Should the launch have been delayed? What else could be done?

[DPZ2]

Which shows if they had planned for in game growth in NA and EU they would have some new worlds going live. Except either they didn't plan any growth (wow is an anomaly and they don't get blamed for that) or the plan was to see how many more players to stuff on the worlds until the experience started to suffer. You guys believe they don't have road maps planning years down the road?

They did plan for growth in NA and EU and Oceania, and those plans were compromised by the Covid-19 virus as well as technology supply-chain shortages throughout the world.

Road maps made in 2019 (when Endwalker was in early development) suddenly became useless in 2020. With the bonfire that WoW created for themselves, road maps became obsolete where server growth is concerned.

All plans for growth, in almost every industry, had to be rewritten this year, given the economic impact of a Pandemic that is still raging in most parts of the world that is not Europe or North America. The clients we work with in IT are in that bind right now in the foreseeable future.

Only one current MMO (that appears to not be doing as well as planned) owns their own Cloud company.

[DPZ2]

How would renting servers, then returning them work. I am not exactly sure how it all works but doesn't a server = a world? So say they rented 5 servers per data center, ... how would you convince players to transfer to those new worlds? Players want to play with their friends, with their fcs, and those who have houses sure wouldn't want to move to a new server, especially one that was going to be returned after a few months?

Given my understanding of how such servers typically work, it isn't 5 servers per data center. It might be closer to 25, or 50. Think "how many instances have been spun up for leveling areas at the moment". Each of those instances may have their own servers. There's a reason there's a black screen every time you enter a dungeon, for example. You're actually moving to a different server (virtual or not).

[DPZ2]

Do you actually believe that they had no other options but to push it out the door and let people suffer? Someone said they have been trying for 9 hours. That is wrong on so many levels(all parties).

So, would you prefer a release date of July 2023? Or the inconvenience of a bottleneck that allows you to play in December of 2021?

Would you subscribe to the game for another six months of Shadowbringers with no updates? Twelve months? Eighteen months?

Or would you demand a refund. You have until 6 December 2021 to decide about that, you know.

[Moonlite]

They did plan for growth in NA and EU and Oceania, and those plans were compromised by the Covid-19 virus as well as technology supply-chain shortages throughout the world.

Road maps made in 2019 (when Endwalker was in early development) suddenly became useless in 2020. With the bonfire that WoW created for themselves, road maps became obsolete where server growth is concerned.

All plans for growth, in almost every industry, had to be rewritten this year, given the economic impact of a Pandemic that is still raging in most parts of the world that is not Europe or North America. The clients we work with in IT are in that bind right now in the foreseeable future.

Only one current MMO (that appears to not be doing as well as planned) owns their own Cloud company.

Companies are still filling orders. In fact auto industry wouldn't be so borked if they hadn't cancelled their order. You want me to believe they ordered new servers for NA and EU in 2019 and they have got nothing to show for it two years later. Yet somehow the servers ordered for OCE were delivered. Yes they can't get them running, but they say they have them. They have never claimed to have any EU or NA.



And yeah the road map for all forms of online entertainment were increased not lowered. Which still means we should see some servers. Not enough, god no. Let us play a little guessing game with SE being a company that has most definitely prioritized profits over player experience. They ordered ZERO servers for NA and EU even though they expected growth. Until WoW and New World bottomed out, then they were desperate. What they decided/hoped was enough players might move and they hoped EU, NA,and JPN would be stable once OCE was live. You have been here since 2015 and the way the sub is structured, the cash shop, and the way they have invested in this game.



You are 100% comfortable sitting there being, "It was all covid, SE couldn't have possibly put money ahead of the players." If you 100% believe that then I am sorry and when I see your next post I will erase this and just say you must be right. If someone who has been here from 2015 is 100% life on the line confident, I shouldn't question that. But that is how sure I am they made money over player choices that have lead us here. Do I think it would have been smooth, no. That doesn't mean it couldn't have been better.

[Velnora]

Hmmmmm. Might have something to do with the fact that they built, oh, an entire data center in Europe with the funds, including 12 worlds (at 17,000 population per that's 204,000 additional players who don't have to use the North American data center), and they're opening up a new Oceania data center that will be closer to non-Japanese players in the Western Pacific with the same funds? That particular project was well underway almost a year before WoW turned into a barbeque pit.

Which was well underway before Covid was even a thing. They have had time to upgrade infrastructure.

Here's the part nobody talks about. Historically, Corporate SE is absolute shit. Why do you think it took a cash shop to *allegedly* afford a new data center. The money is there. They just don't wanna allocate funds. They have underfunded the game for quite some time, so it comes as no surprise this all happened.

It's not the Dev teams fault. It's the suits.

[Lunafreya]

Launch was already delayed. The situation does suck but let's stop acting like the game is super unplayable because it is not. Once you are in game it is smooth and there are zero errors. The only issue right now is the error code kicking you from the Q and sometimes losing your place. Other than that this launch is completely fine and it will stabilize in a week or so. I'm not sure why people are threatening to cancel their sub over this but this was to be expected. I'm annoyed too but i'm not gonna act like the game doesnt work once I get in.

[Aspirin4Breakfast]

Except it actually is unplayable. I have a job where i work long hours as i am sure most people do, so after paying for the collectors edition to it around in a queue in early access, only to get down 4k in said queue and then get dropped randomly every day and not even get a chance to get in and see the new stuff is absurd. Also, this is just early access....like, there is going to be more people on the 7th when full access is a thing....I think personally refunds are due, as everyone payed for the expansion but only people that can sit there all day and keep requeueing get to play.

[Tatiana]

I think most people knew this was gonna happen. The global supply chain shortage for semiconductors is impacting every industry pretty badly, I do agree they should have upgraded their infrastructure in preparation for the future of the game, that should always be something that's done regardless. Being too reliant on China to supply the world with these has been a hard lesson learned for these industries, and new semiconductor fabrication plants are being built in Europe and the US, but they take a long time to build and are really expensive so there's no easy solution for this at the moment. Hopefully once supply is back to normal they will invest heavily in expanding their servers. They could have delayed the expansion until the summer, when the shortage is estimated to be over, but there would be a massive content drought.

[Hasrat]

Which shows if they had planned for in game growth in NA and EU they would have some new worlds going live. Except either they didn't plan any growth (wow is an anomaly and they don't get blamed for that) or the plan was to see how many more players to stuff on the worlds until the experience started to suffer. You guys believe they don't have road maps planning years down the road?

Or, maybe, possible, consider that major company plans and roadmaps are charted more than a year in advance. For all we know, they'd already planned to add more servers to EU to account for predicted growth after OCE went online. As we've seen, actual growth simply outpaced predictions by a large margin due to various factors.

[Deceptus]

Maybe not a delay, but rather a staggered set of early releases. Pick out a random selection of players totaling a specific percentage of the player population and giving them a date for early release access. That way, it'd be less of a load on the servers while reducing the severity of problems caused by player overflow and maybe improving the ability to fix those problems when they pop up rather than have every player logging in and having the login servers repeatedly exploding.

Aside from putting more effort into improving login servers, I'm out of ideas on this one. FFXIV is certainly a game suffering from success right now.

SWTOR did this on launch. The earlier you pre-ordered the earlier you had access to "early access"

Early access was 3-4 days and a different set of folks could log in on those days depending on how early you pre-ordered.

Essentially staggered the launch