To all the people who are complaining about login queues

[HyperiusUltima]

I get it. This isn't good for us, but how many times have they reiterated about semiconductors? MANY, MANY TIMES.

Live Letters, Announcements, and such if you paid attention to their news feed and the letters Naoki Yoshida wrote to us rather recently about Errors and Congestion.

I understand the outrage that is not getting to play your game immediately as soon as you buy it because you're hype about it. The reason why people are getting 2002 errors is simple, as said in the letters Yoshida gave us, summarized: They prevent the Game Servers from crashing and becoming unplayable, and requiring emergency maintenance.

It should be obvious which is worse because it literally kicks everyone out and prevents them from playing the game, compared to trickling through the queue.

Again, the servers are always stressed whenever they've launched a new expansion, and considering that they're wanting to pay more for semiconductors and there being a shortage, welp; there you have it. Yoshida and his team were already trying to rush getting the semiconductors to make the servers they need to handle the kind of load they're dealing with now probably after the player influx when Blizzard shot themselves in the head for WoW alongside the allegations they are facing.

All the dev team tries to do is give their best; this is known since Yoshida does a Live Letter a bit after launch to announce anything new going forward, as well as recap on issues and the like. Every time there's been an expansion release, I've heard this phrase from his lips: "Our team has been working around the clock."

This means they are doing all they can to make sure the launch is clean, even if it is rather muddy right now.

Give it a week or two, then come back. The game time they are giving means this:

For $15/30 Days - It's 50 cents a day you're paying. Multiply by 7 days, and you get $3.50 - a 23.3% refund, and it goes to everyone who has game time currently in the game.

For $30/60 Days - Same $3.50, except it's a 11.6% refund in this case. Still, a refund is a refund.

This is for the current situation - and if they compensate any more days, I will add them here for how much revenue may be lost based on how many days they compensate for us.



To the people who are calling this 'white-knighting', look to this as an example as to what I'm getting at here:

I get it, I sincerely, truly get it as I've experienced similar situations elsewhere. It sucks, full stop. Launch histories of this game and others help to paint a picture that makes this one seem even worse than it is. It doesn't help that other games don't have the login server issues this one does. It doesn't help that other people are able to play when you can't; it only makes the situation worse for the person unable to play.


We "White Knights" get it. We get that people are rightly angry that they're not able to participate in a game they're paying for. We get the need to express that anger and frustration on an official platform. We also get that there's a much larger chain of events that has put things out of SE's reach. We're able to see the broader picture, have paid attention to SE's communication with the players, likely have more empathy than others, and are able to be understanding of the constraints events of the past two, almost three, years have put on international trade.

I know from personal work experience that there's a 6-12 month lead time on *plastic bottles* and that shipping times and costs have more than tripled. That's wreaked havoc with our supply chain and logistics operations. The company I work for's one of the largest in a hobby industry that's a complete luxury and have seen historic growth the past two years. People are home a lot and therefore get involved in hobbies more than they previously did; including trying new games. Many businesses, including the ones who make the components that go into servers, aren't able to get the parts they need to make their product fast enough to keep up with demand, if they're able to make them at all. Even if they can place the order, the lead time on receiving it is likely very long, which means the lead time of the server manufacturers is equally long.

We saw the exhaustion and sadness on Yoshi-P's face when he announced the recent two week delay. We know the CBU3 team have been working ridiculous hours to get things working as well as they can.

We understand that SE had planned the installation of an entire new data center which, when online, would have funneled Oceanic players off existing DCs, reducing burdens on their worlds. This fact alone shows that SE was paying attention to growth, anticipated the need for new servers, and planned accordingly based on projected growth rates. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond SE's control dictated that the DC wasn't able to be installed on the original timetable and the OCE players are still logging into the various JP/NA/EU worlds they have been.

If being empathetic, seeing the broad picture, and understanding that people, departments, and companies are under unprecedented constraints means we're "White Knighting", so be it. It does not, however, mean we can't understand peoples' outrage. Many of us White Knights aren't able to log in either; we just try not to let it upset us much.

Major Edit: Welp. Here we are again. Another 14 days added on as of 12/15. This is a lot bigger than expected. Let's go over the numbers again.

$15/30 Days = 0.50 a day, 21 days = $10.50, divided by $15 = SEVENTY PERCENT OF MONTHLY REVENUE REFUNDED TO THE COMMUNITY. 70%! That's A LOT for just their monthly sub for this month in terms of revenue.

$30/60 Days same deal, except now it's cut into 35% of their bi-monthly revenue. Still, it's pretty major in the long-run. Anymore and we may be looking at close to a full refund of a month(which I hope doesn't happen at this point given how much they've given already as a service that's extending BEYOND what any normal MMO would do in these circumstances historically).

There's also the fact that they're freezing advertising and the Free Trial all the way up to Heavensward temporarily - which cuts into sales on Endwalker a lot. I'm pretty sure this short-term move is the best they can do considering the current state of the game they've been monitoring for nearly three weeks, not only because they need a lot of fixes, but they also have to control the congestion issue. If they don't, they know it's going to spiral out of control - so it will definitely hurt part of this quarter.

[Haseno]

To say that I'm not frustrated would be a lie. However, this is largely out of Square Enix's hands. The global supply lines are damaged in a very major way and people can 't expect a private company to resolve that issue because the issue is entirely political. People vote for bad policy, bad politicians, and economic harm is the end result. Private Companies are harmed from that bad policy, and us as consumers all suffer the consequences. People have unrealistic expectations of private companies to be miracle workers in situations like this. But, people don't take the time to learn how government policy and action negatively affects their daily lives both directly and indirectly. So, they have no right to complain. They voted for it. They are responsible for it.

[Mialee]

LOL they OVERSELLED over what the could manage they don,t deliver we don't care WHY. WE don't need to pay if THEY don't deliver! If you think Square fill go broke if they give 1 free month... It's been 1 week it's still shit! Next week you will say wait 1 more week and it will be still shit after is Chrismast break and it will still be shit...

[Wiglac]

But they take our money... Shame on You

[Hasrat]

It's not even about "the semiconductors" really. I mean, to an extent it is, yeah. But more importantly it's just down to a time crunch. Even with semiconductors raining from the skies, implementing new hardware in the span of months is just not a thing that really happens here.

"But they knew about this problem for years!!!!"

Yeah. And had an entire new data center planned, expected to considerably spread out the player population (on top of the improvements they've made across all servers/data centers over the years).

They went into this launch expecting it to run like every other launch. The population exploding faster than they could react kinda threw a wrench into that. Without that explosive growth, everything they've done so far would very likely have been sufficient to handle what their projections previously predicted the population would be.

But, here we are.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of rational complaining. And the situation is certainly a mess. But at least take a moment to recognize that nothing short of omnipotence would've allowed the company to adjust course to accommodate everyone flooding into the game in a timely manner.

As for queues, yeah, they're bad. Worse than expected, sure. Should the queues/servers have been improved more prior to this? Maybe. But, having never been pushed to this limit previously, it's kinda a situation of "never knew it needed fixing." Again, refer back to "it handled us just fine before, but then the flood happened."

[Puremallace]

Noone is complaining about the queues. We are not stupid the problem is the disconnects occurring during those queues which I have seen happen since like 2007.

[Mykhel]

Then they should have delayed the launch with that explanation. Period. This game was not losing its traction at all. Had they waited until the new year, we would've understood. At least I would've been able to login to the damn game. I also don't care about "how little" we're paying. We're paying for a service WE CANNOT ACCESS. This is why they ran betas. This was also what I thought they delayed the game for a few weeks back. They should have gauged: "You know what? We can't sufficiently supply our player base with servers. Let's delay a little longer until we can."

Ask anyone. They would've rather had another delay than a game they can't even play now.

[Siyukan]

People don't care about the queue.

People care about crashing/errors in the queue.

No amount of semiconductors will fix that, thats spegetti code.

If the Queue didn't crash, and you knew you could check back every hour or so and go from 8000, to 200 without a crash, you'd evaporate 95% of complaints.

People have a right to be upset about that, however we just don't need to hear it every 2 minutes and the 10 people threatening to quit.

[Mykhel]

If the Queue didn't crash, and you knew you could check back every hour or so and go from 8000, to 200 without a crash, you'd evaporate 95% of complaints.

100% correct on this.

[Esper56]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...edgdhp&pc=U531

Apple is having to halt iphone and ipad manufacturing.

APPLE, ONE OF THE BIGGEST TECH GIANTS, DOESN'T HAVE THE CHIPS NEEDED TO MANUFACTURE THEIR IPHONES AND IPADS.