The login issues and you: Why most posts here are uninformed and pointless

[ZombieLover84]

You know why I don't like threads like this which try to stop people from complaining/getting mad about a big problem? Because it encourages the repeat of the same mistakes. Do you know what happens when enough people get pissed off about a mistake? Those responsible for the mistake get punished, and the mistake doesn't usually happen again.

SE has *no excuse* for making such a stupid planning mistake. They had all the data they needed (being their 3rd FF mmo) for server capacity requirements and all the time in the world to test it during development.

Whoever decided to limit the server capacities to this degree has cost SE a lot of money and made the launch of their new MMO a joke. Those responsible for this should be fired without question, because the same thing would be done in any other industry.

So stop telling people to calm down over something they have plenty of right to be pissed over.

I said you have a right to be upset. However, I would like you to provide me this information that SE had all the data they needed to provide a perfect server launch. Any server based game is based on estimates, market data, etc. That data can be wrong, even with the best tracking in the world. Look at Diablo III. A company that handles the biggest MMO in history, underestimated the server capacity requirements needed for it even with preorder records beta testing for over a year.

It's an estimate, and estimates and be wrong. And you always under estimate. Over estimating is wasteful and cost's business's money. If a product is overstocked, then it was expected to sale better then it did, and now it's costing the company money because it's sitting on the shelf.

[Goromaia]

[Matty86]

Gw2 didn't have this issue, not even close, GW2 had some sever crash the first 2 days, fixed in.... 20/30 minutes? Then you could play for hours whitout any issues. And GW2 had (and still have) 2x the concurrent user online.
Diablo III sold 10x what this game will ever sold, still it wasn't unplayble for 10 days... yes Diablo III release was bad, 1 of the worst release ever, but NOT as bad as FFXIV ARR.

[Ghemyni]

Bravo! I like your attitude.

[ZombieLover84]

The duty finder, the main cause for every error that was in world, which in effect caused SE to limit populations was a KNOWN FAULT in beta. So population problems aside, they knew in beta with those limited numbers of players that it was an issue.

That aside, the game was crashing within hours of launch. They didn't have that many people go out and buy it and install it first thing that morning. The game exploded from digital downloads. Not to mention that the downloads and the CD copies still needed last minute updates. So those players weren't live right off the bat.

If you want to say it was the EA population, fine, but remember EA population had to be registered and receive a code to get in. They knew the numbers. Even if it wasn't until EA, they should have pulled the launch by a week to fix the problem.

That is not accurate. While you did have to be registered and get a code, I didn't register until 2 hours after EA started. So again, they didn't know my numbers.

And while they knew the pre-sell numbers for digital sales before EA, those numbers increased at an unexpected rate during EA, which is why the duty finder crashed so quickly. Most of the people I currently play with did not preorder this game, hard copy or otherwise, until EA. The point where data tracking didn't mean anything anymore because they couldn't change anything at that point. I myself and around 10 real life friends all registered our preorders the first day of EA. We all did not beta test. I personally don't like beta testing. The majority of MMO players do not beta test. We got on EA because 1. We knew we could cancel if we didn't like it and 2. We knew we were going to be able to keep everything when we moved over to launch if we decided to buy the game. All 10 of us did.

Now imagine how many more people in the world did the same thing we did.

[BlueStar62]

I said you have a right to be upset. However, I would like you to provide me this information that SE had all the data they needed to provide a perfect server launch.

Are you serious? You don't think that SE would have enough data on this matter after managing MMO games for years?

I have not known a MMO based company, especially one with as much MMO development experience as SE, to ever underestimate server capacity to this degree. Sure new MMOs have load bearing problems and maybe laggy servers at the start, but this is absurd. Do you have any idea just how far off the mark SE was with this? There is a difference between being slightly off in your estimates, and being miles off. SE screwed up big time.

[ZombieLover84]

Gw2 didn't have this issue, not even close, GW2 had some sever crash the first 2 days, fixed in.... 20/30 minutes? Then you could play for hours whitout any issues. And GW2 had (and still have) 2x the concurrent user online.
Diablo III sold 10x what this game will ever sold, still it wasn't unplayble for 10 days... yes Diablo III release was bad, 1 of the worst release ever, but NOT as bad as FFXIV ARR.

Yes GW2 did have this issue. It crashed the first two days and they stopped digital sales, just like FF 14 has. And it wasn't fixed in 20-30 minutes. They fixed the login issues rather quickly, but at the sacrifice of taking The trade post down for over a week.

http://www.inquisitr.com/312183/guil...tivity-issues/

And guess what, it happened about 4 hours after headstart....just like FF 14.

You just said Diablo 3 was unplayable for ten days...but said this game was worse....when it's only 7 days old.....How is your math that bad.

[Derceto]

Beta 4 was a train wreck in motion. One thing after another went wrong. That alone, should have been reason enough to delay this game a week or two and have it done properly. Namely, because of how important it is to not fail again.

Personally, I would have been much happier had it been delayed 2 weeks, and launched properly. What's done is done however. I was never very angry or vocal myself, as I've been through a few harsh game launches. However, I can't blame those who were. The arguments are most certainly valid, that the more we tolerate these failures, the more acceptable they become.

I just get the impression that SE launched the "bare essentials" in place, when good practice is to over shoot expectations to be well prepared for potentially high adoption. When SE themselves claim along the lines of "Another mistake like FF XIV could be the end of SE", I just expected this to be taken "far" more delicately and with "far" more care and preparation. All in all, my fingers are crossed for a smooth movement forward with this maintenance. I truly hope everyone can play without worry after this.

[ZombieLover84]

Are you serious? You don't think that SE would have enough data on this matter after managing MMO games for years?

I have not known a MMO based company, especially one with as much MMO development experience as SE, to ever underestimate server capacity to this degree. Sure new MMOs have load bearing problems and maybe laggy servers at the start, but do they stop selling games and disable character creation all together? Do you have any idea just how far off the mark SE was with this? There is a difference between being slightly off in your estimates, and being miles off. SE screwed up big time.

A larger MMO company, with way more experience then SE, halted digital sales.

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1565854...e_updated.html

While Arenanet developed Guild Wars 1 and 2, NCsoft published. And NCsoft is one of the largest MMO publishers in the world.

Sim City, another game that requires always online, also stopped digital sales. How long has EA and Sim City been around?

[Raist]

Umm... shouldn't this have gone under General?

Oh.. but wait... most of us can't post in General because of some stupid restrictions they have there.

Just saying... seems a bit odd to make comments about all the unqualified posts in technical, when the post itself may not belong in Technical either.

As for the "why we were having issues", it wasn't an issue with capacity per world server as much as it was capacity to the back end servers that manage instanced content. The world servers can handle substantially more then they are currently allowing. It's the back end servers responsible for instanced content and such that were getting overloaded because they were assigned to service multiple worlds at once, and that estimation for capacity is what was off. SE had to come up with a quick fix for that issue, as it was adversely affecting a lot of popular content (not to mention it is required for main story progression and eventually job quest lines as well).

So, basically, they had multiple approaches they could have taken, some more involved than others. They appeared to have just taken the easier way out (in terms of coding and such). They could have restricted access to content somehow, until they could get more hardware to support it (which is a large part of what they are doing--more servers on the back end and restructuring how many worlds rely on them at once) but that would have been a more complex operation and possibly require more server downtime to implement then they liked. Choking down the gateway/queues to allow fewer people in was likely just an easier task to accomplish in the short term.

So, they aren't necessarily needing to add more capacity per world just to support us as much as they are needing to add more capacity for the subsystems that support these worlds so they can actually handle at least the originally projected capacity. Granted, they need to beef up the hardware for future expansion and such... more worlds (and more support servers to service them) for more new players and such, but the real issue is more with the topography of the servers and how too many world servers were relying on too few support servers for specific content.

Who knows... with any luck, this new back end layout may have very well extended supportable capacity per world without any tweaking to the worlds, but it's nice to know they are going to ramp up the worlds anyway. They won't know just how successful it can be until they see how the new topography holds up under stress though. Once all that is reworked and seems balanced, they may find they can start letting more people back into each world until they reach the limits of the new structure, and retweak again. We just won't know until they get it all back up and fling the gates wide open again.

One thing for sure... I don't expect the growing pains to end anytime soon. But, if nothing else, it sure will be nice to get some relief in the short term.