Best served with cold steel.

[AngelyLowell]

Indeed. I did SAM solo duty with no problem.
They need to lower the HP of the enemies so people can clear this more faster.

I did with my DRK with BiS and took 10 min to complete. People with lower gear probably taking longer than that.

If people can clear this more quickly, maybe it helps.

[Priya]

I really want an update on this. The last mention of it was 7 hours ago.

[Scorp6]

I'm usually quite understanding about games and launch day stuff but this is surprising even to me. Even if they were caught off guard with the number of players with early access, it's been too long to have nothing done. I have a party and some (a lot) of college work to do. Hopefully when I'm done early in the morning tomorrow it'll be playable. Friendly advice. Finish college the first time. Don't take an 8 year break like me.

[Meillquei]

I had people in my FC say that they were able to do it today. So don't give up hope guys

[zegota]

Except that literally won't fix the problem.

I'm running through Heavensward on an alt leveling Red Mage, and I just completed THREE solo instances within the last hour with absolutely no trouble whatsoever. It's clear that its not other people doing content that's the problem.

It's that the playerbase got bottlenecked at the Raubahn quest (and at this point I'm inclined to believe the Stormblood solo instances are allocated to their own server) and the more people that pile up behind them, the worse the problem gets. Closing the other content down so people can progress through the MSQ won't solve anything because that content isn't what's bottlenecking the solo instances in the Stormblood zones.

The idea is to allocate the servers being used for older content to the MSQ, at least temporarily.

[Scorp6]

I had people in my FC say that they were able to do it today. So don't give up hope guys

Good news. Thanks.

[Khalithar]

For the folks still not past it, it took me 16 hours of nonstop clicking on rau to get it to pop.

As for the quest after, the same error is happening with the red text. After six hours of that I was done and went to sleep. Fortunately the quest after cold steel worked fine but when I passed by Rau there was still a crowd.

[BlakeEarhart]

I had people in my FC say that they were able to do it today. So don't give up hope guys

I've had more long black screens today than yesterday so maybe the problem is simmering down a bit.

[SelphieTerrra]

This has taken the "Early" out of "Early Access".

"Well do something else!"
I have been. I've been doing "something else" for the entirety of the lead up to Stormblood. (And right now, I've just been doing PVP to pass time)
Another point - ...most of the "something else" in Stormblood is behind this damned block.

"It's testing! We're lucky to have it!"
It's not testing, it's early access. If it was a test they should've labeled it as such. Is there a certain element of testing to early access? Of course, it's putting the product out there for the first time - bugs will happen. But this isn't the testing, development stage where they can go back to the drawing board and they have time to fix things before the launch. We're the consumers. Being sold a product. We are not paid testers. We.are.the.customers. Square is "lucky" to to have us as customers. That is what a business is. Customers pay = they are owed the product they are promised. It's just that simple.

[Elkanah]

snip

At this point, I just want to join the empire and wipe out all of Eorzea with my Samurai and Dark Knight lol. I'd be more than willing to fight with the Garleans if it meant seeing doma and kugane >_>