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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Moonlite]

You get nothing. They will wait till its over and the yes man will line up to say it is the players fault. Half the posts are already blaming DDOS and we haven't even got the expansion. They waited when they created the problem in Stormblood. Might get a nothing apology that the rest of the player base will beat you with on how much they care.



It is like anything else that is questionable about the game. They have a free pass and if you don't like it best to move on.

[Kolsykol]

Part of me is actually considering leveling Reaper and wait with the story until it's more stable.
It's a MMO so it's gonna be wonky.

[ItMe]

Yeah, the nightmare was during official launch. Good times, good times.

Yoooo I've kept hearing about the nightmare that was 1.0's launch.
WTF you guys had it rough back then.

My favorite little horror story was def how players were getting trapped in the adventurer’s guild in Uldah because the doors opening was handled server side instead of client side, and due to massive server lag the doors wouldn’t open.