It has now been 19 hours.

[Maeka]

Make no mistake, this is not the players fault. It's Square Enix fault.

That being said. There's nothing us players can do about it, and there's nothing SE can do within reason to fix it outside of suddenly conjuring more server power out of nowhere tonight.
All anyone can do right now is wait.

Don't take the blame away from the playerbase, because that's wrong too. We're just as much at fault for reacting so unreasonable (when I say 'we', I mean the playerbase collectively).

Yes, okay, SE's servers could not handle the load. What would you say their fault is? Not having better equipment? lol. That crap costs money. A lot of money. And they already did a Data Center move, and upgrade... what more do you think they could have done instead? They are already trying to lighten the load by letting Pre-Order people go through first, and then the rest later instead of everybody at once...

What more are you saying they should have done ahead of time?

The only thing I'll say is that they could have made the procedures for logging on and disconnect/error handling a bit better. They seem rather archaic.

But again.....

The Playerbase does share some of the blame, for having such unreasonable reactions to the problem. They are actively making it worse as we speak, and have been all day long.

And emergency maintenance to do WHAT, exactly?

It isn't maintenance they need, they need for people to freaking go to bed so that the load goes down. The only thing maintenance will do is FORCE people to do something they SHOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IN THE FIRST PLACE, and in fact, it will just set a timer for people to clog the servers again. Instead of people trickling off one by one, you'll get everybody logged of, setting their alarms for the maintenance end so that they can all jump back on and crash the servers again and you will have solved NOTHING.