this is out of control

[agroyboy]

well I liked min to 63m guess what? area I need items for it is in the next area lol. biggest problem is your trapped in 2 zones till you complete this. not even a dungeon yet. first primal is 63.

[Venjamin]

Snip

Yeah, this is garbage mentality. The customer is, in fact, very rarely right, and it's a generation of "customer is always right" bull that has raised an extremely entitled group of 'let me speak to your manager to make up for my incompetence' human beings.

Snip.

And you are literally the most wrong person who's ever been.

You are under the delusion that you're allowed to have your voice, and the people that don't agree with you should be quiet. ( Hey, sounds pretty similar to what you're accusing other people of doing! ) You should shut your mouths because you are literally NOT HELPING.

Here's the thing about these kinds of situations. The more time and effort a company has to spend dealing with the whining and the crying is more time and effort that can't be directed at the actual issue. Every time someone has to stop to give another pointless 'update' is time they're not working, when literally all the update will be is "Hey, we're still working!"

No one at Square is sitting with their thumbs up their butts. I can guarantee you the buildings are just this side of burning down.

Game companies CAN charge 60$ for a game. They can charge more! All you have to do is NOT BUY IT. Hit their bottom line. But whining isn't going to change their pricing points.

You literally do NOT have the right to demand above par results. You can demand 'par' results, because, guess what, par is what you pay for. Every little extra thing they do where people like you never thank them? Consider this karmic balance. Instead of only hoping on the forums to cry, hop on here to congratulate them on a successful event ( you know, almost every other event they've run ). For going above and beyond.

Things happen. Balls get dropped. Once the issue is resolved, I can 100% guarantee you that someone will lay out a genuine full answer as to what happened and why things went sideways. That's what a -good- company does.

Be as dissonant as you want. You're doing it to feel better, and that's fine. But don't pretend you're doing some sort of ridiculous 'higher calling', or you're making ANY impact other than a negative one.

What's happened isn't unacceptable. It's the reality. All that's left is for them to finish up their fix, let us know, and then you and every other 'dissenter' will be back sucking on your appropriate corporate teat.

[agroyboy]

gtfo. doesn't matter who you are. you have the right to your own opinion. I give a damn if you ate paint chips your own life. you have the right to biotch. if you don't understand that it's from ffxi. problem been going on over 24 hrs. and they said at arnt changing anything. so don't go saying they are working on it. not been one update since it been going. also go ahead tell me I can't speak my mind. I've served my country for 16 years 5 years at war and been shot and blown up multiple times. so you have no right to tell anyone they are wrong.

[Venjamin]

I have every right to tell you you're wrong when you're wrong. Nothing's 'broken.' All they can do is optimize, which is what they're trying to do. I explained why updates are stupid. I never said you couldn't speak your mind, just that doing so isn't helping.

Get some reading comprehension to go along with your martyr complex.

[vio_p]

Early access by definition means, you get to access the full product earlier than other people. It definitely does not involve being a tester.

have you ever played a mmo that had early access and did not receive any fixes during the first week or two?

Personally i've never played a mmo that has been perfect from day one, they've all needed some fixes. Also while there are some people not happy with combining the term tester and paying customer, they need to realize that even though we have paid for the game, pay a monthly rental for the game we are also public testers for the game even if we dont want the be and the only way not to test the game is to stop playing.

[Aramina]

have you ever played a mmo that had early access and did not receive any fixes during the first week or two?

Personally i've never played a mmo that has been perfect from day one, they've all needed some fixes. Also while there are some people not happy with combining the term tester and paying customer, they need to realize that even though we have paid for the game, pay a monthly rental for the game we are also public testers for the game even if we dont want the be and the only way not to test the game is to stop playing.

I never played one that completely prevented you from progressing the story for over 24 hours and counting.

[Chiami]

There are two possible expalantions for this huge mess, given SE is sitting on years of experience running these games AND they also knew (or should have known) how many copies of pre-ordered Stormblood were out there, so knowing how many people would be on the servers going for MSQ wasn't even remotely rocket science.

a) This is a level of incompetence that would get people fired in other areas of business. I can tell you for sure (and I have worked in IT just as people close to me) with something as we are seeing here there would have been blood in the meeting room.

b) This is actually planned. Take their money, let them in early… but don't ensure they can actually continue. If people get angry, do a bit appeasement tactic. Renting extra servers for the intial onslaught seen as an investment not worth the customers possibly lost over this. After all, there are the RPers, the avid fanboys/-girls that excuse everything done by SE (as seen in this thread), and many people who will be annoyed but won't cancel their subscription over this. So as long as the net loss of subscriptions over things like these does not hurt the bottom line, compared to cutting corners (insufficient infrastructure, bad planning, cheap production methods/value etc.), increase of new subscriptions through aggressive market ing etc. … why bother.

The second is an attitude I have seen quite often in large cooperations (yes, from the inside). I don't know if it is the case with SE, but increasingly everything I am seeing in this game points in that direction.

It remains to be seen how SE handles this additional cluster**** within the expansion. But my hopes are extremely low.

Right now "Early Access" simply has turned into "Waiting for Access" and I simply regret having pre-ordered. I doubt I will ever pre-order again, if I actually renew my subscription, given how bad SE has become in balancing classes (WHM...), handling the community beyond appeasement tactics and marketing schemes, and many other in-game issues.

If I want to be treated badly or stand somewhere in line I can have that for free elsewhere.

[Ramiren]

b) This is actually planned. Take their money, let them in early… but don't ensure they can actually continue. If people get angry, do a bit appeasement tactic. Renting extra servers for the intial onslaught seen as an investment not worth the customers possibly lost over this.

This is pretty much the impression I got, it seems to me that Square-Enix just isn't willing to invest in the additional server capacity required to properly cover their product launches, knowing that this capacity may well go to waste once the hype dies down. From a short term business perspective this seems sound. However over the long term, the more people start to see this pattern of long queues, broken events and sporadic service at launch, the less likely they are to actually invest in those games at launch.

I like to think, by and large, FF fans are a pretty smart bunch, most of us aren't just casual gamers, many of us were around before call of duty turned gaming into the cesspool it is today. I don't think anyone is really stupid enough to preorder a third or fourth expansion knowing the state the original game, ARR, first and second expansions all launched in.

As for people saying "this happens with every MMO launch", it doesn't happen with every launch, but it does happen frequently enough, especially to Square-Enix, that they should by now be learning from these mistakes and not repeating them. As consumers our patience only stretches so far, and when you repeat the same capacity issues every single time you launch, people will lose patience. "Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity" only applies when the stupidity isn't repeated over and over.

[PubstarHero]

b) This is actually planned. Take their money, let them in early… but don't ensure they can actually continue. If people get angry, do a bit appeasement tactic. Renting extra servers for the intial onslaught seen as an investment not worth the customers possibly lost over this.

The sad thing is that in most businesses, renting intitial servers is pretty much SOP for major launches to prevent messes like this. They had preorder numbers, they have download records, they have registered accounts, AND they have 2 previous major launches under their belt. They should have known that this would happen and that maybe they needed to do a 30-50% boost in instance space for a month. Or you know, use some kind of dynamic usage system they set up with their host. I work in a Datacenter myself, and none of this is particularly hard if your developers know what they are doing, and spinning up load balancing systems is cake.

But the real crime here? Complete radio silence. Nothing has been said from SE or the NA NOC team since 1:45PM yesterday. Where I work, we have to send out notices and status updates a minimum of every 2 hours, even if its "Everything still broken, we have no idea what is causing it".

[Sinrai]

my suggestion is just hotfix an autocomplete for those on that quest just to get them past it. That large of a chunk of people should free it up for the others. This really is out of control.

So everyone gets stuck on the next quest/dungeon? Bad idea.

The only thing i blame on SE is not properly explaining what to expect. Now they have tons of angry customers..

Last year everyone was stuck in login queues forever and getting error messages. You can at least login and play this time around. And tbh, this is par for the course for a MMO release. I haven't seen a single MMO that hasn't had issues.

What a lot of you fail to see, is that it HAS gotten better from HW release. There's no error 2002 or 90000 preventing everyone from playing.