Can the game not completely exit when you fail to connect to the Data Center?

[ClaTheNinja]

When you click Start on the title screen and the game fails to connect to your Data Center, (happening incredibly often right now as everyone is trying to play Heavensward) the game gives a "the lobby server has encountered an error" message and then just instantly exits the game altogether. I don't know what it's like on PS3/4, but it's incredibly inconvenient on PC because I have to restart the launcher, type in my name and password again, and wait for the game to load... only to fail to connect to the Data Center again and have the game automatically close again.

So... can we not do that? Can the game just stay on the title screen rather than exit altogether? Thank you.

[BreathlessTao]

Yes, I was just about to post this same thing. It's annoying even when there isn't a major launch event like now, and it only happens once or twice, as opposed to over and over and over and over again as it does now. Either make it so that the launcher doesn't let me log in at all; or make it so that once my credentials are accepted and I "get in", the game stays on the title screen until I explicitly exit. Fetching the data center list and actually connecting to them should be an entirely separate process that does not affect the running of the software itself - sure if I can't connect, I can't play, but once obvious communication does happen and my login details check out valid, I see no reason why any sort of connection should be needed for me to tinker with settings or watch movies. Or, y'know, actually exit the app myself.

On a sidenote: any chance of an option to set a "favourite" data center manually? Mine's still stuck on Chaos, even though I moved to Aether more than a month ago and mostly play on and log out from there. That extra step of having to select another data center every single time is frustrating - and in such a case as this, it also presents one extra step for the connection to fail.

[bwalker36]

Yes, The Launcher needs some work. The launcher should remain open and logged in when you launch the game. Any time you need to restart you must log in again which is quite annoying and issues like this make it even worse. They should take a page from the Battle.net launcher.

[Story]

It is only with US data centers.
I can log on to Japan and European Data centers with no problems.

[Saerydoth]

It is only with US data centers.
I can log on to Japan and European Data centers with no problems.

I confirmed this. Both US datacenters (Aether and Primal) are completely down. You will not be able to connect to either. If the game fails to connect to the datacenter itself, it crashes to desktop (which I agree it shouldn't). If there is a queue for the server once you get in then you get put in a queue. Can't they just implement a datacenter-style queue?