It's apparent SE doesn't care that non-JP servers are encountering 2002 issues

[Saimeren]

You don't like that people defend Square and their server shortage problem? Are you so ignorant that you can't look at the news from time to time?

Not sure if you've noticed or not, but there's a pandemic going on right now. And with such pandemic comes a supply shortage. Most notably for Square is the storage on semiconductors which are used in their servers.

If you're complaining about this, yikes.

[technole]

You don't like that people defend Square and their server shortage problem? Are you so ignorant that you can't look at the news from time to time?

Not sure if you've noticed or not, but there's a pandemic going on right now. And with such pandemic comes a supply shortage. Most notably for Square is the storage on semiconductors which are used in their servers.

If you're complaining about this, yikes.

Yeah, hypothetically they probably roadmapped say 10% growth based on experiences, and then the Asmon/WoW wave hit and they were hit with say 25% growth. That's a lot to plan for in a short amount of time too. If anything they were caught-up on lousy lobby server code that couldn't handle the current limits. It's unfortunate, but I feel this was an area some of the network guys could have spent a little more time with to keep the experience more positive. Like auto-rejoin queue after 2002. No reason some people have to 'nurse' the queue.

[Theodric]

You don't like that people defend Square and their server shortage problem? Are you so ignorant that you can't look at the news from time to time?

Not sure if you've noticed or not, but there's a pandemic going on right now. And with such pandemic comes a supply shortage. Most notably for Square is the storage on semiconductors which are used in their servers.

If you're complaining about this, yikes.

I think it's rather disingenuous to blame the 'pandemic' for a situation that has been a problem even before Covid entered the equation. Why were they spending so much money on advertising the game if they had so little faith in their product drawing a crowd?

Furthermore, they future proofed the Japanese and North American servers but not the European servers. So they took steps towards accounting for player growth, but not to the degree required and only in certain regions - which strikes me as rather bizarre.

I'd also note that it is pretty standard for customers to raise concerns when a fault is detected in a service or product. Just because businesses that operate largely online like to embrace tactics that they would never ordinarily get away with as a more physical service that does not mean that everybody has to roll over, take it and buy into each and every deflection thrown their way.

[Krotoan]

I think it's rather disingenuous to blame the 'pandemic' for a situation that has been a problem even before Covid entered the equation. Why were they spending so much money on advertising the game if they had so little faith in their product drawing a crowd?

Your suggestion then being just don't advertise the product they spent the last 2 years on because they don't want to sell too many? Especially when they have no restriction on where you can play? How would they limit people to exactly which servers and data centers and time slots they wanted?
Can you at least see how that would be against a companies interest and sound absolutely mad to anyone with a stake in their success?
The problem existed before the pandemic but was exacerbated by it. This was their claim.

Furthermore, they future proofed the Japanese and North American servers but not the European servers. So they took steps towards accounting for player growth, but not to the degree required and only in certain regions - which strikes me as rather bizarre.

Likely because the growth in those places and profits supported that. They made plans to account for growth.. that were again insufficient to account for what happened this year, but that wasn't something they really could have foreseen and even once they knew, the ability to adjust just isn't there.

I'd also note that it is pretty standard for customers to raise concerns when a fault is detected in a service or product. Just because businesses that operate largely online like to embrace tactics that they would never ordinarily get away with as a more physical service that does not mean that everybody has to roll over, take it and buy into each and every deflection thrown their way.

Everyone has a right to complain, just as those who feel they have a broader grasp of the situation feel they should explain this to others in a less "charged" form than others tend to present it.



As always this forum has incredibly strong POVs present, some comically so...

[Packetdancer]

Semiconductor shortage is just BS, its a lame excuse.

I mean, it really isn't. It's a massive headache for me at my day job (I work at a hardware design company); I am currently unable to get dev kits for a particular chip I need to develop for, which means I'm flying blind and unable to actually *test* my code until we get real hardware. (Which is honestly stressing me out.)

So far as I know, Square does not lease server capacity, they buy it. As do many MMOs. While virtualization can work fairly well for many things, MMO servers are not universally one of them -- especially not if the MMO server architecture isn't designed for it from the start. (Which I would lay good money FFXIV's server architecture is not.)

It's also worth noting that the average MMO server is not the same thing as a desktop computer; you're looking at more specialized server hardware, with particular performance metrics you must meet. If you don't meet those metrics, you end up with the game not performing -- pressing an action button on your hotbar takes half a second to register on the server, or the enemies 'stutter' around the field, etc.

Even for hosting companies that do have the hardware, Square-Enix can't just go lease the servers at some other facility, because you need the servers within a logical datacenter (like, say, Primal) to be in the same actual datacenter; MMO architectures generally have a lot of inter-machine traffic -- between the server that handles your inventory and character data, whatever world instance server you're on, the communication server that handles all the linkshell and channel traffic, etc. -- and you do not want that internal traffic subject to the speed limits (for lack of a better term) between physical datacenters, as opposed to being on the same local network.

The chip shortage doesn't make the login situation acceptable, it doesn't make it okay, but that shortage absolutely exists and it is a massive day-to-day problem for people in more than a few technical fields. And it's not something Square-Enix can simply solve by throwing money at it; they've demonstrably been willing to pay multiple times list price for the servers they need, but those just aren't available.

Your suggestion then being just don't advertise the product they spent the last 2 years on because they don't want to sell too many?

To be fair, they actually did halt sales of the digital copy of the game this past spring, so it's demonstrably something they're willing to do to alleviate pressure if they think it will help. The fact that they haven't done so suggests to me that their own internal numbers probably show that most of the folks who wanted to get in at Endwalker launch already bought copies, and that as a result removing it from sale wouldn't do much to alleviate the login issue.

That said, I don't know what they could actually announce. I cannot imagine they aren't looking into what options they have to alleviate the login problems, but if they just announce "we're looking into what options we have", people will say it's just empty words and they shouldn't say things until they have a fix planned. But if they don't announce that they're still looking into what further options they have, folks take silence as proof that they don't care.

[elvenmad]

You don't like that people defend Square and their server shortage problem?

For EU and NA the servers are leased, for EU I know for a fact there in Frankfurt Germany, and is the very same server company that provide servers for 100's if not 1000's of publishers in the EU, WoW, Tera, Rift..practically all the EU servers for games published in the EU are from the same company, which now makes you think, if more people are playing FFXIV and not other games the overall load on servers is still the same as before Endwalker, for every player not playing X game is now playing Y instead = still same load on servers.

People keep mentioning "semiconductor shortage too, that's just BS,
Maybe, just maybe, due to covid and more people playing online games these sever company's have increased the cost slightly to "cash in" hence I believe its more a fact that Square do not want to lease more server capacity for the EU and NA regions as a more save the huge influx of revenue for them. This is not a fault of the FFXIV team, Yoshi etc this is down the Square themselves they are the ones who control the purse strings and have set budgets for each of the game projects and publishers.

just down to corporate greed, they literally don't want to spend their huge influx of profit