Endwalker madness question for vet players

[Gothicshark]

I know we are all in the same boat and to mix metaphors that horse is well and truly dead. What I want to know from the vets is "When should we expect it to get back to normal?" For the other expansions how long did the madness continue? 3 weeks... after the first raid drop?

As a Balmung player who has been here since 2015, this happens every expansion, it dies down after a week. Although the last time I saw queue sizes this big was the first great WOW migration of 2015. Around May of 2015 a massive amount of WOW players came here due to Warlords of Dreanor announcements about flying. I guess technically it was the second migration of WOW players, the first being in 1.0 but it wasn't that big or sustained.

[Gothicshark]

WoW migrant speaking here, I don't recall WoW expacs launches ever being as bad as this.

I was there in November of 2004.It was worse, as they hadn't implemented the queue system yet. So the launcher crashed your computer instead.

I was there when the Gate to Outland reopened. Couldn't get in until 4am.

I was there when the ships set sail for Northrend, and they promised it would be smooth, it wasn't, and it was 10million times worse than this.

It wasn't until the game started hemorrhaging Subs did expansion releases become easy.

[Catwho]

Usually what clears the bandwagon players away is not the state of XIV, but the state of everything else.

1. Those who took vacation days probably only took them for next week. That'll free up the day time, but the night time queues will remain bad.
2. Holidays will cause some thinning as people go shopping, travel, etc. I was actually not online all afternoon today due to two holiday parties, which freed up a spot for someone.
3. Another AAA game getting released. The audience for XIV and games like Halo Infinite don't really have a lot of crossover, but it might siphon some folks off, especially if they're frustrated about the queues in this one.

WoW was the "home base" game for a lot of my friends. They'd go and play XIV when a patch came out, but their daily login and friendship networks were all in WoW. One of them has had to confront the reality that Blizzard's decline has also put an end to that era of her life, and while she'd like to pick up XIV full time instead.... it's not happening.

To alleviate the pressure, they really truly need additional servers. The queues for EU are as much as the total server capacity on some servers. But with the silicon shortage, who knows when they can do that? Data center travel has made world balancing really a non issue when things are stable, so if I was SE, I would not be concerned about adding new servers only for them to be abandoned in six months.

[AtlasS]

It’s like none of you have played a game at launch before. Suck it up.

[FudoMyoo]

I know we are all in the same boat and to mix metaphors that horse is well and truly dead. What I want to know from the vets is "When should we expect it to get back to normal?" For the other expansions how long did the madness continue? 3 weeks... after the first raid drop?

Past experience is about 1 week. Excluding 2.0 which is so much more worst.

[coffeeserver]

I was there for those too and developed a sense on when the "world" would right itself. I could see guild activity levels and city hub shenanigans and figure out when the new was going to wear off. I was asking the vets here what their opinion was and I think the answer I got was somewhere between 1 week to I dont know when to never...

[C000kiemonster]

I know we are all in the same boat and to mix metaphors that horse is well and truly dead. What I want to know from the vets is "When should we expect it to get back to normal?" For the other expansions how long did the madness continue? 3 weeks... after the first raid drop?

The two week point is when people calm down. But that’s two weeks from official launch.

This time around, it may be a month because of holiday gamers and the need for more servers.

[Siniztor]

Stormblood was worse, because the server caps were lower, while also having a large amount of players circumventing the 30 min logout timer. Disconnects also weren't uncommon, not to mention Raubahn EX preventing a lot of players from progressing the story early on. I could easily spend around 3-4 hours in queue to get into Balmung, while I've currently only had queues of 1-1.5 hours at most.

The time you have is you ive had over 3 hours in Q and have FC mates with 4+..we have watched many many movies lol Ive literly been in Q now for 2 hours 17 mins

[Reyn]

Yeah, my experience has been about 2 weeks of craziness and then it starts to stabilize a bit. Basically, however long it takes everyone to finish the MSQ and dip their feet in the new endgame content. There's a lot of players who only show up for patches to keep up with the story. Or people who only show up on weekly resets for raids. Once they start vanishing it's business as usual.

Could be longer than usual this time though - we don't usually have queues at all during the slow months pre-expansion like we've had, and with all the trouble getting in it will take "snow birds" a lot longer to get their fill before going back to their other games.