7 days of Free Game Time due to Congestion.

[CazzT]

It's actually good, yes people are going to be disappointed ATM of course because they did everything humanly possible to at least try and reduce the impact to people

They didn't, though. They've known of this issue for years. It's happened with every expansion launch. Apparently it happened with ARR launch, too. This isn't something they haven't dealt with before. So no, they didn't do everything they could. By all evidence, they've done nothing about it except give out free game time. And while 7 days is very welcome and very generous, it's also less than a bandaid for a gaping wound that could have been prevented. As another person pointed out, for some people those 7 days don't matter since the hours they work (factoring in drive times to and from) basically means they don't get to play.

One of my FC mates, and a dear friend, works 9+ hours a day right now, with a 1 hour drive to work and 1 hour drive home. He logs on and spends about 5 minutes saying hi to everyone and then logs off because he needs to go to bed to get enough sleep for the next day. Because that's all the time he's able to squeeze in due to the login issues. He's been through long queues before, he knows to expect that. But that's not playing the game. For him, those extra 7 days means 35 minutes of being in game. across an entire week.

Some of my FC mates spent 6+ hours trying to get in.

I want to make it clear I appreciate the generous compensation. It's far more than pretty much any other dev team would give. But I also want to make it clear that this wouldn't even be necessary if they had dealt with this KNOWN ISSUE in an appropriate manner since it's happened numerous times already.

Now I don't know about Square Enix but in general Japanese companies don't operate like companies in the western world do, every single decision has to go through each upper manager until it reaches the end boss, it could be anyone on any level who thought the purchase was "unnecessary", check the ringi decision system- I've dealt a lot with this through work. But I believe they probably realize they made a huge mistake by now question is what happens over x-mas but it's probably not unlikely that heads will roll.

As long as one of those heads is NOT Yoshi's. I can't think of a better leader than that man. I'm sure he has his flaws, but I've rarely seen anyone take responsibility and show genuine, heartfelt sympathy for the plight of players like he has. The day he's gone from the FFXIV team is likely the day I bid Eorzea a sad and painful farewell.