Sincere Recommendation: Accept you will not be able to play, walk away for a while

[Krotoan]

Well, yes, that does make more sense than a nerd rage rant, but I still feel that there could have been something more they could have done. I'm not so upset I'm going to attack random people on a game, but they needed this to go a bit smoother. Just wishful thinking I guess.

To be absolutely fair though, SE COULD have rewritten a lot of their login and queuing processes to "future proof" the game. Things could have been better but most of the people ranting are "Hindsight 2020" ragers. SE has many opportunities for improving the game purely from a software point of view, but it takes something like the current situation to support the need for that level of rework, at least to the higher ups who need to approve the costs.

It was all working for most of the users and the dropped queue errors usually went away relatively quickly after initial rushes.. this release is all kinds of firsts for them though.

I think in the current situation though they ARE doing all they can to react. The new patch should fix some of the 2002 drops, especially to those who drop simply because of poor login server queuing processes and they have announced some pretty radical changes to their upgrade plans, with heavy chunks of capacity being approved and being worked towards implementation as we speak.


There are always things that COULD have been done, but there's very little I would have expected to be done personally. Companies don't like to spend extra money for no reason and there was very little reason for them to get all ambitious 3 years ago. Also being so close to a release of an expansion I wouldn't have expected them to rework basic things like the login process or server interactions when the focus for the last year has likely been refining all the new stuff in the game itself.

[Conundrum]

Selling a product and then effectively saying, "by the way there will be issues with providing what we sold you but hey we warned you" is a morally bankrupt way to conduct business. Clearly, commercial interests and bottom line sales were prioritized. Apologies are a cheap way to make money, they don't cost anything.

Pray lend them your creation magics so that they may conjure semiconductors and servers from the aether.

[talamoth]

Your comment moved me to post on the forum for the first time. Thanks for, so clearly and succinctly outlining in two sentences, the perfect storm that now represents the queue situation. After playing countless MMO games, including the "biggest MMO in existence" for 15 years, I was always looking for the "it" factor and never could find it. I quit the aforementioned "biggest MMO in existence" because it sucked so bad I couldn't tolerate it anymore. I found FFXIV and have never looked back. I feel FFXIV is a genuine masterpiece. It is genre breaking and nothing exists like it anywhere.

Yes, the queues are long but I deal with them. I do something else while waiting or I wait until I can log into the game in the morning. Because this game has such fantastic communication, I knew what to expect. No hanging in the wind wondering if anyone was going to address the issue. It's been outlined so many times and it's been apologized for.

I don't think Square Enix could have possibly anticipated the insane growth that was to befall them with the downfall of the "other" MMO. But it wasn't just that which drove massive amounts of players to FFXIV, it was also the major streamers who switched from covering the "other" MMO to streaming about FFXIV. This, in and of itself, brought a ton of people in through their sheer popularity as streamers.

I've heard of people so angry they are threatening to sue Square Enix. This is heartbreaking given how much communication has been given to the player base as well as the weeks of comp time offered. And I'm sure the comp time will keep coming until the issue is resolved because that is the nature of this company. They truly do care about their player base.

As unfortunate as it is, the queue situation is the reality right now and I have found my own ways of dealing with it even though everything in me wants to be playing FFXIV. The queues are getting a bit better. It's been a few days since I have seen 7,000+ in the queue and I am noticing that I don't get disconnected while in the queue.

Imagine a company who has to temporarily halt sales on their product because everyone in the world wants it and it's just too damned popular. That says something about the quality of FFXIV and I feel proud to be a member of the community. I hope all of this clears up soon because it is a drag not to be able to play. However, I really hope people don't resort to lawsuits and rage quitting. That's just sad.

[Miles064]

Pray lend them your creation magics so that they may conjure semiconductors and servers from the aether.

Once again them not being able to get the servers isn't the issue. They knew this and still sold access is the issue. There is no way SE doesn't have any idea how many subs are active in each area or how much avg space each datacenter can hold. If a datacenter holds like 500k people total but has 600k subs active, they could slap a warning that tells you that you will most likely have a queue during primetime hours. If this starts climbing to 700k 800k etc they should 100% just state they dont have the space and let people make the decision from there. That would require them to start listing sub numbers though.

[Conundrum]

Once again them not being able to get the servers isn't the issue. They knew this and still sold access is the issue. There is no way SE doesn't have any idea how many subs are active in each area or how much avg space each datacenter can hold. If a datacenter holds like 500k people total but has 600k subs active, they could slap a warning that tells you that you will most likely have a queue during primetime hours. If this starts climbing to 700k 800k etc they should 100% just state they dont have the space and let people make the decision from there. That would require them to start listing sub numbers though.

Your plan is a gross oversimplification of...well...everything.

[XplicitX]

. TL;DR: Nobody could have foreseen this happening and the "perfect storm" of crap the last 2 years have thrown at us has made it even worse.

They've had the same damn problem with every expansion they've EVER released so don't tell me, after all, this time since the game launched they didn't have the money to buy the necessary backup servers to not make every launch a shit show. These people have billions of our money & make each new expansion a headache for no reason other than to keep as much of our money as possible & all they need to do to keep that money is "apologize" (which is free btw) each time. Then the player base swoons each time by saying oh wow look how transparent they are being. Apologize for me harder daddy & you can keep all my cash!!! What you idiots fail to see is the pattern you all fall for each time. If they had at least prepared for the usual influx upon release they probably wouldn't have had to stop selling the game right now. So at least they are getting what the deserve in the long run.

[Miles064]

Your plan is a gross oversimplification of...well...everything.

Explain then. Each server holds so many people at a time and each data center has so many servers right? You should be able to figure out a number based on that alone. If that total number is 500k then give it till 600k or 650k till it becomes worth warning about as the servers do not have the same population nor do all players log on at the same time. If it keeps going up past that though they should just say so when people try to buy the game or even resub to it. "Hey total data center cap is 500k people at once but your data center has 900k active subs at the moment, you still want to join? Gunna have some issues getting on maybe"

[Catwho]

For anyone who is threatening to sue, or thinking about whether it's even possible, the podcast Virtual Legality from Hoeg Law ran over Square Enix's ToS and found that as part of Terms of Service, you agreed that if you felt the service was unacceptable, the most you could be afforded in a lawsuit was the purchase price of the game itself. (And likely in exchange, your account would be terminated, since you got your money back.) You also can't actually sue in some states, because they said it first should go through arbitration, and while that might not hold up in CA's court system, it would in many states in the US.

[Hysorn]

I think I might soon, I need to level BRD and finally finish all the role quests, I already cleared both extremes and am only missing 2 accessories on PLD that I am not all that excited to farm. After getting BRD to 90 I will either level something else or take a break until the 4th of January.

[Catwho]

They've had the same damn problem with every expansion they've EVER released so don't tell me, after all, this time since the game launched they didn't have the money to buy the necessary backup servers to not make every launch a shit show. These people have billions of our money & make each new expansion a headache for no reason other than to keep as much of our money as possible & all they need to do to keep that money is "apologize" (which is free btw) each time. Then the player base swoons each time by saying oh wow look how transparent they are being. Apologize for me harder daddy & you can keep all my cash!!! What you idiots fail to see is the pattern you all fall for each time. If they had at least prepared for the usual influx upon release they probably wouldn't have had to stop selling the game right now. So at least they are getting what the deserve in the long run.

Every single person who works in IT has said this though - the sales to delivery time for enterprise grade servers is 50+ weeks no matter how much money you throw at the problem. The only industry who is getting priority shipments of IT equipment right now is healthcare because of the pandemic, and even that is still three to six months, because the hardware in question literally does not exist right now.

I guess if you want to assume that every person who works in an industry that is also starved for servers is lying about this, you can continue to believe that SE just didn't care enough, but that's a bigger conspiracy theory than even Reddit could accept.