Dear Square-Enix. Please preemptively stabilize servers.

[raelgun]

Yeah pretty much but SE have made major improvements to the servers since 2.0. The servers are generally fairly stable. Even with all that effort we will still probably see some issues, it just won't be disastrous like some people claim.

Dunno dude, WOD release for WOW was pretty bad, blizzard had to reduce the amount of active players per server to retain stability because so many people tried to log in at the same time, FF14 is in my opinion the 2nd most subbed mmo and a good one at that, its gonna be popular, expansion releases are pretty big for advertisement in it self considering how many people have been shot pretty hard by the recent mmo releases like Wildstar and ESO, FF14 has been a good mmo to turn to from there if people did not want to try WOW.

[seekified]

Indeed. If people just took it easy and lived their life as normal things would go a lot smoother. I reckon many have not seen what a popular game's launch looks like and genuinely believe that they are going to be on the front line of levelers having fun. Taking time off, stocking up on food and canceling plans etc... Those people will be really disappointed with how things go! Some of the frustration will spill on the forums too, even though SE can't do much to improve the situation. Just wait and see.

The 19th is Midsummer here in Sweden which is a big celebration - I'm secretly hoping there'll be problems so my FC mates don't get too far ahead. XD

[Sylve]

Dunno dude, WOD release for WOW was pretty bad, snip

WoDs problem is that Blizzard downsized, chopped and merged hundreds of low pop servers after the mass exodus of Subs during Mists of No-Content-at-all.

Then, when all those subs came back ... Well, we all saw the result.

XIV has actually done the exact opposite, server capacity is better now than it was at launch. So as i said earlier, Zero Hour instability, then smooth sailing. I'm not worried either way. Ill get to play when i get to play.

[Reinha]

The 19th is Midsummer here in Sweden which is a big celebration - I'm secretly hoping there'll be problems so my FC mates don't get too far ahead. XD

Same here in Finland. :P

FF14 has been a good mmo to turn to from there if people did not want to try WOW.

FFXIV might have even more appeal now that things are going south in WoW. Players have been asking for more things to do outside raids since about January and nothing is being delivered. Even leveling new characters is boring now. They recently announced a new patch, which brings a new raid and about 30 minutes of questing. That's it. And to add insult to injury, one of the lead developers announced that there will be no more flying in current content areas from now on. All of this tells me that there are a lot of dissatisfied WoW players looking for a new MMO (just have a look at their forums), and this one is just about to introduce flying and has a good record with the pacing of content patches. It would be amazing in the long run if this community could catch some of those MMO veterans, but Heavensward launch might end up worse because of it.

[Hieral]

They have all the statistics they could ever want for how many people will potentially play, including how many pre-orders have been made and how many accounts usually are brought back online after a patch. This should be like any 2.x patch, just on a larger scale

Well, see, the issue with that is they should have known how many of us preordered ARR and should have been paying attention to sales numbers proactively, not retroactively. ARR didn't launch worth a damn. Just seems safe to ask that they, you know, pay attention this time?

[Hieral]

Umm if blizzard can't do it, no one can, blizzard pretty much has the best servers in the business and WOD launch just was hard to log onto, this will be no different.

Nothing can be done, we just have to put up with it, I think only 1.0 launch went smoothly lol considering not a lot of people bought the game to log into.

They forgot to release it on console like they'd been telling people would be happening for two years. Kinda hard to bomb a launch with only one platform out of the current 3 as an option.

[MistyMew]

Same here in Finland. :P



FFXIV might have even more appeal now that things are going south in WoW. Players have been asking for more things to do outside raids since about January and nothing is being delivered. Even leveling new characters is boring now. They recently announced a new patch, which brings a new raid and about 30 minutes of questing. That's it. And to add insult to injury, one of the lead developers announced that there ♥
will be no more flying in current content areas from now on. All of this tells me that there are a lot of dissatisfied WoW players looking for a new MMO (just have a look at their forums), and this one is just about to introduce flying and has a good record with the pacing of content patches. It would be amazing in the long run if this community could catch some of those MMO veterans, but Heavensward launch might end up worse because of it.

Agreed!

As for server stability, a glitch free launch would be awesome but tbh , I dont expect that from any game, but I hope it is as smooth as possible!

[melflomil]

Here is my question. Getting on will be a pain in the ass no doubt about it. If we get on will we encounter any problems like constantly getting kicked out? I

[kyuven]

Nothing can be done, we just have to put up with it, I think only 1.0 launch went smoothly lol considering not a lot of people bought the game to log into.

1.0 had its own problems. The servers were relatively stable, but that was because a lot of people canceled their pre-orders after 2 significant events:
1) People in beta reporting that it wasn't ready for release and/or was just generally terrible.
2) They actually "kindly" asked people not to post reviews for the game until they had a month to tweak everything (hint: nobody listened)

This mess actually lead to the 2.0 launch mess because they anticipated that they'd get fewer players than they did for 1.0.
Ignoring the fact that everyone in beta was saying how improved the game was.

[Firepower]

There will be problems, guaranteed. Completely unforeseen random problems, it is impossible to stress test every single mechanic, instance and functionality improvement to the degree that it is going to get swamped with on early release. Nobody could of predicted the issues with the Duty finder on 2.0 release and they ended up separating them into different banks of servers (now there is, Gaia, Primal, Mana, Chaos, Elemental, Aether) In fact I believed in future that they would eventually get re-merged but the game was far more successful than they planned so they ended up having to make more to alleviate stress on the individual lobby servers.

If I had to make any estimations these events are most likely:

Lobby servers to make new characters (Au Ra + new comers) are going to be swamped at prime time periods of the day, if you intend to make a new character do so during the off peak time for your data centre.

Duty finder is also likely to be destroyed, use party finder, also expect a long wait to enter any dungeon, trial or instance, Because the instance servers can only hold so many instances at any time so expect even as tank classes that you will not be restricted by time taken to gather party members but restricted by time it takes for an open spot in the instance for your particular party. I imagine this will also be worsened by smaller parties being able to take up instance spaces in earlier dungeons.

Main story quests will be swamped, I remember on release that early main story quests such as "Kill 5 Ziz" took forever because everyone and their grandma was trying to kill them to progress those quests, I think square will have learned from this and likely provided story quest enemies with faster respawn times, less open world "farm" quests or larger amounts of them available but your best bet is to try and party up for these types of quests to reduce downtime and increase chances to claim/kill.

Some things will be more popular than others, so if you want to avoid the majority of server issues (instances, over populated zones) try and do something less popular. Levelling the new jobs should be ok because there is enough places for a level 30 to spread out to, I would also like to mention that queuing for a dungeon lower than level 30 is possibly a good idea as the majority are likely to be trying to queue Haukke/Brayflox and they are likely to be overpopulated so places like Toto-rak (everyone hates that place anyway) are likely to provide decent dungeon EXP but without a ridiculous wait time to enter, although I would expect Coerthas to be absolutely rammed within a day. Also earlier pre Heavensward instances and zones have already been stress tested and are sufficiently stable for people to play in. But I can't say the same for the new job quests.

Downloading the update even is likely to be a small problem for a lot of people, although their download servers are relatively good, unless you get the download quickly expect to have a lot of traffic slowing down the speed at which you can download.

And finally Definitely expect to see "the world is full" about every time you log in. Personally I would like to see square re-introduce auto log out back again for a small period of time to allow more people to log in.