Casual players locked out of FFXIV for indefinite time!

[Saimeren]

I mean, you could turn your pc on when you get home and log in, go about your evening chores, dinner ect. By the time you're done, your queue should be relatively short.

They can't do anything about the queue times that isn't against the purchase contracts. Complaining about it isn't going to solve anything.

[MeldinX2]

I mean, you could turn your pc on when you get home and log in, go about your evening chores, dinner ect. By the time you're done, your queue should be relatively short.

That's exactly what i'm trying to do. I mean even today. I had a 2.860 queue and it is shorter than usual i thought. I started it 16.35 and i still have a 996 people in front of me in queue now at 18.38. So it does take a long time even when it's shorter than usual.

[Laerune]

I do hope they fix this fast or introduce a option to freeze ones subscription. I come from work at 6 PM and on my server this means 7/8k queue. It takes around 5 hours. This means I can only play from 11 PM till 12 AM, since I need to wake up at 06:30, this is not possible for me.

I can only play in the weekends and maybe on Wednesday.

[Thaurnus]

The way it's going the free week will be a free month as things haven't gotten any better. It's quite depressing for us casual normies that work 9 to 5. And to add insult to injury, being in the UK the Euros all get a couple of hours head start over us, and no, I'm not moving house/country just to play.

[CNitsah]

At this point, what I'm waiting from S-E is a promise to buy servers so the situation as soon as they can so it doesn't happen next time.
It's sad for them that at their moment to shine, they failed so bad, but not because of the game itself.

[Packetdancer]

Actually, it isn't. And will likely cause further problems.

*points up* This.

Beyond the obvious "people forced to log out during peak hours might just get right back into the queue and make the situation worse" part, queues in the abstract are weirdly finicky things. In fact, there's actually some really fascinating mathematical theory about how to optimize queues in the abstract; not everything which you would intuitively think would improve things does, and in some cases they make things worse.

Conversely, things you'd think might make things worse—like letting people skip the main queue and funnel through a far more strictly limited one, a'la Disney's Fast Pass system—actually can make queues unbelievably optimized. (Fast Pass, believe it or not, actually speeds up the non-Fast Pass line, and by a lot; there are some really neat studies on this.)

To take the 'limit playtime' suggestion and run with it, imagine you could request a limited playtime window three times per week—say four hours max—and be guaranteed a login spot. So you could say, "I want to play somewhere between 4pm and 10pm Pacific time", and if there was still a 'play slot' available in that time, the system could say "Okay, log in at 5:30pm Pacific, we guarantee you'll be sped through the queue, and your playtime will end at 9:30pm." Now you have this person logging in at a known time, which means they don't have to sit in the long, slow queue for hours and hope. That reduces the main slow queue by one person, but the tradeoff is that the person who got sped in has a time-limited play window once on.

Meanwhile, folks who want their play session to be open-ended (or who used up their limited play slots for the week) can stay in the normal queue.

As you start to fiddle with those knobs, you can potentially find a place where X number of 'limited play' slots will reduce congestion enough that the main queue becomes more manageable; you have fewer people logging in overall at any given moment, because the folks who accepted limited play would log in at a known, predictable time rather than clogging up the normal queue for hours and hours. You could even also further tweak the knobs to see what it does to the model, like making it such that if you request a shorter window (2.5 hours, say, instead of 4), you get skipped even further forward in the login queue.

Now, this is pure theory; obviously there are real-world limiting factors, like "can you raise the number of limited play slots high enough to make a significant difference in the main queue, without causing the limited play queue to become crowded enough that you can no longer guarantee a timely login" and whatnot. Plus, that would take a chunk of development time to implement, etc. So while it's an interesting mathematical and intellectual exercise, and you might even be able to find the right settings for those hypothetical knobs to alleviate congestion, it almost certainly isn't a practical solution here right now.

But hopefully it illustrates a little bit of why queues are a tricky thing at times!