Stranded off Home Realm

[Quuoooote]

MULTIPLE WARNINGS

SE did post a warning, yes, which was amended an hour before the maintenance ended to include the parts about needing to return home to access the game. Prior to the announcement update during maintenance it was implied that only DC travel would be disabled, and logins on other worlds would be possible, albeit with a lower login priority. The current warning still recommends returning home, which is where the actual issue lies: If you're stuck away from home right now, the feature recommended in the article is not functional.

Additionally, it's unrealistic to expect every single player in the game to heed a news post warning. What about players that were unsubbed? Players that were busy the day before maintenance, and unable to log in? Players who simply missed this one single news post? Is it fair to assume that every active player is staying updated on social media/news? In an ideal situation, the warning would exist to help mitigate congestion issues like this, not eradicate them. Because there are always going to be outliers for whatever reason, and it's unfair to treat players as if they deserve to be punished when SE's systems are clearly at fault and failing here.

[LianaThorne]

SE did post a warning, yes, which was amended an hour before the maintenance ended to include the parts about needing to return home to access the game. Prior to the announcement update during maintenance it was implied that only DC travel would be disabled, and logins on other worlds would be possible, albeit with a lower login priority. The current warning still recommends returning home, which is where the actual issue lies: If you're stuck away from home right now, the feature recommended in the article is not functional.

Additionally, it's unrealistic to expect every single player in the game to heed a news post warning. What about players that were unsubbed? Players that were busy the day before maintenance, and unable to log in? Players who simply missed this one single news post? Is it fair to assume that every active player is staying updated on social media/news? In an ideal situation, the warning would exist to help mitigate congestion issues like this, not eradicate them. Because there are always going to be outliers for whatever reason, and it's unfair to treat players as if they deserve to be punished when SE's systems are clearly at fault and failing here.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...56e40c77a5af8e

This was posted on the 18th and it still included that world travel would be disabled then. The edit didn't change that bit of information or add it in. The edit only added in that people would need to return to their home worlds via the login menu. So people had over a week at least to make preparations if it mattered to be on their home world prior to servers going down.

[WantonWalrus]

I don't think anyone's arguing that we weren't given a warning ahead of time as long as you were looking out for news on the game. It's that we were told one thing and then the message got updated to something very different after we couldn't do anything about it. Everyone else I've messaged about this on discord has said they thought it would be a low priority queue also for off-home world. If they were disabling queueing at all on another world, why also turn off returning home? I can't even log on malboro despite having a zero person queue to log into it.

[Quuoooote]

This was posted on the 18th and it still included that world travel would be disabled then. The edit didn't change that bit of information or add it in. The edit only added in that people would need to return to their home worlds via the login menu. So people had over a week at least to make preparations if it mattered to be on their home world prior to servers going down.

That's true, but still doesn't change the fact that it's irresponsible to assume that every player will read and strictly heed a news article outside of the game. I'm also acutely aware of what the news post said pre-edit, which was "Aether/Primal/Crystal: Will be unavailable for travel." This does not imply in any way that the game will be unplayable if you choose to remain on another Data Center; only that travel from home to another DC will be impossible. The latter portion, "If your character logged out while visiting a World on these data centers, they will need to be returned to their Home World via the login menu", was included an hour before maintenance ended, at which point it'd be too late to do anything about. My personal preparations included logging out on Aether so that I could play there with my static members while DC travel is disabled for the first few weeks of content, and were based off of the information presented in the news post prior to maintenance. I was willing to endure lower login priority since that's what the news post said at the time — not that the game would become soft locked.

But even assuming the news post is sacred: If it says right now that players are supposed to return home to play the game, and the return home feature is clearly non-functional... What are players supposed to do? Again, the warning should have been in place to mitigate issues so that the outlier group would be smaller and cause less much congestion sorting themselves out. Having absolutely no resources or infrastructure in place to situate people in the wrong places is clearly on SE's hands.

[WantonWalrus]

Yeah, pretty much what he just said with this. I'm not entirely upset since I knew I would be running into *some* issues with logging off not on my world. But since we were left with the impression that it would be a lower priority login and I knew the server was relatively low population, I didn't mind waiting a little to be able to login. Now not only can I not login because the zero person queue world is still considered congested, but I can't go back to my home world.