Should the launch have been delayed? What else could be done?

[UsagiAndCrepes]

I doubt that even with the best hardware available in the world without any shortages that the situation with the lobby errors would improve significantly.

When you are on a world you are moving around, you are emoting, sharing all your hot takes in town with everyone that doesn't want to know it, sorting through you giant inventory, swapping glams, spamming all your actions in a duty. All of the things you do have to be sent, processed, and then sent to everyone in your vicinity, likewise you receive everything they do too. There is a lot going on and it's reasonable that there will be a capacity problem any way they go about it. Sure they'll need more hardware for that.

When you join a queue you are ... idling. There is nothing going on, no communication between players, nothing. The lobby updates your position every so often, logs a few people in, accepts new people to the back of the queue. How responsive does it really need to be? You live in a world where you use countless apps that take their sweet time to serve hundreds or thousands if not millions of people at once without shutting down the app, it just gets slower. Somehow throwing more hardware at the problem is the only thing that can solve this....... An interesting conclusion to say the least.

[kaynide]

Delayed, no.

1 month from now, the game will be smooth again because people will have filtered out. Same as every single expansion.

This is the norm for FFXIV and indeed many online MMOs; you are encouraged to unsub for a month or two if you are angry at not being able to play.

It's simply not worth throwing money and infrastructure at this because the sheer volume of players will not be this high in the next quarter.

[Dangerjoe1982]

I think the biggest issue about the launch is people across different data centers have different experiences. Even thou this is an English forum, theres people posting for the NA/JP and EU in here..

While i see people from the NA servers saying stop whining and wait the 1hour - 30mins queue. The EU players (im on the Twintiana EU server, thats the lowest pop / newest server to my knowledge). When i get home from work the queue is between 3000-4000 and the login time is about 4hours if i dont get booted.
I have just cancled my sub last night when i saw the +5000queue and i knew i wouldnt even be able to play in the weekend. I will return in about 3months when its playable again, for me this has been one of the most aweful launches i have ever seen, the game it litterally unplayable to me.

[Akiudo]

delay it until they could sort this out ? you do see the very vocal part of the player base throwing the godmother of all tantrums over not being able to play without a hitch for what's not even been half a week ? square announcing a 1 year delay (and anything below that would by itself never solve the problem) would mean that they could kiss a number off subscribers goodbye thats a lot larger than anything this "botched" launch could ever cost them. only good thing about a delay that long at this point would be the subscriber numbers going down so far the servers would need to handle a lot less work.

[Sathona]

Wait...haha. Wouldn't delaying until they got all the servers they wanted by definition have fixed this in that situation? ie, wait for the servers to launch the service that requires the servers?

I work in the tech industry and have seen the delays but they are not indefiniteit's not like the bot caused forever shortages of 3080s we are talking about here. It's just delays on delivery.

Good idea, they should have delayed Endwalker until covid ended and production went back up. /s

[Velvet_Lunarfang]

Delayed, no.

1 month from now, the game will be smooth again because people will have filtered out. Same as every single expansion.

This is the norm for FFXIV and indeed many online MMOs; you are encouraged to unsub for a month or two if you are angry at not being able to play.

It's simply not worth throwing money and infrastructure at this because the sheer volume of players will not be this high in the next quarter.

Actually regardless they should honestly just because it is short term still always best to be prepared then not prepared

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

Literally tons of stuff couldn't have been done. They could have gone with aws for example don't come in here with this nothing could have been done. Options existed they just didn't utilize any of the outside the box solutions.

Name them.

And please don't be vague.

Do you even know how a server infrastructure looks like or how many semi-conductors and chips are needed for just 1? No. No you don't.

They utilize AWS I'm not sure why you think they dislike AWS.

Political callout are not needed here.

So you admit upon your disgusting political affiliation.

If it wasn't true then you wouldn't have been so triggered and reacted so violently against him.

Get better views, yours are childish and disgusting.

And aws? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about yet want to pretend you're the smartest one in the room. Grow up.

[Rhysati]

Wait...haha. Wouldn't delaying until they got all the servers they wanted by definition have fixed this in that situation? ie, wait for the servers to launch the service that requires the servers?

I work in the tech industry and have seen the delays but they are not indefiniteit's not like the bot caused forever shortages of 3080s we are talking about here. It's just delays on delivery.

There has been a shortage on semi-conductors now since the start of the pandemic nearly 2 years ago. And with yet another, hardier strain tearing through the globe, it isn't ending anytime soon. Do you think they are going to wait 5+ years for semi-conductors to be available just so some people aren't inconvenienced for a few days/weeks? That's just silly.

If you get online at a decent time(not prime time), you can get right in. I've played friday, saturday, and doing so again right now. This is just how every MMO launch ever has worked. There were also warnings given that this was going to happen. I don't know what more you folks think could be done.

[Sceros]

Personal prediction: Especially for EU servers, there won't be any major improvements before 2023. You can't wait until 2023 with Endwalker ^^
I mean .. maybe, just maybe, due to how overbearingly harsh the current issues are, Square might be trying even harder to find some work arounds or spend even more money to get some new equipment. But will it work? Who is to say? :3

[JTWrenn]

Good idea, they should have delayed Endwalker until covid ended and production went back up. /s

That is not how server purchases work...not at all. It's not like 3080s where you are competing with bots to buy these things.