Am I being realistic?

[FornaxLacerta]

It is always hard to determine what the masses would do. It seems that Square-Enix (SE) was caught off guard with the FFXIV: ARR variant. I am pretty sure, SE did not realize how their updated game design was going to bring a surge of players.

Which is simply bad project management. There are many professional load testing tools that you can purchase to simulate, in real time, hundreds, thousands and even millions of users performing specific actions on your application. Want to see what it looks like when 50000 users simultaneously try to log into your server? Want to see how your game reacts when 500,000 users try to jump into a queue at the same time? They make tools for testing those very things, like HP Load Runner for instance. Just bad project management here if they're discovering infrastructure issues this late in the game.

[Takusai]

Which is simply bad project management. There are many professional load testing tools that you can purchase to simulate, in real time, hundreds, thousands and even millions of users performing specific actions on your application. Want to see what it looks like when 50000 users simultaneously try to log into your server? Want to see how your game reacts when 500,000 users try to jump into a queue at the same time? They make tools for testing those very things, like HP Load Runner for instance. Just bad project management here if they're discovering infrastructure issues this late in the game.

I concur with the poor project management scenarios. They might have thought about this potential scenario as well. The Project Management team possibly concluded the likelihood of high volume was highly improbable. It is doubtful we would know the decision made. It is for the theorists to deduce and speculate. We are the players just have to deal with the pain.