To all the people who are complaining about login queues

[HyperiusUltima]

I get it. This isn't good for us, but how many times have they reiterated about semiconductors? MANY, MANY TIMES.

Live Letters, Announcements, and such if you paid attention to their news feed and the letters Naoki Yoshida wrote to us rather recently about Errors and Congestion.

I understand the outrage that is not getting to play your game immediately as soon as you buy it because you're hype about it. The reason why people are getting 2002 errors is simple, as said in the letters Yoshida gave us, summarized: They prevent the Game Servers from crashing and becoming unplayable, and requiring emergency maintenance.

It should be obvious which is worse because it literally kicks everyone out and prevents them from playing the game, compared to trickling through the queue.

Again, the servers are always stressed whenever they've launched a new expansion, and considering that they're wanting to pay more for semiconductors and there being a shortage, welp; there you have it. Yoshida and his team were already trying to rush getting the semiconductors to make the servers they need to handle the kind of load they're dealing with now probably after the player influx when Blizzard shot themselves in the head for WoW alongside the allegations they are facing.

All the dev team tries to do is give their best; this is known since Yoshida does a Live Letter a bit after launch to announce anything new going forward, as well as recap on issues and the like. Every time there's been an expansion release, I've heard this phrase from his lips: "Our team has been working around the clock."

This means they are doing all they can to make sure the launch is clean, even if it is rather muddy right now.

Give it a week or two, then come back. The game time they are giving means this:

For $15/30 Days - It's 50 cents a day you're paying. Multiply by 7 days, and you get $3.50 - a 23.3% refund, and it goes to everyone who has game time currently in the game.

For $30/60 Days - Same $3.50, except it's a 11.6% refund in this case. Still, a refund is a refund.

This is for the current situation - and if they compensate any more days, I will add them here for how much revenue may be lost based on how many days they compensate for us.



To the people who are calling this 'white-knighting', look to this as an example as to what I'm getting at here:

I get it, I sincerely, truly get it as I've experienced similar situations elsewhere. It sucks, full stop. Launch histories of this game and others help to paint a picture that makes this one seem even worse than it is. It doesn't help that other games don't have the login server issues this one does. It doesn't help that other people are able to play when you can't; it only makes the situation worse for the person unable to play.


We "White Knights" get it. We get that people are rightly angry that they're not able to participate in a game they're paying for. We get the need to express that anger and frustration on an official platform. We also get that there's a much larger chain of events that has put things out of SE's reach. We're able to see the broader picture, have paid attention to SE's communication with the players, likely have more empathy than others, and are able to be understanding of the constraints events of the past two, almost three, years have put on international trade.

I know from personal work experience that there's a 6-12 month lead time on *plastic bottles* and that shipping times and costs have more than tripled. That's wreaked havoc with our supply chain and logistics operations. The company I work for's one of the largest in a hobby industry that's a complete luxury and have seen historic growth the past two years. People are home a lot and therefore get involved in hobbies more than they previously did; including trying new games. Many businesses, including the ones who make the components that go into servers, aren't able to get the parts they need to make their product fast enough to keep up with demand, if they're able to make them at all. Even if they can place the order, the lead time on receiving it is likely very long, which means the lead time of the server manufacturers is equally long.

We saw the exhaustion and sadness on Yoshi-P's face when he announced the recent two week delay. We know the CBU3 team have been working ridiculous hours to get things working as well as they can.

We understand that SE had planned the installation of an entire new data center which, when online, would have funneled Oceanic players off existing DCs, reducing burdens on their worlds. This fact alone shows that SE was paying attention to growth, anticipated the need for new servers, and planned accordingly based on projected growth rates. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond SE's control dictated that the DC wasn't able to be installed on the original timetable and the OCE players are still logging into the various JP/NA/EU worlds they have been.

If being empathetic, seeing the broad picture, and understanding that people, departments, and companies are under unprecedented constraints means we're "White Knighting", so be it. It does not, however, mean we can't understand peoples' outrage. Many of us White Knights aren't able to log in either; we just try not to let it upset us much.

Major Edit: Welp. Here we are again. Another 14 days added on as of 12/15. This is a lot bigger than expected. Let's go over the numbers again.

$15/30 Days = 0.50 a day, 21 days = $10.50, divided by $15 = SEVENTY PERCENT OF MONTHLY REVENUE REFUNDED TO THE COMMUNITY. 70%! That's A LOT for just their monthly sub for this month in terms of revenue.

$30/60 Days same deal, except now it's cut into 35% of their bi-monthly revenue. Still, it's pretty major in the long-run. Anymore and we may be looking at close to a full refund of a month(which I hope doesn't happen at this point given how much they've given already as a service that's extending BEYOND what any normal MMO would do in these circumstances historically).

There's also the fact that they're freezing advertising and the Free Trial all the way up to Heavensward temporarily - which cuts into sales on Endwalker a lot. I'm pretty sure this short-term move is the best they can do considering the current state of the game they've been monitoring for nearly three weeks, not only because they need a lot of fixes, but they also have to control the congestion issue. If they don't, they know it's going to spiral out of control - so it will definitely hurt part of this quarter.