every time someone says "a chip shortage, or they can't find more servers".

[Juun]

I want to highlight this point.

Know what TCAS is?

Its the system you put on aircraft so they dont meet by accident at 30000 feet at 650 mph. FF 14 servers are one thing, a non functioning TCAS on an airliner means it doesnt leave the ground.

Oh you COULD, I suppose...but theres no guarantee the plane, or its passengers, will ever reach their destination alive.

Pretty sure most airplanes are grounded, if you havent realized there is an ongoing pandemic going on.

[Lily_Skye]

i think of this. sorry that I could only find a clip in Spanish for the part I wanted. https://youtu.be/xxoEiKfjzlQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKG-kbKeIo

[Nothv13]

NA and EU Worlds haven't been fine since Shadowbringers launch.

There are several people tracking the active characters on the lodestone. In these benchmarks, EU and NA have been at over 20k active characters per world since June 2019. In June 2020 they were at 22-24k. All while japanese servers were at 11k per World. JP just has vastly more worlds per DC and per active player. (let's leave the housing implications per world out for now)

Population grew slowly but steadily and servers have been full. They just didn't do anything and had no plans to do so until post Endwalker launch. It's a massive failure on their planning and managment department since they cheapened out to future proof anything.

And yet as an NA player on one of the most active, I never saw anything above a 100 person queue that would pass faster than it took to go to the bathroom. As you said the population grew slowly but steadily, they had plans based on this growth to add more such as the OCE, and then additional server power in other datacenters. The covid pushed the OCE plans out due to shortages and the influx caused them to try and push up the other upgrades, but once again chip shortages still pushed those out. You have zero understanding of the situation or why businesses do not purchase things they can't predict they'd need.

[Flatopia]

You're right. You cracked the code. You have seen through the phony weave of lies those businessmen are hiding from you. The truth has been finally set free!!

These japanese business men looked square at their playerbase and said "Muahaha, We want less player retention, worse customer experience, less potential revenue from players unable to log in, the backlash of the launch going poorly, and continued issues caused by dated hardware not meeting our player counts because dude it would be sooo funny."
They then proceeded to rub their hands, ready to lose so much potential money as businessmen get excited to do as we all know.

Thank goodness we have heroes like you, ready to put those money-hating greedy businessmen to the axe for daring to blame a global catastrophe for causing supposed 'market shortages'-- whatever that means.

[Arazehl]

In June, July and August there was a massive growth spurt that was somewhat unexpected when Blizzard's got caught literally with their pants down. On top of that the player base wasn't happy for a long time. Miserable in fact. When the investigation into Blizzard was announced to the world people playing their games such as WoW, became fed up with Blizzard. Just prior to this happening Square Enix decided to have their FFXIV Free Trial extended to include Heavensward all the way up to level 60.

FFXIV was really the only mmorpg in that genre to have one of the most decent and successful games out at the time with Shadowbringers being the hit that it was and with the Free Trial dangling in front of players who needed a good mmo to got to. What could be more enticing?

They really weren't expecting this massive influx of players that they receive, they were caught off guard. At the same time it was a blessing and a curse. Yes if they had fix the server problems earlier rather than later, they wouldn't have been so caught off guard.

Veterans remembers when a new housing ward released and everyone would swamp the login servers as soon as they'd come online and of course they'd crash. The servers couldn't handle the load and still can't.

I for one hope and believe that that Square Enix, and the dev team learned something from this and that whatever they put out in the future for this game that they have better foresight at what's going on in gaming community, to expect the unexpected and to learn from their mistakes. This is just my PoV.

[Sathona]

There is a real shortages don't get me wrong. Thing is you ever stoped and think why there shortages? Some company's like Samsung,aplles and some in chains buy more that they need to be the only 9nes in the game.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

[LittleImp]

You seem to make it sound as though the issue is very simple to solve through the writing and changing some code. I'm not going to disagree with you because I have no clue about what goes into coding a game but I'll just ask this; if it's honestly such a simple thing to do for the devs, just a bit of code to write so that you keep your place in the queue, why do you think they wouldn't do that? Do you honestly believe the developers are just lazy/don't care about profit or public appearances?

It isn't necessarily simple; It depends entirely on the nature of their existing system and how badly they've programmed themselves into a corner, and could take anywhere from weeks to months to address.

And if you're saying; "Oh well they're incompetent and can't do this thing I am saying because they are bad at creating/improving a game" then again, where is the solution exactly? Should they hire new developers right now? Ask them to quickly tackle writing/changing code for a game they've never worked on? Is it an apology you'd want? Money back?

Addressing outstanding issues with the queue system / error handling should have been a development priority well before the expansion came out. Instead, SE seems to have decided to take a gamble and leave these problems unaddressed until launch, likely so the game didn't need to be further delayed and they could allocate development resources / their budget elsewhere. They're probably rushing to address this problem now, but as said earlier something like this could take weeks or months. Many of the simple bandaid fixes they've deployed haven't worked.

I don't want anything out of this. I've sat through the queue exactly one time in almost two weeks, because I work from home and can keep my character logged in. I'm just tired of seeing people trying to offload blame for this onto literally everyone and everything but the actual party responsible for what is happening. SE dropped the ball hard here, and no amount of bizzare white-knighting or attempts to otherwise reframe reality will change that.

[hynaku]

Not sure about this chip shortage. Because the company I work at just upgraded and replaced all there server hardware other day.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Not sure about this chip shortage. Because the company I work at just upgraded and replaced all there server hardware other day.

On a whim with no planning? Or with a lead time and wait.


They are being produced. It's just a shortage, which means supply is lower than demand.


Anyone can get things with enough lead time and a wait. Yall just don't want SE to have to wait like everyone else does.

[Aurikai]

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-...-shortage.html



https://marketrealist.com/p/when-wil...-shortage-end/




https://hbr.org/2021/02/why-were-in-...uctor-shortage



COVID 19 + lockdowns + closed facilities + continued lockdowns in some nations = very few semiconductors and chips = very few if any available servers.

No components = no servers.

When you shut down a huge slew of the industry that supplies the massive increase in demand for computer systems thanks to those same COVID 19 restrictions, dont be surprised when there is a huge backlog and shortage of the materials needed for said servers because said industries that MANUFACTURED those components have been closed for an extended period.

You listed a bunch of old articles talking about the entire semiconductor industry, the only real shortage is for specialized semiconductors for cars and odd devices, not servers. How about some real world data?

In Stock - Server CPUs for just one retailer (51 pages - including TOP AMD/Intel)
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100008494%204131

In Stock - RACK MOUNTABLE servers for one retailer (100+ pages)
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100283...031341&Order=3

Servers from DELL shipping within 10-20 days (i.e. the period from which EW was originally supposed to release until now)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop...ts=35782,35781

Article with graphs showing large increase in shipments of CPUs
https://seekingalpha.com/article/445...-shortage-ends