barenor

of course i know very little about the actual functionality behind the scenes of an MMO and I can only venture to guess or offer my own opinions.

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That was arguably the most rational thing you said OP. I'm not now nor will I "flame" you for your opinion. Instead I'll offer mine..
After reading the countless posts, rational & raging, I have yet to see one person point out the possibility that based on past experience, SE anticipated the population at launch to be significantly lower than what it was. Now looking at it from SE's and investors standpoint, this is outstanding. This means that the product itself is a success. I for one feel this is something to be proud of. Now clearly there are many issues that need to be addressed and that, as has been stated by Yoshi, the devs, and community moderators, is happening. Are you receiving instant gratification? Absolutely not. Should you expect to? Not if you consider yourself to be a reasonable person. Truth of the matter is these types of issues happen with every major MMO release without fail. To say that Yoshi and the dev team should have had the ability to break this industry norm is just plain ignorant. Now I fully expect cries of "white knight" in response to my post and to those people I say -Try being a little less
self-important and understand that everyone else spent their money on this game as well and still show patience knowing that the problems will pass and good times will be had by all.

I completely agree with this, However I would like to add on a bar, which is not too difficult on their bar or a small text that says "Low | Med | High | Full" so we have an idea what to expect and how to deal with it. I utterly despise the idea of having to spam click buttons just because the server queue isn't sure if you can go in.

-Another would be a free world transfer for the first time, then bill the second use and so on, this creates less congestion and familiarity with the system.
-Aethernet crystal names. I can't stress this enough and many have complained as to how inaccurate the teleport names are, infact saying "Bismarck" instead of "Culinary Guild" makes it confusing. It's not like you can tell your first time friend in the giant lopsided town to click on a location name he is completely unaware of.
-Chat bubbles. I know they're trying to avoid spam with the whole chat windows but I would like to see chat bubbles as this makes it easier to read. I tend to pay attention to little details like a squirrel so I tend to keep everything as it is, and seeing someone type something important, then washed away with "X has poked you" "X laughs hysterically" followed by giant names just eating half of the lower right corner of your screen.

These are just my 2 cents.

I'm curious what "less populated" servers you're talking about.

When 18 of 19 NA servers are locked for char creation...that doesn't really imply there would be anyplace for people to GO to with a transfer =p

Thank you for the supportive responses, we're all a part of this mess and having to put up with this together and i've done my share of raging over the early access and beta periods deffinitely. I just feel like they could be doing so much more to at least ease the pain for us the player/customers and make our experience better. instead of trying to provide us options and helping us help them through some of the options I listed above, they have chosen to simply place limits and restrictions on our servers, leaving anyone who isn't logged in AND CAMPING/AFK/NEVER LOGGING OFF is left to bang as the door and rely on luck to try and land an open spot on the server.

I'm just tired of having to deal with this, I just want to play the game, WE ALL just want to play the game, thus why we all rage about what we're experiencing and demand answers or solutions. I'm glad I was able to share my thoughts and see positive feedback from other posters, I know i'm not alone in my frustration, but part of my frustration stemmed from the very people claiming "this is normal for any MMO launch".... yeah.... I'm not satisfied with that response, i'm just not willing to accept it or let it slide anymore. Keep trying to log in everyone! XD

I actually haven't raged over the times that I had been booted/unable to log on at any point during phases 2, 3, 4 and early access. Have I been irritated? Yeah, a little. As annoying as it is to read, this is normal for any MMO. Nobody ever expects an MMO to be so popular on launch day and before. I certainly didn't, considering I was in the beta for 1.0 and I absolutely hated what they were doing. I hated that 1.0 had so much potential but the developers working on the game at the time didn't want feedback from myself, and others from all over the world, on how to make 1.0 better.

That being said, the game could use some sort of afk-timer. It probably won't help with the congestion issues a great deal, but maybe it will help a little.

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Originally Posted by Barenor

4. Due to your inability to prepare for such a massive influx of players and maintain reliable services <snip>
why not try reallocating system/hardware resources from less populated servers to more densly populated

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If their market data indicated that they would need to handle X concurrent players normally, and they overprovisioned so they could handle peaks of 2X concurrent players, and they're hit with 5X players trying to get in at the same time, I wouldn't really call it inability to prepare.
They're just hit with way more players than they expected the peak to be at.
(this is just an example, not actual relative numbers)

Even if some worlds are less populated than others, they're all populated way more than expected, so I doubt there are any resources to move around right now.

I would also like this thread to go all the way up to Yoshida. I hope that this piece will be the motivation the company needs to fix this problem which is a burden to everyone of their precious users. I hate to think of all those poor users that can't log on.

The underlining problem with the huge amount of users logged is that a lot of them are just afk (away from keyboard), and not just for an hour at a time. This can be 6, 8, 10 hours whilst they go to sleep, go off to work or school, or even go watch a couple of hours on Netflix, they leave their accounts logged in to ensure that they still have a place on the server when they come back. For everyone else, this means we can't login, receiving error messages saying that the server is full etc.

I can point out one location, The Hawthorne Hut in East shroud contains a back room that is currently occupied by 20 online users afk, just simply waiting in sanctuary obtaining their rested bonus. That's 20 users that have decided that they've got better things to be doing in real life, and have left their characters logged in so that they can ensure they will still be playing when they come back. On the outside, that's 20 poor gamers who can't login and enjoy their purchased game thanks to these afk members. But also for those of us in-game, we have to suffer with frame-rate drops whenever we look at this building that is densely populated by afk characters, wasting the performance from our graphic cards.

I would like to point out that this is just one room in the game. What about all the hundreds of other rooms in the game that are filled with 10/20 afk characters.

Reading the most recent article on the Square Enix blog http://eu.square-enix.com/en/blog/fi...nsion-digital- I see no mention of introducing a bog standard timer into the game, which as I'm sure everyone can figure out, will allow users to be afk for so long before their account is automatically logged out of the game. If the user intended to come back on the game, then all they would simply need to do is log back in. I'm sure proposing an hour is sufficient to allow users to go to the rest room, answer the door, make a cup of tea etc.

The server would be freed up of hundreds if not thousands of afk accounts, allowing the rest of the world to enjoy this game without having to bump into any of these proposed restrictions, the worst which I believe is restricting users to creating characters on the world of their choice. This I believe is only going to cause more problems down the line. For everyone else who is playing, the game will run much smoother. Yet I don't know how bad this affects the graphics for the ps3 (which I think have been a technical marvel), I'm sure it would help in some way.

The login process needs to follow a gentleman's manners, in that the person in front holds a door open for you to enter, and you would pass on this courtesy to the person behind you. In-game, this would translate to a user logging off, you take their place, and when you log off someone else takes your place. At the minute, with users going afk, it's like they've gotten to this door first and installed a lock, that only they can access, locking everyone else out of that server slot. I've heard plenty about Final Fantasy online being the most friendliest of gaming worlds, but going afk for a long time is a selfish gesture. Giving your slot to someone on the other hand earns you plenty of kudos.

Now the timer is a simple solution, and it's been mentioned many times before. What I would like to do though is draw your attention to why it is important that Square Enix implement this change as quickly as possible.

I can't entirely blame these gamers who do leave their accounts afk. I understand exactly what it's like not being able to log in to the game, trying every 10 minutes with no luck. Knowing that I have to give up and try again the next day is gutting. And when I do finally get in, I'm scared to log off. To think that I might not be able to get on for the rest of the day. I understand why users will leave their characters logged in, to ensure they can get right back into the action for the few spare hours they have during the day. For all the heroic ways I save npcs, for the happiness I get when I sell an item on the market, for the inspiration I get from seeing the world's graphics, instead of coming away from the game satisfied, I log off with trepidation. When will the next time be that I will be able to successfully log in?

Secondary problems now arise from this. For some gamers, they might feel they need to play for more hours then they intended to just to get as much out of the game until the next time they are able to log in. This could be time that's cutting into their chores, sleep or work, and is promoting a unhealthy gaming attitude. The gamer needs to FEEL that they can log off for an hour, ie to go stretch their legs and take a walk, have a wash, make tea and come back knowing that there won't be a problem logging in, because if there is, then next time they may feel pressurised to simply continue playing instead of getting something important done. They should come back knowing that they didn't make a mistake logging off, that they didn't need to leave their pc on and their character afk to continue playing the game.

Also the fact that these users are leaving their computers on for such a long length of time inactive is terrible. Going back to the above example. If all those 20 users in that room are afk for 8 hours, that's a total of 260 hours of computing wasted on characters just standing in a room. And again, this is just one room out of hundreds where this is happening everyday! I don't like to think that Square Enix is having some part in contributing to Global Warming by not simply kicking these inactive users from their game. I know some companies pay tax towards how much CO2 they produce, and I wouldn't wish it on Square Enix, specially with the financial situation they are currently going through, but what if someone could take Square to court for having contributing to these emissions...? I don't know what's possible with courts, but you hear all sorts of crazy things in the news about ridiculous lawsuits, which is why I want Square to cover there backs. I want to be playing FFXXV 20 years from now.

I'm no green peace missionary, but for those who think it's ok to leave a computer running idle for 8 hours at a time, please do jump onto one of those workout bikes that show how much wattage your producing whilst you cycle and power your computer yourself for 8 hours. You wouldn't be able to walk for a week. TURN THEM OFF!

I've taken so long writing this that I've forgotten the rest of my points, but hopefully there's still enough here. I'm sure everyone's had enough of reading already. But please Square, something like a timer is surely a quick coding fix, and will save Square millions in additional servers (costs that may come back to the users if they up the subscription amount). This is my first MMO, but I've heard that even the other MMORPGs have systems implemented like this already.

My personal belief is that Square are holding out on upgrades until next week, just waiting for users to reduce their hours on the game and for other players who had little interest to begin with to leave the game entirely, as this will put ease on the servers hugely. For the time being though, it is up to all us gamers to log off when we are done with playing the game, and let someone else on to enjoy it. Working on an honour system, these users will log off around the time that we would want to go back on etc. Let's all be stand-up guys in a stand-up world.

Lastly, I would just like to add about the character creation and restricting world choice. Can not Square instead just recommend which worlds would be better for the user to log in to, by showing ping rates and world capacity. That way the user can make an informed choice on where they would like to enjoy their game, but still allowing others to choose a world that they were already set on as their friends and family are playing in that world.

By the way, throughout the entire time I was typing this letter, I was afk in the game. I can only apologise, but this is me, scared. I'm so scared that I wouldn't be able to log in I've had to go against my own morals to ensure I would still be able to play. Please Square, you have to fix this, you've made me do terrible things

Regards,
Sam

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Originally Posted by Ashrynn

"At Square Enix Our Motto IS : Don't Ever Admit There's A Problem"

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Given the ENTIRE HISTORY OF ARR is one HUGE 'mea culpa' from SE, facts counter your lie.

ARR is living proof SE admitted there was a 'problem' with V1!

i do not agree with the theory that they have under estimated the no. of buyers for 2.0

Why? Pls hear me out.

Assuming you go to Mcdonalds. You ordered 20 burgers and handed over the cash. 2 min later, someone from behind the kitchen yelled "Hey we are out of buns!!". Logically you shd refund me my cash for 20 burgers but u did not. u chose to hog it while i linger in limbo while you said "we are working on it". Also, when u decided to accept my purchase of the 2.0, you are crunching those sales numbers every day while you are fully aware of how much server load is available. its simple maths right? put the sales figure beside the figure for the users accessible to servers. apparently one figure is more than the other. n u said u cannot anticipate??!!

totally UNACCEPTABLE!!

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Originally Posted by Samiby

Reading the most recent article on the Square Enix blog http://eu.square-enix.com/en/blog/fi...nsion-digital- I see no mention of introducing a bog standard timer into the game, which as I'm sure everyone can figure out, will allow users to be afk for so long before their account is automatically logged out of the game. If the user intended to come back on the game, then all they would simply need to do is log back in. I'm sure proposing an hour is sufficient to allow users to go to the rest room, answer the door, make a cup of tea etc.

Regards,
Sam

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http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...67#post1103367

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Originally Posted by Ashrynn

"At Square Enix Our Motto IS : Don't Ever Admit There's A Problem"

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Can't say I agree with this as they did try to remake the game. While we do have issues now I am trying to have faith that it will improve with time and they will compensate us for time lost.

SE's lack of communication is both abysmal and pathetic.

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Originally Posted by Reizer

i do not agree with the theory that they have under estimated the no. of buyers for 2.0

Why? Pls hear me out.

Assuming you go to Mcdonalds. You ordered 20 burgers and handed over the cash. 2 min later, someone from behind the kitchen yelled "Hey we are out of buns!!". Logically you shd refund me my cash for 20 burgers but u did not. u chose to hog it while i linger in limbo while you said "we are working on it". Also, when u decided to accept my purchase of the 2.0, you are crunching those sales numbers every day while you are fully aware of how much server load is available. its simple maths right? put the sales figure beside the figure for the users accessible to servers. apparently one figure is more than the other. n u said u cannot anticipate??!!

totally UNACCEPTABLE!!

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Interesting comment. In this instance you would ask for a refund, for the burgers they could not provide, and go on having given up on eating 20 burgers. Given your example you should be refunded for your time - time played. (If you have not played at all then that is a full refund) Not expect to play anymore for the rest of the 30 days of time that came originally with the game. This was what you were thinking correct?

Good to see we're all getting along :)... As I said I'm not stating anything that hasn't already been said by thousands of other people. The fact that they don't institute at least an afk limit timer baffles me. Again, I'm sure this letter just fell on deaf ears... or rather blind eyes? But at least I tried, like so many before me.

For me since we get the first month free, they have 1 month to fix my ability to either load in every time or place me in a queue for my full server so I can try to get in and wait my turn. If they can't establish a fix for that, then they obvioisly don't want my business.... which is fine, there are plenty of others who do... but right now I feel like I'm in an abusive relationship with this game lol. I love the game, and she loves to tease me and make think I can play, spending an hour+ of my time trying to load into my full server every night before I either get in or give up.

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Originally Posted by NamidaTekika

I'm curious what "less populated" servers you're talking about.

When 18 of 19 NA servers are locked for char creation...that doesn't really imply there would be anyplace for people to GO to with a transfer =p

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That is kinda his point in reason #3. There is no way to tell what server has more or less population at any given time!
Having this information up front can change your decision on initial server selection before you dive in. Once your character is created your pretty much commited unless you are willing to reroll another character.

Once you put some time in your character you are even less likely to change servers! So Offering a character transfer service would be excellent gesture on Naoki Yoshida's part. The character transfer service deserves to be a paid service. but for right now it will stem the pain and possibly help in getting players from high populated servers to lesser populated servers.

Thank you for having one of the more rationally done posts about these issues.

I agree with many of the ideas presented about how to fix the current problems as well as some of the other ones presented in the responses, such as having showing server population next to the server name.
I actually had a post earlier today that echoed a lot of the ideas presented here, unfortunately I am to lazy right now to look it up and link it :P

Having read the letter from Yoshida, know that at least one person at SqEnix is listening and making moves to implement these types of solutions such as; more servers (supposed to be up this weekend), an AFK timed-kick feature, and extending the free to play period.