A Plea to the Community: Long Queues

[Varictus]

Part 1/4
This "fix" has awarded me with a long queue and plenty of time and nothing to do, so I'll write this post, hope you enjoy it SE! It's also going to be done in 4 parts, because of the arbitrary 1000 character limit on posts.

TL: DR - SE, Fix your servers. If I didn't have good friends playing this game I would've quit by now. The monthly subscription cost far out weighs the level of service we are receiving. Don't expect players to fix your problem.

Server auto kick at 12pm PST has made little to no difference for me. I have been waiting over an hour to log in. Hopefully just maybe I won't be disconnected after logging in and have to go through an even longer queue because the way the game handles disconnects is absolutely terrible, and could be easily rectified.

[Varictus]

Part 2/4
This is my solution as it stands to attempt to log in on time for raids: Log in to my computer remotely from work via my phone before head home and hope I'm logged in on time before raid. Maybe I'll have to poke my character remotely every 20ish min to keep the connection alive.

@SE, you must fix this before the raid content is released.
One of the people on my team is thinking about quitting because he gets disconnected while loading into an instance, then has to go through the queue. This could be partially resolved by having a 5 minute grace period after a disconnection or log out to log back into the game and skip the queue. Last night we stopped raiding because we were afraid of getting disconnected when trying to load into an instance. Tonight we're not raiding again because of the server queues.

[Varictus]

Part 3/4
SE, I assume either your software is not scale-able past 10,000 users and thus throwing more hardware at the problem is not a viable solution, or adding additional hardware has diminishing returns and far outweighs the cost of frustrated consumers of your product.
There is typically a quick drop off of players after a month from expansion release, however if the company you're in business with cannot easily spin up additional hardware and be scale-able to your multi-million per month revenue, it's a terrible company and an even poorer choice. The server company is costing SE customers and reputation.

[Varictus]

Part 4/4
About the option to transfer off to solve SE's problem, this for me is NOT a solution. I started playing this game to enjoy the game with my sister and friends. All of us are not transferring off. If I transferred off server, I would be leaving my friends and no longer get to enjoy aspects of the game outside of raiding and dungeon crawling with them. FFXIV is known for having servers with their own culture and feel, of which Balmung is rich in. Requiring us to transfer off to fix your problem creates a divide in the community and is taking a large amount of fun for us. The fact that we're still putting up with the long queues, and frequent disconnects with subsequent queues in the hopes it'll get better, speaks volumes about how much we enjoy the community and the game.

[Elamys]

Part 1/4
This "fix" has awarded me with a long queue and plenty of time and nothing to do, so I'll write this post, hope you enjoy it SE! It's also going to be done in 4 parts, because of the arbitrary 1000 character limit on posts.

What long queue? Because I haven't heard of anyone waiting in queue for over 20 minutes. If 20 minutes is too long for you, then perhaps you should play another game.

[Varictus]

What long queue? Because I haven't heard of anyone waiting in queue for over 20 minutes. If 20 minutes is too long for you, then perhaps you should play another game.

1 hour 15 min, started logging in at 5:53pm PST.
Our healer, who got disconnected at 6:10ish had a 1h 35min queue.
So yes, long queues are still a thing.

[Varictus]

I should mention, our healer went through the 1h 15min queue I went through, then disconnected loading into lakshimi ex, then had to go through the now longer queue a second time.
People really should be able to skip the queue following a disconnection.

[Gyson]

1 hour 15 min, started logging in at 5:53pm PST.
Our healer, who got disconnected at 6:10ish had a 1h 35min queue.
So yes, long queues are still a thing.

Well, by that hour there are hundreds, if not over a thousand characters idling AFK in a manner that intentionally defeats the auto-logout safeguard Square put in place to minimize problems like this. I'm not sure how large the queue was you were waiting in, but if the owners of those characters weren't doing that I suspect your queue would have been very short (if not entirely absent).

Which, honestly, was the point this thread was trying to get across. By circumventing the auto-logout while AFK to avoid queues, players are creating the very queues they want to avoid. Yes, Square put players in this position to begin with, and Square should be finding better solutions. But it doesn't change the fact that the queue issue could be resolved tomorrow if people would just stop circumventing the very safeguards meant to prevent queues in the first place.

At any rate, the server resets are seriously reducing the queues for a majority of the day, which is a big improvement.

[Nixxe]

1 hour 15 min, started logging in at 5:53pm PST.
Our healer, who got disconnected at 6:10ish had a 1h 35min queue.
So yes, long queues are still a thing.

That's not a long queue. rofl

Before this fix, the queues were routinely 3+ hours for anyone dumb enough (read: unfortunate enough) to login during the middle of the afternoon to about 2 am Eastern time. Now I login at those same times and it's back to the normal Balmung queue of like 6 people. The longest queue at any given point in the day seems to be the one to get back in after they restart the servers, which is itself only a few minutes. Queue times are so not a problem that I freely logout again.