Why no new servers? Not just this launch but the last 8 months?

[Sotaris]

Supply shortages are an explanation, not an excuse. If you don't have enough of something to meet demand, you should stop selling it to people.

If you know ahead of time that you're not going to meet demand, but you keep selling the promise to something you cannot actually provide...that becomes fraud. Warning people not to expect what they pay for, literally at the same time as you take their money? That doesn't make anything better.

If they knew that they were going to have problems as early as June, they should have limited or even halted pre-orders. They didn't, though, because? That would have affected profits.

Your experience as a customer is less important to them than profits. This is unacceptable, and you should stop making excuses - y'all are honestly making me SMH here. You are paying customers who worked hard for your money, you deserve to be treated with respect.

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

[Moonlite]

I think they really need to work on the login servers. I make zero excuses for those.

I have not had any real issues getting in, I know I am lucky that way. aside from my delusional phase early morning on the 3rd, its been pretty smooth. do I think thats an experience shared by all? not in the slightest. do I think they should have worked on the login servers a while back, most definitely.

I think a majority of people are pointing at the servers as a convenient target, the servers seem to be stable and fine from my experience so far.

should they have worked on the login servers ages ago, I am thinking yes. if they were buffering players in a 20-30 person queue for as long as I have played to make things smoother, that kinda tells me they needed to stop listening to the people saying more servers... and listened to the people saying things about the login process...

Yeah the server seems mostly fine. It was mostly fine in stormblood as well. It was a glaring design/software problem. The way it handles the lobby error is a design problem. Now they could throw more hardware at it. But that doesn't make the poor design. One I saw the login server could only handle 17,000 I was shocked. Since unless something has changed I was sure when Balmung and Gilgamesh were together they melted the login server. So 17,000 across a data centre seems like chump change. I have also played longer then I planned since I know login might not work. Which in turn increases the wait time. If I knew come back pop the que up wait 30-60 mins and be in. I would probably logout sooner yesterday. So let us hope that they work on fixing the software problem so they don't have a repeat of this in 2 years. Hopefully all the yes men on these forums convince them they can just ignore it again.

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

Weird my english must be off. "limited or even halted pre-orders" means shut the game down?

[DPZ2]

yep. can't wait for "wholesome 100" yoshi-p to cry on stream again how they're "really sorry" while SE posts their best quarter in 10 years. Yep, they really love their players! Unlike evil WoW!

Most of that "best quarter" is due to Mobile Games, not specifically FFXIV.

WoW isn't evil, it's just that most of the upper management appears to be evil. That, and the game lost its focus after Legion. (I'm being polite here, that was about the time Chris Metzen left the company).

[Rae88]

Most of that "best quarter" is due to Mobile Games, not specifically FFXIV.

WoW isn't evil, it's just that most of the upper management appears to be evil. That, and the game lost its focus after Legion. (I'm being polite here, that was about the time Chris Metzen left the company).

Yeah I've uninstalled Battlenet from my computer for the foreseeable future. It's a fine game but I can't support Bobby Kotick and his little board minions atm. I'll pick up BDO as my second MMO instead (and yes it's PTW at the top of the PvP ladder but it's very easily played as a solo grinding FTP game).

[Ranhansha]

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

When your bar is full you don't let more people in, you don't shut it down. What I think he means is, if you're not willing to make more rooms in your bar, but you're taking money from customers in advance and promising them a place inside but have them waiting for over 8 hours outside, you're kind of mean to them.

[Brill_]

See if the believed in actual growth they would have ordered way before the WoW thing. some servers were already showing strain before WoW. They have been notoriously cheap with this game and pushed the consequences onto the customers.

Servers were fine before the Wow exodus. I've been playing since 1.0 and outside of their DDOS issues, I only recall 3 major issues.
1. 2.0 launch. They under estimated how many would play. They responded by adding more servers(which is what they would do now if they could actually get the servers)

2. 3.0 launch. Main issue I recall here is this was back when 2002 would completely kick you out of the game and you had to relogin.

3. 4.0/Raubahn ex.

Over the years they've added an EU datacenter and a 3rd US data center. Thats not being cheap. When it comes to capacity, it can be hard to predict when there are unknowns such as an exodus from a competitor. How was SE supposed to predict a major streamer would switch to FFXIV and bring a huge following?

There's people that work in IT. I'm sure they all know how hard it is to get approval when you ask for money for upgrades or expansion. They planned it out based on current use and expected growth. Then the wow exodus happened and all their data modeling/forecasting went out the window.

What if SE went to the other extreme? Let's say the doubled or tripled the amount of servers they had. Once the 6.0 spike goes away after a month, then you're left with empty servers and people would be complaining about that.

[Exosapien]

Japanese data centers are also a disaster area right now too it seems. I get COVID is a thing but lets not pretend other games and MMOs have launched in 2020/2021 with more then enough time to create a new server in each data center. My technical knowledge might be bad but literally everyone I talked to said this launch was going to be a disaster given the increase in population.

Other MMO's are launching with brand new populations and hardware to match. Expansions have ongoing populations, populations that return just for the expansion, and in this case a surge of new players for many months during it's content drought which is weirdly out of place in any MMO situation.

[Feron]

Sooo they should just shut down the game then?
Some of you doesn't seem to think very ahead.

Did I say shut down the game? Please try reading more closely. Or, IDK, at all. I said stop selling preorders after you have reached the point you know you can support.

1) They know how many people can log in at once, and how many can remained logged in based on their server ability (allocation of resources), and
2) They knew that the expansion would drive a huge surge, especially on a weekend (risk mitigation), and
3) They knew that the early access/preordering would create even more surge on early access days, impacting not just these customers, but even customers who didn't buy the expansion (delivery of service).

This problem was 100% avoidable, and creates a bad experience for the customer. It's crappy project management. And everybody who says this "ALWAYS HAPPENS WITH ANY GAME!!" yeah it does, and it's crappy project management then, too. Why do they do it anyways? Money. They have your money right now. And they are not providing the service they promised right now. So basically you and hundreds of thousands of other people just gave SE an interest-free short-term loan.

SMH honestly with you folks.

[Zaynee]

Creation magic hasn't been discovered on earth.

Then they knowingly stole from people. You can't legally sell something you can't provide. Plain and simple!

[Zaynee]

ooooo i wonder if they ever considered restricting the early access availability as they knew the servers were going to be a bone of contention........

crickets !!!!

THIS!! RIGHT!! HERE!!!!