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

[Omedon]

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.

EDIT the day of (first) compensation:

Well apparently the answer to my initial question was: We get a free week. That's classy!

Though, to be honest, my lingering concern is that there is no fix for the current situation aside from "a lot of people just lose interest." I honestly can't think of how anyone fixes this, in a timely fashion, with all the money in the existing world as we know it with its chip shortages and such.

Maybe this won't be the last free week given out, I don't know, but I'm glad they see this as something in their arsenal.

[linayar]

People will adapt, just like with Stormblood.

[Roda]

I mean I'm expecting some hiccups, maybe even crashes, but such is the way of mmo launches.
(Expect periodic server restarts as people cheese the auto-logout)

That being said, XIV's launches have been steadily improving with each expansion despite the game's growth. So it probably won't be too bad after the initial surge. (ShB was miraculously smooth iirc. )

[Vahlnir]

The servers go down, they come back up after an emergency maintenance. That usually doesn't happen until official launch though. Either way, pretty straight forward. There will be no compensation other than bringing the servers back to working order. So...there you go. That's what will happen at some point.

[myahele]

I expect even longer queue times just to get in the server than ShB release. I also expect emergency maintenance and probably at least 1 DDoS during early access. This was how it was with the other expansions, so I've always expected the same will happen with EW.

[Zsolen]

It isn't SE being ready you need to worry about. It's potential DDOS.

[ryouma17]

the wow refugees will take to the forums and social media and cry like they always do, i will tap into my unlimited reserve of patience and wait it out just like i did with stormblood, the only thing i plan to do during the early access anyways is check out the new jobs. i dont plan to tackle the story for a good week or so after release so the starting zones can empty out

[Vahlnir]

the only thing i plan to do during the early access anyways is check out the new jobs

That's what I usually do, too. This expansion it will be Reaper during EA. And maybe Sage through Shadowbringers beast tribe quests.

[Raven2014]

I'm also a bit worried tbh, I don't remember having a queue ever except at the beginning of an expansion. Yet, we have a queue for at least a year now, this suggests we're already at capacity. And yesterday for some reason the server got nuked twice.

Unless SE plan to have some serious scaling for launch day, it'll be a shit show.

[Maxilor]

The servers have been getting hit hard recently by what I assume to be DDOS attacks.

Even last night I got kicked out and when I tried to go back in the queue was in the Thousands so I assume that means the whole server went down.

People just can't let others have fun I suppose.