Full Servers; Are you fed up with it?

[Rurushan]

How can you write an essay, I'm limited to a paragraph

Who, me? I'm usually pretty long-winded, sorry. If you are saying that you can't actually put so much in one post because the forum itself is restricting you then... I have no idea why that is.

[kpau]

This explains it's self, the number of players was not and could not be foresee

Most of the article is dead on target but that part is where anyone who works in the Internet industry should call bullshit. Yes, it could. They had the data from pre-orders, they had experience from their last try at it, they had the observed data from a dozen other top grade MMO start ups.

Did they do their world network server cluster design homework? Hard to say but instead of mere days to scale up server nodes, they're taking more than a week. Scalability is intrinsic to any large high transaction service -- doesn't look like they thought about it (from a black box analysis of their actions and the time frames).

Lastly -- this is a business. If you take money from customers, you'd better be communicating with them if they aren't getting product. Daily, even if it is only to say "alligators everywhere, shooting them". Silence is bad PR exponential.

[Eripha]

Another white knight thread that is riddled with arrogance, openly demeans anyone with a different opinion, and stands as an affront to consumer rights. Surprised it got as many likes as it did.

'One Free Month' - On the condition that you buy the game. Therefore it is not 'free'. If a company can legally slap the word 'free' on any part of their product by any loophole or other twisting of words, they will do it because thats what simple-minded consumers latch onto the fastest. Every MMO ever has offered you one month of play without subscription fees. Imagine what it would be like if they didn't. You pay $30 for something you can't play until you go home and pay MORE for it. That would be pretty bad, right? Now imagine if you pay for the game, set up your account, and then your first month is wasted in one way or another due to extremely poor/unusable service. I think the worst are people using some bass-ackwards logic to say that the free month is there to make up for such launch-day MMO issues, because launch-day issues is very common with MMOs. Morons. That month of play is included with every purchase of the game for as long as the game exists. People who join up years from now will still get that month of play, they aren't going to take it out once they have their shit together. And this brings me to another key point:

'Launch-Day issues happen to all MMOs, you should have expected this' or 'It's fine, it's not like any other company had a clean launch' - NO. Seriously? The logic here is 'because (almost) everyone else is less than satisfactory, that makes it okay'? Please stop playing video games and find yourself a new hobby, you are ruining a favourite pasttime of nerds everywhere. GET OUT. Quality standards keep dropping every generation because consumers like you have come to gradually accept the increasing amount of bullshit that companies come up with to maximize their profits and ROB gamers of their money. Remember when we used to pay for COMPLETE video games? That doesn't happen anymore... DLC was invented and so many people bought into it because of the way we were told that we would be buying 'extra' content to extend our games. Nowadays we buy full games with upwards of 25% of the content locked until we pay them MORE. This is content that is ALREADY ON THE DISC and people just keep shovelling money out to these guys and sure enough... other companies look at their profits and say "gee, they made a lot of profits because the consumers paid for something that required little to no extra work, we should do that too" and now even Nintendo is doing it. MMOs are not any different. MMO server clusters cost a lot of money to maintain regularly so naturally, no company wants to overshoot their projected consumer base and end up with extra hardware - that is a profit loss.

'They are doing everything they can' or 'MMO launches are all chaos theory and it's impossible to be fully prepared for them' - More nonsense. Beta tests are a fairly good indicator of how many people are going to be playing your game. The company collects all kinds of data from these things, including the number of logins, the amount of stress their server cluster can handle... all sorts of things that could help them prepare for release day. Not EVERY MMO out there has had a terrible launch either... even if you consider all of them to have been 'rocky', you can at least acknowledge that its to varying degrees of success. The thing is, other companies have already set the standard for running a succesful MMO, and they release their profit statements regularly. This isn't a new age of gaming, its existed for decades. It isn't that it's impossible to be completely prepared for an MMO, its that a combination of poor planning and a desire to maximize profits - which is cost of product vs cost of production, meaning getting you to pay more for less - results in a rocky start like this. If servers are so full, there should be a limitless queue system and an AFK kick timer to reduce stress on the servers and allow players who WANT to play to actually get in without having to waste time mindlessly mashing the login buttons to try to get in... a queue would allow for doing OTHER THINGS while we wait. Until they address why this hasn't been implemented, they are not 'doing everything they can', this is inexcusable.

'Why would they not care about their consumers if they wanted to be successful?' - Well, thats just it. To them, being successful does not necessarily mean caring about you. This what I've been saying the whole time. They watch business trends to see whats making money... and happy-go-lucky dipshit consumers are the majority, paying for products that restrict the consumer just enough that they don't complain and continue to buy their product. You aren't the source of their profit - your wallet is! If SquareEnix felt that they would lose an unbearably large amount of subscribers because of unsatisfactory server capacity, they would have had more servers at launch. They know that if they fix this up real quick, they wont suffer much (if any) damage because you guys are still going to pay to play their game and they are also ensuring that no money is being wasted on unnecessary server clusters.

If you want game companies - or any company, for that matter - to actually care about you, then you have to stop sucking up to them like you're actually friends and let them know AS A COMMUNITY that if you aren't happy with the service provided, you aren't paying for it. If you don't make that direct connection between your happiness and your wallet, then they aren't going to cater to your happiness because they know they can do less work and still get your money. The best example so far is the Xbox One. They didn't listen to what we were complaining about, but they changed a TON of their restrictive policies that aimed to give them all your money. You know why? Because they saw pre-order sales and shit their pants at how low they were. You have to vote with your wallet to get what you want from these guys, and maybe, just maybe, these businesses will learn from Microsofts flop and will heed our warnings BEFORE we drop our support for them.

Think about that next time you open your mouth about complaints like we're children.

I'm not going to treat you like a child, but did you read everything in the first post of this thread?

1. I agree with.

2. YES. At least MOST MMO launches have their flaws and you SHOULD expect it. Also they are shoveling out more money for upgraded servers unless you didn't read that part, so what was that part about not wanting to spend money on more hardware?

3. Well the fact is they never did stress tests on their servers, so they made a mistake. Implement an AFK timer or a better que? That takes time just as putting in increased servers. Things that need to get programmed in, tested and implemented takes days. Though I totally support the idea of an AFK timer and better que.

4. Hey at least them caring about our wallets is indirectly caring about us as well. If money flow stops they will wonder why. I'm also pretty sure they are listening to the community with the all the apologies they are giving and the fact they are aware that this is all going on. It isnt like they are turning a blind eye to it all.

Another thing I'd like to bring up that numerous people continue to say yet I haven't heard any explanation on HOW they know that is:

How do you know that they knew this was occuring from Beta phase 4?

[Puggy]

Ahh, you know, saying that people should expect this from a new MMO is somewhat short sighted in my eyes? Why? Well, glad you asked. Because as long as people defend someone, for doing something wrong, or do not want to make something better, things won't get better.

I mean, humanity could have said "Ahhh bugger, babies during birth and shortly after, man up!" a possible approach, no question there. If nobody would have wanted to actually improve that, death numbers would still be way higher. Though there were some, who did not like having 10-30% of the newborn killed. One of them being Semmelweis who figured out that if the nurses, helping during birth actually wash their hands, the deathcount kinda shrinks.

Or you could say "Well, people die from a sneeze, suck it up." Again, a valid approach, though evolution has shown us, that it might not be the best, as we did develop medicine to prevent people from dying due to some simple cold.

I admit those are rather extreme examples, still, if you tell the industry "it is fine the way it is." I really doubt there ever will be an MMO without starting problems. Because we, as costumers told them that we don't need one.

Why am I saying this? Well because I do not like to see people leave. Not that I like them, it is more a matter of People=Money=more content for me to enjoy.

[Rurushan]

I'm not going to treat you like a child, but did you read everything in the first post of this thread?

1. I agree with.

2. YES. At least MOST MMO launches have their flaws and you SHOULD expect it. Also they are shoveling out more money for upgraded servers unless you didn't read that part, so what was that part about not wanting to spend money on more hardware?

3. Well the fact is they never did stress tests on their servers, so they made a mistake. Implement an AFK timer or a better que? That takes time just as putting in increased servers. Things that need to get programmed in, tested and implemented takes days. Though I totally support the idea of an AFK timer and better que.

4. Hey at least them caring about our wallets is indirectly caring about us as well. If money flow stops they will wonder why. I'm also pretty sure they are listening to the community with the all the apologies they are giving and the fact they are aware that this is all going on. It isnt like they are turning a blind eye to it all.

Another thing I'd like to bring up that numerous people continue to say yet I haven't heard any explanation on HOW they know that is:

How do you know that they knew this was occuring from Beta phase 4?

My post was directed at white knighting in general and other posts made in this topic rather than just the OP.

2. So you're basically saying games released with major flaws (to the point of being unplayable) is completely OK? Why is bad service and buying products that don't work as advertised acceptable to you? Of course they are shovelling more money out for servers NOW but it's something they should have done BEFORE RELEASE. The reason they didn't is because they didn't want to overshoot their player base and end up with wasted hardware that cost them money to have installed. You didn't read/didn't understand what I posted on this point.

3. How long do you think it honestly takes to implement an AFK kick timer or a login queue? You later try to slam me for assuming things I may not actually know, but you (and almost every other white knight) do the exact same thing. I forgot to touch on this one... but people are also assuming we'll be getting free transfers to help balance out server loads when the new ones come in. Where was this stated? How do YOU know, hm? I'll grant you that I don't know how long it would take them to implement a proper login queue, but I guarantee that they have pre-existing code for this from either their own projects or they have it ready for this game and are simply choosing not to use it for reasons they have not explained (poor communication with the players). As for an AFK kick timer? You will never be able to convince me that it takes more than 5-10 minutes to drop a single 'IF' statement that checks to see if the player has been idle for X minutes and then boots them off the server if true. This is MMO 101 and it would be insane to think that SQEX doesn't actually have systems like this already ready made for them... again, it's much more likely that they have their own reasons for NOT doing these things... and they aren't telling us why.

4. Like I said, they only care about you if you if you are the kind of person who doesn't blindly pay for things just because they are from a company you 'trust' and 'love'. If you are that kind of raging fanboy, then they aren't actually concerned with you, because you'll be giving them your money anyway. I'm sure they are reading as much of tech support forums as they can but they are failing BAD on communications. Everything they have stated is either an empty apology (ACTIONS, we need ACTIONS and not WORDS) or a quick write-up on what they plan on doing that is so vague that it results in just more questions from us. We don't know anything. They are getting more servers 'as early as next week'. When? How will this affect the server loads on other servers? Will we get free transfers to help balance server load? Will restrictions be loosened on current servers when this happens?. And I haven't seen anything being said by SQEX about registration issues, the website and instructions given thus far are NOT self-explanatory.

Beta tests are not strictly to test the content of the game. They know exactly how many people were on their servers during these times. They obviously have an idea of how many players their servers can handle otherwise they wouldn't have told us directly that they've restricted logins because they were reaching their capacity. The numbers are there for them and they've had them for weeks. So yeah, thats how I know they know... because they've fucking TOLD us. If they don't actually know what their server limits are then they are lying to us. So pick one, I guess.

[Surfie]

How do you know that they knew this was occuring from Beta phase 4?

It is THEIR job to know. They either knew that there would be issues or they didn't. If they didn't know, then they failed. If they did know, then it was a conscious decision on their part to ignore the warnings due to cost benefit analysis. In either case, the customer has a right to complain.

Imagine working for Nasa and not being able to foresee that an faulty design in something as small as an O-Ring would cause fuel to leak out and lead to catastrophic failure. Actually, that did happen.

[Grasinga]

Thanks for the post, might help clear up some confusion.

[GundamAxelWing]

hey to lighten things up here, look at it this way SE is trying to fight the 1017 Boss and waiting for the backup to come in, go SE beat that Boss

[AthelReiki]

hey to lighten things up here, look at it this way SE is trying to fight the 1017 Boss and waiting for the backup to come in, go SE beat that Boss

This is probably the best thing I've read on here.

[VeriferVenti]

How do you know that they knew this was occuring from Beta phase 4?

The problem with Beta Phase 4 is that the evidence was there, but in Yoshida's recent letter, SE claims that they did not have sufficient evidence to make such a conclusion. There are, however, ways in which they could have acquired more evidence. First, they could have extended the duration of this beta. A weekend of open beta is an insufficient period of time, which we have seen from this launch. Second, given the number of pre-orders purchased in addition to the fact that this is their second attempt with this particular MMO (third if you count FFXI), SE should have been able to estimate a ballpark figure for the number of servers required.

However, the clearest indication that their calculations were off comes from Yoshida's recent letter, wherein he indicates that each server, as seen in the server list, can support 5,000 concurrent connections. This means that the arguments made previously by individuals, who saw that the number of servers allocated to Japan and those allocated to all of Europe and North American combined, were correct. As such, they cannot have expected this launch to go well in Europe and North American. But, with SE, the priority is Japan, and there they succeeded.