Casual players locked out of FFXIV for indefinite time!

[Packetdancer]

Honestly, what I think would be the smallest change with the biggest effect would be not having 2002 errors bounce you out of the client.

I mean, I get why it's probably happening from an engineering standpoint. But maaaaaan is that behavior obnoxious.

[MeldinX2]

This whole situation is a mess. I also work full time, and i need to go up out of bed around 04.30 in the mornings to get to work. So i need to go to bed at a reasonable hour aswell. Making my gaming time very limited. As it is now the queue will take up almost every minute of time i have to play. Making it almost impossible to play the expansion other than on the weekends. So i do understand peoples frustrations when you buy a product you can't even access most of the time. Aswell as paying for it each month. I don't know what SE can do about it. But they do need to do something. Not to be mean, but it is their responsibility, it does not matter why things are hard right now. If they sell a product they are responsible for it working. Again it is what it is but something needs to change. If this goes on for weeks after weeks then people are going to lose their patience. I expected it to have issues at launch, like most MMO launches but usually these issues resolve themself in a week or two. But that does not seem to be the case here.

[Saimeren]

I mean, you could turn your pc on when you get home and log in, go about your evening chores, dinner ect. By the time you're done, your queue should be relatively short.

They can't do anything about the queue times that isn't against the purchase contracts. Complaining about it isn't going to solve anything.

[MeldinX2]

I mean, you could turn your pc on when you get home and log in, go about your evening chores, dinner ect. By the time you're done, your queue should be relatively short.

That's exactly what i'm trying to do. I mean even today. I had a 2.860 queue and it is shorter than usual i thought. I started it 16.35 and i still have a 996 people in front of me in queue now at 18.38. So it does take a long time even when it's shorter than usual.

[ForteNightshade]

It's actually a great idea to log everyone out every 8 hours. Think of it this way.

Actually, it isn't. And will likely cause further problems.

First and foremost, the dev team would have to take time away from working on legitimate fixes to implement a system whereas every single character who logs in has an eight hour countdown which will then reset should they log out early. That is no small task, especially for a temporary solution. Now you'll have people being forced to schedule queues to sync up with their friends, resulting in even more people potentially trying to log into the game at the same time. Keep in mind, what has been causing the Lobby Server to buckle isn't just the amount of people but the sheer volume all at once. Players who want to play with friends who can only log in during peak hours will log out only to immediately get back into the queue with said friend(s).

Taking this a step further, if they didn't implement an immediate reset to your countdown timer as your statement of "instantly getting kicked right back out" suggests. They essentially makes it impossible for people to play outside specific times. I, for example, couldn't log into the game during the morning when queues are basically non-existent and still be able to play with my friend who gets off at 7pm my time. Instead, I'd be getting into a queue I haven't actually been apart of, adding to aforementioned volume. In other words, peak hour log in attempts would become significantly worse—especially once Savage releases and every single raider is syncing up their log in to be during peak hours.

Between the work involved implementing such a restriction and the likely ramifications for doing so. It just isn't realistic.

[Laerune]

I do hope they fix this fast or introduce a option to freeze ones subscription. I come from work at 6 PM and on my server this means 7/8k queue. It takes around 5 hours. This means I can only play from 11 PM till 12 AM, since I need to wake up at 06:30, this is not possible for me.

I can only play in the weekends and maybe on Wednesday.

[Thaurnus]

The way it's going the free week will be a free month as things haven't gotten any better. It's quite depressing for us casual normies that work 9 to 5. And to add insult to injury, being in the UK the Euros all get a couple of hours head start over us, and no, I'm not moving house/country just to play.

[CNitsah]

At this point, what I'm waiting from S-E is a promise to buy servers so the situation as soon as they can so it doesn't happen next time.
It's sad for them that at their moment to shine, they failed so bad, but not because of the game itself.

[Packetdancer]

Actually, it isn't. And will likely cause further problems.

*points up* This.

Beyond the obvious "people forced to log out during peak hours might just get right back into the queue and make the situation worse" part, queues in the abstract are weirdly finicky things. In fact, there's actually some really fascinating mathematical theory about how to optimize queues in the abstract; not everything which you would intuitively think would improve things does, and in some cases they make things worse.

Conversely, things you'd think might make things worse—like letting people skip the main queue and funnel through a far more strictly limited one, a'la Disney's Fast Pass system—actually can make queues unbelievably optimized. (Fast Pass, believe it or not, actually speeds up the non-Fast Pass line, and by a lot; there are some really neat studies on this.)

To take the 'limit playtime' suggestion and run with it, imagine you could request a limited playtime window three times per week—say four hours max—and be guaranteed a login spot. So you could say, "I want to play somewhere between 4pm and 10pm Pacific time", and if there was still a 'play slot' available in that time, the system could say "Okay, log in at 5:30pm Pacific, we guarantee you'll be sped through the queue, and your playtime will end at 9:30pm." Now you have this person logging in at a known time, which means they don't have to sit in the long, slow queue for hours and hope. That reduces the main slow queue by one person, but the tradeoff is that the person who got sped in has a time-limited play window once on.

Meanwhile, folks who want their play session to be open-ended (or who used up their limited play slots for the week) can stay in the normal queue.

As you start to fiddle with those knobs, you can potentially find a place where X number of 'limited play' slots will reduce congestion enough that the main queue becomes more manageable; you have fewer people logging in overall at any given moment, because the folks who accepted limited play would log in at a known, predictable time rather than clogging up the normal queue for hours and hours. You could even also further tweak the knobs to see what it does to the model, like making it such that if you request a shorter window (2.5 hours, say, instead of 4), you get skipped even further forward in the login queue.

Now, this is pure theory; obviously there are real-world limiting factors, like "can you raise the number of limited play slots high enough to make a significant difference in the main queue, without causing the limited play queue to become crowded enough that you can no longer guarantee a timely login" and whatnot. Plus, that would take a chunk of development time to implement, etc. So while it's an interesting mathematical and intellectual exercise, and you might even be able to find the right settings for those hypothetical knobs to alleviate congestion, it almost certainly isn't a practical solution here right now.

But hopefully it illustrates a little bit of why queues are a tricky thing at times!