What happens when "early access" is "cancelled" by server fail?

[Omedon]

thankfully most of the wow refugees have all moved on to other games

Um... until Endwalker, perhaps?

[Vahlnir]

theres a difference between a small influx of new players and having half of wows playerbase jumpship overnight, thankfully most of the wow refugees have all moved on to other games so it shouldnt be too bad

Plot twist: They are probably still here and/or have been here all along like myself. WoW player here, by the way.

[HyperiusUltima]

I think there's zero evidence that we need to worry too much about this. Shadowbringers launch was fine, and at the time they were dealing with an influx of new players back then as well. I guess nobody remembers that anymore, or they weren't playing at the time. People were really hyped for Shadowbringers too.

Also don't forget that SE rents out servers to help stabilize any launch issues; this is why we got multiple instances of the same zone in Stormblood so we don't hit the area population cap so easily, and even then it was flooded because of Ixion Campers. Getting Locked out of the Lochs was a thing.

Come Shadowbringers, things were smooth and they fixed their issues from before. The other thing is that they did a major ad buy campaign for Shadowbringers because it was going to be this big hit - and it did hit big. Endwalker's going to be the same thing since I bet they've got a larger budget thanks to Yoshida's leadership and Creative Business Unit III's work.

[Roda]

Oh also, if something catastrophic WERE to happen, where we missed the EA or a laaarge chunk of it, it's not unheard of for SE to add a couple days of gametime to everyone's sub for the trouble.

[Jeeqbit]

Early access won't be cancelled by server fail, but it's possible the servers could crash or need a lot of emergency patches in the first week. This has happened previously but between the crashes and other problems, you will still be able to play.

[Kranel_San]

I don't know about you guys, but like... I'm not counting on early access being... accessible. Indeed I don't see the first week (or more) of Endwalker being reliably available, serverwise. Veterans who sat out the content lull will likely return to find the space they left behind occupied by a WoW exodus exacerbated by its own momentum and a global chip supply crisis making "just buy more servers" complicated, as they've told us themselves. And that's before we consider that FFXIV is top dog now, making it a DDOS attack magnet.

While it's easy to argue "they got this," and attribute the two week delay to magically assuring that the great server calamity doesn't happen, let's pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the devs are just as human as the rest of us, and Endwalker is just not reliably accessible for at least the entire duration of early access.

I for one have switch games at the ready, and am expecting to use them for a forced FFXIV vacation, so this won't put me out much, but how does Squeenix traditionally handle this from a PR standpoint? I can tell you that if the FFXIV community is anything like the WoW community (and there is a LOT of overlap now), there will be cries for some kind of compensation. Does that traditionally manifest some response from the devs? How much of those preorders including early access is likely to be leveraged by the community and responded to by the devs in kind?

I'm legitimately curious because I do think Endwalker is unfortunately walking into a woodchipper at launch for the aforementioned reasons, and I've never been here at an expansion's transition moment before.

It isn't the final days and the end of the world if it didn't include the servers as well.

[Kuro_Matsu]

It isn't the final days and the end of the world if it didn't include the servers as well.

Yoko Taro's ultimate plan.

[Sacae]

I'm not particularly concerned. They learned from the Stormblood debacle, and Shadowbringers had a nearly flawless launch. Any problems will come from DDOS, IMO.

[TaleraRistain]

I've got multiple Early Access launches under my belt now, including Stormblood, and I'm not too worried. Will we have hot fixes? You betcha? Could we have times the game is inaccessible? Definitely. And the game has been a DDOS magnet for every expansion launch. But that's a chance we take doing Early Access. We've still ended up with plenty of time to do things in the game, even with things like Raubahn Savage and Pippin EX. I'm on vacation and I've got my backup console game ready for any downtime.

[Floortank]

I played through the early access of all three expansions. There were some queues but I managed to get in and play the game every day. There's no reason to expect that the game is gonna be down for a week. We're not talking about World of Warcraft.