This is starting to get to be as bad as the 1.0 launch

[Tsukino]

I really feel for the people who play in the most common times and are stuck in a queue unable to play the game. The only real consolation is the hope that 21 days of free time will help get to the point where it's playable again for them.

But this is actually the second smoothest launch we've had in FFXIV history. Everyone else has already pointed out how 1.0 doesn't even compare (people with my same join date were spamming the forum for like two weeks leading up to launch telling them not to do it), but the other expansions except for Shadowbringers were all worse for their own reasons.

2.0 had all the same errors we have now, with the 2002 and 9000X coming up way more frequently. But there was also no queueing system, so you just had to keep error-crashing the game until it worked. And sometimes you'd even get an error that made it so you couldn't log back into the game at all, for literally days!

3.0 added DirectX 11 and a bunch of people had all kinds of new crashes depending on what hardware and drivers they were using. Lots of people kept getting kicked off while playing and then had to try and play the error game again, though this launch was a bit better than 2.0 since there were less people for the expansion than the base game.

4.0 finally gave us a mostly functioning queue system that funneled people into the game, but in addition to the same 2002 errors, someone on the dev team decided it was a good idea to put a solo instance that uses the instance servers in the very start of the main story quest. Before you even could get to any new areas or towns or anything, you got stopped by a solo instance that was impossible to do because everyone was trying it at the same time, locking you out of basically all of the content in the expansion for IIRC weeks.

It wasn't until Shadowbringers that we had a game that you could get into after around a week of being out, because it had all the same problems we have now, more players than ever before, but way less players than right now.

[Hik3n]

Great, so now we get a fix for the 2002 error, wonderful. I just spent 5 hours in a queue that started at 4300, and I've still seen them as high as almost 9k at times on Gilgamesh. When will I actually be able to login and play without having to hop on at the crack of dawn EST or twiddle my thumbs for half a day?

If you're telling me that I have to wait until Jan to see your timeline for a datacenter fix I'm cancelling my damn subs. I get it COVID, blah blah blah, supply chain blah blah blah. The WoW exodus to XIV was almost a damn year ago, you had plenty of time to prepare. I mean seriously, there have been queues on both Gilgamesh and my legacy server since I fired my sub back up. You can't tell me the metrics didn't tell you that you were going to have this volume at launch LONG before EW launch.

If you need help, I'll send you my resume.

The only solution to this problem would be to delay Endwalker until they short out the server issues, they didn't do that because it was the end of the year, Christmas, and they needed a nice data for the investors even if it means the servers are destroyed, and now we are in this mess, yes I get it there are shortages and Covid an all that, but if you know, and they knew this will happen, just delay the game so people who already play can do so in peace until the server issues are resolved... So I don't see why people still make excuses for SE, they released a new expansion on servers that were already at their limits way before it came out, and made a problem that will be here for months, I don't see this resolved end of next month even if queues will be shorter, because even now a ton of people just gave up, at one point all of them will come back, and they will do so in waves, so the queue issue will be here for a long time, the only difference will be, you won't have 5-6k queues, you will have 1-3k queues, and that still takes 1-3hours to wait it out, and that is still an unacceptable number in every way.

[Kes13a]

The only solution to this problem would be to delay Endwalker until they short out the server issues, they didn't do that because it was the end of the year, Christmas, and they needed a nice data for the investors even if it means the servers are destroyed, and now we are in this mess, yes I get it there are shortages and Covid an all that, but if you know, and they knew this will happen, just delay the game so people who already play can do so in peace until the server issues are resolved... So I don't see why people still make excuses for SE, they released a new expansion on servers that were already at their limits way before it came out, and made a problem that will be here for months, I don't see this resolved end of next month even if queues will be shorter, because even now a ton of people just gave up, at one point all of them will come back, and they will do so in waves, so the queue issue will be here for a long time, the only difference will be, you won't have 5-6k queues, you will have 1-3k queues, and that still takes 1-3hours to wait it out, and that is still an unacceptable number in every way.

guessing you didnt visit the forums during the notice of a 2 week delay.

a further delay until they cornered more servers somehow, would have likely caused people to march on SE headquarters demanding heads and setting up fires to burn staff in. people were warned, and yet DEMANDED it release immediately...

so, your neat little concept of delaying launch does not fit player expectation reality.

[Krotoan]

The only solution to this problem would be to delay Endwalker until they short out the server issues,

I'm assuming you mean "sort" here. And again it's apparent you don't understand the situation at all.

"sorting out" the server issues would mean getting new ones... something they're ALREADY trying to do and have been trying to do for months and likely will take even more months. If you are implying they should delay the entire expansion until they get new ones, your quick fix would have likely ended up with FAR more bad will as an expansion people had been anticipating for nearly a year would have been simply unavailable to the entire population for an indeterminate amount of time rather than entirely playable if you managed to get in. The solution for this problem is being implemented, they are doing what they can and compensating people in the mean time. The "perfect" solution is simply unavailable in a timely manner.

they didn't do that because it was the end of the year, Christmas, and they needed a nice data for the investors even if it means the servers are destroyed,

The servers AREN'T destroyed. For the most part the worlds are accessible to max capacity and stable. If you get in, you can play for hours on most worlds. And they stopped sales during the holiday period. Let me tell you this is NOT what the investors want. Losing those sweet "back in the black" holiday sales is probably the opposite of what any investor would want to see.

and now we are in this mess, yes I get it there are shortages and Covid an all that, but if you know, and they knew this will happen, just delay the game so people who already play can do so in peace until the server issues are resolved

You apparently also don't "get it". If you did you'd realize how bad the supply situation is and how delaying an entire expansion until servers become available is a nightmare solution. Currently you CAN play in peace, you just have to get in. Todays patch should make that more of a waiting game than a luck game as well.

... So I don't see why people still make excuses for SE, they released a new expansion on servers that were already at their limits way before it came out, and made a problem that will be here for months,

People aren't making excuses, they're providing perspective to armchair developers such as yourself who's solutions are ludicrous like "Delay the expansion for possibly another year". Also SE did NOT make this problem by themselves. A lack of supply along with a huge unpredictable increase in demand caused the issue. While SE could have done a few things in the past to make this less of a problem there really wasn't any reason to think it'd be necessary until a few months ago when it was already impossible to react.

I don't see this resolved end of next month even if queues will be shorter, because even now a ton of people just gave up, at one point all of them will come back, and they will do so in waves, so the queue issue will be here for a long time, the only difference will be, you won't have 5-6k queues, you will have 1-3k queues, and that still takes 1-3hours to wait it out, and that is still an unacceptable number in every way.

By next month I would say a majority of people will have finished MSQ and gone into "dailies and done" mode. The biggest actual problem right now is that even waiting patiently doesn't necessarily mean you'll get to play. You can queue.. then be dropped multiple times and never get in . This is a huge problem but right now it seems that someone identified the issue, SE verified it and has a fix that's dropping tonight.

So maybe for people like yourself who find such things "unacceptable", you should probably just unsub till late next year, cause servers aren't going to be upgraded for a while. The rest of us will wait in queue and then play what I feel has been a great game in the mean time.

Weird that you already have a bard at 90 though... what with the wait being unacceptable to get in and all.

[HyoMinPark]

4.0 finally gave us a mostly functioning queue system that funneled people into the game, but in addition to the same 2002 errors, someone on the dev team decided it was a good idea to put a solo instance that uses the instance servers in the very start of the main story quest. Before you even could get to any new areas or towns or anything, you got stopped by a solo instance that was impossible to do because everyone was trying it at the same time, locking you out of basically all of the content in the expansion for IIRC weeks.

Raubahn Savage and Pipin EX were only a problem for the first couple of days of SB Early Access. They didn’t cause problems upwards of weeks for the majority of the playerbase. For Aether, when Balmung and Gilgamesh crashed on that first day of EA, a lot of people were able to continue on, actually. Yeah, you had to take a bit of a detour (I leveled botanist while waiting), but it wasn’t a problem for that long.

That said, I wouldn’t put this launch as bad as 1.0 or 2.0. I wasn’t there for either but I have friends who were. The game is relatively stable once you get in—the problem is get getting in. Versus the other two where you would frequently just crash to desktop or couldn’t even connect to the servers (or wait in a queue). And there were multiple emergency maintenances.

[Usernamewastaken]

I said it in other threads, I will say it here as well. This is not an official complaint site. If you are not happy with something, I would suggest to send them an official ticket. That way you might actually get an answer from them. I highly doubt they read these forums.

Also, how is you joining them will solve the chip shortage? Do you have a manufacturing facility in the garden of your house? (And if yes, do you have the proper COVID measures to let your workers inside and health and safety is ensured? Do you have testing done on them, or do you collect their vaccination certificate before allowing them in? What do you do when the material you ordered is not arriving because of border locks due to different country regulations on allowing travel for trade? Yes, these are the things companies face now. Furthermore, in economy everything is connected... if your supplier does not supply, you will not have goods and services to produce based on those needed materials... )

Plus, I might be wrong but I think they faced the issue of high volume of people joining the game when Covid was already at its peak. In many countries the Omicron wave is going through right now with new lockdown.

This is in fact where you provide feedback and your view on the game. The devs read the forums and take the feedback. Submitting a ticket goes to a GM not a dev.