2nd night unable to play because of LONG queue times

[ApeKing]

Your comment sure doesn't help the problem. Just makes others more angry. It was popular before 6.0 and queues sure wasn't 1000+ like they are now.

I just found out there is an ignore list. Makes things much more pleasant

[DontPanicMe]

It's not even a valid comparison, at least in my country.

It's not possible to order a PS5 when there is no stock - you can register your interest sure, you cannot place an order and pay your cash upfront: it's illegal to take money for an item if that item isn't already in your possession and you don't know when the item will be provided to the customer (i.e. you're not a position to reasonably confirm when the customer will receive the item).

Meanwhile I've paid for connectivity to their data centres so I can play their game, received nothing in return and no ETA on when I should receive it - just excuses.

This is actually a lot more comparable to an ISP selling you gigabit fibre broadband, but not having enough IP addresses available so you can't actually go online anyway. Again, THIS would be illegal.

There aren't similar consumer protections in place for software sales, or there are but they're not enforced, so software companies don't care to treat us better, and they won't until regulation steps in and forces them to.

It's even worse than this imo. I fully expect this to carry on for 2-3 months and with the amount I've been able to get on in the last week - I seriously would put my account on hold and stop paying for a few months..... only..... I can't! If I do I will lose my house! At the very least they should again suspend auto-bulldoze of housing while people can't login.

I've been sitting in a queue - and just playing wow instead. Imagine that.... the new launch of a new expansion of FFXIV has got me to play other games more......

[CrimsonGunner]

It's even worse than this imo. I fully expect this to carry on for 2-3 months and with the amount I've been able to get on in the last week - I seriously would put my account on hold and stop paying for a few months..... only..... I can't! If I do I will lose my house! At the very least they should again suspend auto-bulldoze of housing while people can't login.

I've been sitting in a queue - and just playing wow instead. Imagine that.... the new launch of a new expansion of FFXIV has got me to play other games more......

didn't they announce they stopping auto demolishing houses though?

[Yahallo]

It's even worse than this imo. I fully expect this to carry on for 2-3 months and with the amount I've been able to get on in the last week - I seriously would put my account on hold and stop paying for a few months..... only..... I can't! If I do I will lose my house! At the very least they should again suspend auto-bulldoze of housing while people can't login.

I've been sitting in a queue - and just playing wow instead. Imagine that.... the new launch of a new expansion of FFXIV has got me to play other games more......

didn't they announce they stopping auto demolishing houses though?

They did. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...b5258c95eda939

[DontPanicMe]

Enterprise hardware and Consumer level hardware are totally different worlds.

Its a bit like "I can buy a new car so you are obviously talking crap when saying tanks are not in stock!"

[Nulstat]

Im sorry but i totally disagree with you. Wow has been able to solve this problem with sharding and virtual machines since like 2014. The fact that SE was too cheap to develop that capacity is on them. The chip shortage has been going on for over a year, and basically Yoshi put up a post (after i had already purchased endwalker) saying o "oh poopies server on fire". Now they are saying a fix is months out. This represents that SE decided to let their server infrastructure launch a new expansion with zero capacity for returning players. It doesn't get much more business stupid than that, and its a shame because they have a very high quality product here. SE deserves every bit of negative feedback they are getting and the community should NOT be understanding. Technology exists out there to solve this problem, they chose not to purchase it, and they expect us to pay for that decision with our time. A little boohoo from Yoshi doesn't change that, and he should be as mad about it as we are.

WoW is a slightly bad example to use here. Sharding came to pass because of the exact reasons that FFXIV is having now, back in Warlords. Blizzard also had far more servers, and all of them were suffering. Sharding is great and worked for them - a process that FFXIV already uses, as multiple instances have always appeared on launches and tend to vanish when no longer needed. I believe they may have even upgraded that sharding technique for this expansion. WoW also serves as an excellent example of why too much expansion is a bad thing when it comes to servers - the literal undercapacity of many servers now so severe that they've combined them so populations feel alive instead of lonely.

They upgraded their servers back in July. They accelerated their plans for servers that were slated to go into play in 7.0 and started pushing them for 6.0 instead - we're getting a whole new Datacenter for Oceania, hopefully in February. They stated, also back in July, that they were waiting on the delivery of servers that they had bought and were in talks for other vendors for more, because - unsurprisingly - offering more money doesn't solve the issue that something doesn't exist. They raised the server caps as much as their new servers could allow for without frying them. They even brought in their dev servers to try and add more.

The FFXIV team has done literally everything possible, even choosing to try out cloud servers and finding them unsatisfactory for the needs of the game. Like Yahallo said - there's a lot of entitlement bleeding from the people who are upset about a minor inconvenience to their day when all efforts have been made to alleviate that as much as they can. They have gone to great lengths, and for that I am completely understanding and yes, I would expect any reasonable person to be understanding as well. That they aren't is simply entitlement on their end.

[DontPanicMe]

didn't they announce they stopping auto demolishing houses though?

If they did I missed it - would love to see they have! I know they did during the initial lockdowns for COVID19 but they started them back up again I thought. I don't (at least totally) blame SE for this current issue, I work in IT in a large college and we've just put in around £1.5M virtual infrastructure and have had significant problems with lead-times on servers ourselves (like 3-6 months), but it does still "irk" me to be paying for the game I cant use just to avoid having my house demolished.

While I don't want to stop my sub, I would definitely consider that as an option for a couple months while this problem still exists if I didn't risk losing my house. If anyone can point me to any current announcement that they HAVE again suspended demolishing houses that would be very welcome.

[DontPanicMe]

They did. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...b5258c95eda939

Many thanks - I must have totally missed that. Appreciate the link

[souldonut81]

I'm sorry but saying that the community shouldn't be understanding is just entitlement. At the very least Yoshi P and the dev team deserve our understanding as I am pretty sure they are not happy with the situation either.

I participated in WoW Legion's launch and remember the usual early expansion issues so I wouldn't say they solved the problem since 2014. Also, the issue only became severe when the 5.5 wave of WoW refugees appeared, that was the main point when FFXIV's population growth exceeded their expectations by an unprecedented margin and it happened this year in the summer. If the numbers were around their projected numbers, we would probably see another Shadowbringers level of launch. Furthermore, the current setup for the servers allowed for an incredibly smooth experience once you are in game. The main reason why queues are long is due to the number of people wanting to play exceeding the limit of each world, which is set at a specific limit to ensure the game runs smooth. Regardless of tricks like sharding and virtual machines, there is still a hardware limit.

The main issue people are stating are 2002's during queue. However, based on the explanation for it, where it is caused by network instaibility/packet loss which is related to the amount of network traffic, how someone's connection is routed by their ISP, etc. It sounds like a fundamental networking issue rather than a FFXIV specific problem. The only real solution is either waiting for less players or more hardware.

Furthermore, you had a chance to refund the Endwalker expansion, even if you only listened into the last announcement they made before Endwalker, you had a month to let your sub lapse. The Yoshi P and the FFXIV devs have gone well out of their way when you consider how most other games handle these type of situations.

Fact is, there are no practical solutions. I suspect this so called "fix" is just a bandage fix or is sacrificing some sort of server stability to try to accommodate additional people. Unless they were able to acquire the server hardware they needed somehow, I don't think much will change. We can look at the result of the last fix, where they just increased the capacity for the login queues. It honestly didn't really do much as the fundamental problems still existed with there being just too many people trying to login and not enough space in the game servers to accommodate everyone, thus people are stuck in the queue longer and there is such a large amount that it increases the chances of things like collisions.

Hahaha, calling me entitled w/e. There is nothing entitled about expecting a software as a service provider to provide the service they are selling. a 30 minute que is manageable. A 3 hour que is a complete failure and is essentially a non functional service. Legion launched in 2016. Shadowlands also launched during the pandemic, and despite having more people, did not have this issue. There is clearly a technical solution. Tech team knows they messed up, thats why our lodestone posts are 4 pages of random server error tweaks. No one cares about them fixing the 90000 error really, what they care about is adding server capacity so that we dont have to sit in que when something happens. There are a lot of hops between my computer and their servers, they cant stop interruptions from happening and the information they are posting is complete garbage/ window dressing. They know they messed up and thats why they posted before the wall even hit. I actually want to play this game, i dont mind personally paying the sub and waiting a few months but a lot of people are not in that position financially. Failing to this level at server provision, however, and then getting your customers to come apologize for you is a real feat. I dont have to persuade you, the reviews after a month or two of these ques will be merciless and they know it. They better figure something out soon. The current situation is untenable, and i dont think its going to start to bleed off until after christmas given the emergence of Omicron.

[Nosterafy]

No... they simply are not available.... It's obvious you aren't part of the IT industry. I've been waiting on a single server for months now. I'm expecting my server to ship out hopefully in the next 3 weeks. What they're waiting on?: No CPUs available. CPUs are just one part of the semi-conductor shortage effects.

And how long have they known about all the extra players and the pre orders for Endwalker I am in IT as well its called a shortage but there is stock coming still they had plenty of time to get some servers just being cheap.