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

[Rizon]

The problem is due to the lack of server capacity and outdated technology. So delaying the game is not the answer. New and improved servers is as well as sufficient numbers. I do not know what it is like in Japan and the EU but I would imagine they are comparable. Due to the pandemic there is no immediate hope for improvement in this area. So until such time as the newness wears off and the player levels stabilize we will continue to have these problems and it will only get worse after Tuesday after the official release. Only Yoshi-P and his team can give us an idea as to when this will happen so a little info would be appreciated.

[SnowVix]

Wait...haha. Wouldn't delaying until they got all the servers they wanted by definition have fixed this in that situation? ie, wait for the servers to launch the service that requires the servers?

I work in the tech industry and have seen the delays but they are not indefiniteit's not like the bot caused forever shortages of 3080s we are talking about here. It's just delays on delivery.

i was going to say you weren't here when 5.4, and later Dragonsong War Ultimate, were delayed due to the pandemic and people also had a massive explosion of outrage over it, then i checked your join date. you know that delaying endwalker for an unknown amount of time was just not an option.

[Gyson]

Seems like the game is completely unplayable for a large portion of the player base. At this point would it have been better to delay and get more servers in place?

Also, maybe tighten up the AFK timer during launch periods would be a good idea, even having a floating AFK time that goes down to 10 minutes during heavy times would be a fix.

Gotta do something. This is a mess.

I don't think delaying the release further would have helped, unless you're talking about delaying for the better part of a year while the world sorts out the supply issues from the pandemic. I know games are an escape for many, but the truth is they're simply not immune to real life issues.

I also think a 10 minute AFK timer is far too short. Things come up, and someone shouldn't be penalized with 30-60+ min queue just because they had to step away from the screen for 10 minutes.

Really, I think just improving the design and coding of the queue system would have helped a fair bit, primarily by building in more protections for players who get dumped from the queue by server errors that occur during their wait. If they could just reclaim their spot in the line by logging back in within a few minutes, that would help a lot.

I would even take that a step further and extend it to players who are already playing and get dumped by a server error. Just keep their spot in the game world reserved for a few minutes and let them get back in immediately during that grace period.

That would resolve most of the reasonable complaints. The queue times are what they are.

[Maxilor]

I've been able to play just fine, longest queue i've had was about 30 minutes.

Sorry for those that are having issues but when you actually get into the game it works and plays just fine.

Not sure how a delay would have changed any of this.

[Feronar]

Perhaps limit players to X hours of playtime per day. Start at 4 hours then gradually increase, and eventually remove the limit as the initial surge dies down. This would also help to deter AFKers, since going AFK without logging out for a hour means that you've just wasted an hour of your daily limited play time.

[Nothv13]

Wait...haha. Wouldn't delaying until they got all the servers they wanted by definition have fixed this in that situation? ie, wait for the servers to launch the service that requires the servers?

I work in the tech industry and have seen the delays but they are not indefiniteit's not like the bot caused forever shortages of 3080s we are talking about here. It's just delays on delivery.

Delays in all my Tech orders are minimum 3 months. I have some that are still outstanding from nearly a year ago. Delying an expansion that long is potential suicide. These delays on delivery are from both lack of transportation and lack of production. Places like Nvidia are predicting the shortages could last till 2023

[Velnora]

While I know there is nothing to be done, as there is a shortage of chips. It is kinda funny how they had years to upgrade/add servers from mogstation funds. Which was a justification for the cash shop.

[Sekuharu]

Delaying it for the sake of simply delaying it would have done nothing. Maybe if they had put more thought into it, and taken better steps to prepare for the release day it may have helped.

I expected the long ques, cant really avoid it. I also expected longer wait times, and terrible dungeon ques. I didnt expect to be kicked out of the que from error codes, and have to start back at square one though.

[Nothv13]

While I know there is nothing to be done, as there is a shortage of chips. It is kinda funny how they had years to upgrade/add servers from mogstation funds. Which was a justification for the cash shop.

There was no need to upgrade. What they had was working for their player numbers. the only thing that changed that was the WoW exodus and large influx of players to FFXIV. Something that happened far too recently to actually get servers in time.

[Kazrah]

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.