Server congestion - solutions wanted

[Honya15]

Hello!
As you are all well aware, the congestion problems are huge right now. We all understand that you cannot increase servers due to covid & chip shortage, but you could, at least, mitigate the problems.

When Asmon's stream, and they dying of WoW brought it many players, we had the same problem, just on smaller scale. It was months ago, and you knew perfectly well that the same thing - on larger scale - will happen with the release of Endwalker. The question is, why didn't you do anything about it. The queue system, the AFK system, everything is the same as before, nothing has been improved upon. Did you just ignore the problems, and hoped for the best? Well, the best didn't happen, opposite of best happened. It's time to take action. I'm confident, most of the people would be happy to have 1-2 days of maintenance, instead of waiting hours in queue, just to get kicked out during, or if finally could log in, and have to go eat lunch, get kicked out in 30 minutes. It is not okay, it is making the game a chore.
The same thing will happen, and ruin everyone's experience when the savage gets released. So please, now is a good time to do something about it, instead of hiding behind excuses like covid and chip shortage.

Here is a list of what I think would be fairly easy to implement, or at least does not have hardware requirement:

1) Remember password - This is something that should be default. It is not the 2000s, we can have secure password or token storage. There are applications that can use passwordless log ins, so maybe it is time to improve on that. You cannot believe how much time we spend on this loop: open launcher -> wait for the input to appear -> input password -> wait for play button to appear -> press play button -> wait for game to launch -> press start button -> get 2002 -> game closes -> repeat

2) Have an option of launcher to not close on game launch. It is again to smoothen the login process, same as the above. Most of the game launchers have it, why doesn't yours?

3) Have the queue happen when you press the START button in the game. I know this is a much bigger refactor, it would require players to set up their home world in the launcher, not in-game, but would smoothen up a lot of these queue issues. People could actually fantasia or character change without having to go through queue again.

[Honya15]

4) Don't disconnect during queue. Seriously, there is minimal communication during queue, there should not be anything that's so inrecoverable that you need to boot out players from the game. Make effort to recover, instead of just giving an error.

5) If disonnected during queue, do not close the game. Before you press "Start" in the main menu, the client is not connected to the servers. So the main menu CAN handle a not connected state, why not just send the players back to that screen? Why do they have to go through that chore of a log in again?

6) If disconnected from queue, have grace period, that's longer than 30 seconds. When met with 3 hours of queue, people wont be looking at the game every second. They might go take a shower, eat dinner, watch something. Disconnects during this period is 99% of the game's fault, so dont punish the players for it. Have grace period for 5 minutes, or longer. Consoles dont even receive grace period, because of slower loading times, they cant get in the queue quick enough. It is(or at least, should be) just a number to set, so please set it higher.

7) If disconnected from the game (from whatever reason), have a grace period of at least 5 minutes. If the player reconnects during that period, have a priority queue for them. Nothing worse than raiding, game crashes (which is again, the developers fault, not the players, dont punish them for it), and met with a 3 hours queue. Most of the games have this, there is 0 reason for you not to have it.

That's all what I can think of, but if I can think of these as a player, you could probably think better solutions to at least easen the burden and the frustration of the players.
Again, these solutions do not require hardware, most of them do not even require server change, just client and launcher code changes. Please do not abandon the gamers, because eventually they will have enough, and leave your game. Every time you release a new content, the more and more frustration we get. How many releases do you want to get overshadowed by login issues? Please take time to fix these issues!

Apologies if this is the wrong section, but Feedback section somehow has only sub-section of feedback about website, not about the game. Why is that?

[Themarvin]

Well to not leave the password there is a security thing and so is to close the launcher after launchign the game, also it make it more prevent to spam the server, and you cant have the queu button started before you have picked which character and server you want to play on.

As for any server improvement, there is a shortage on chips, if you have not noticed by now.

[Honya15]

As I see, you have not read half of the things I wrote.

Well to not leave the password there is a security thing and so is to close the launcher after launchign the game, also it make it more prevent to spam the server

Having an automatically log in does not expose your account to any serious security issue. Do you think your SE account is more important than your steam account? And yet, steam does have auto login function, and FFXIV launcher does not.
Having the launcher stay open after launching the game actually does less requests to servers than opening and connecting, and logging in every time. You do get why, right?

you cant have the queu button started before you have picked which character and server you want to play on.

As I wrote just next to the suggestion, it would need refactor of the client and launcher code, making players pick server in the launcher -> open game -> queue -> select character you want to play on the server you picked -> play.

As for any server improvement, there is a shortage on chips, if you have not noticed by now.

Again, as I said several times, all of these changes are software changes, not hardware. Chip shortage is not an excuse for not improving software.

It helps in general human-to-human communication if you actually read/listen to what others say, before you react.

[BluexBird]

These are all amazing chips and it's honestly rather sad that a game of this magnitude hasn't had these things implemented.

1. I absolutely HATE having to type in my password every single time. I also HATE the damn delay that happens every time I open the launcher.

2. This wouldn't really be an issue if the crashing wasn't so rampant, but I don't see why this would be a hassle. So yeah.

3. Honestly this seems a bit too janky, I don't feel we have to go this far.

4. Don't think I need to comment on this one - have a reconnect routine that keeps on trying if the connection drops. At least for a few minutes.

5. THIS IS THE BIGGEST ONE! The fact that the game KICKS YOU from the program, forcing you to go through the launcher again... I will NEVER fucking understand this! This should be the FIRST thing they do.

6. I always thought there was a grace period, of a few minutes. The other day, when I was waiting on the queue, I got disconnected with the 2002 error. I immediately opened the game back up, but when I tried to get back on queue, it said there was an error with the login server, and closed my game. THIS HAPPENED A TOTAL OF TWO TIMES! I don't think I need to tell you how long the whole process is (running the launcher, entering password, waiting for launcher to process, pressing START, waiting for game to open, choosing your character), but imagine my shock when after all that, after I was finally able to get back into the queue, I noticed I was in the same spot before the 2002 error. I don't know how long it was, but I was extremely surprised. This also went on to happen 2 more times before I was able to finally get in.

7. Not sure how this one works, but it should be dealt with the same way as above. I noticed if you get DC'd from the game, it keeps you logged in. Not sure if when you try coming back it realizes this and allows you to bypass the queue.

[Honya15]

6. I always thought there was a grace period, of a few minutes. The other day, when I was waiting on the queue, I got disconnected with the 2002 error. I immediately opened the game back up, but when I tried to get back on queue, it said there was an error with the login server, and closed my game. THIS HAPPENED A TOTAL OF TWO TIMES! I don't think I need to tell you how long the whole process is (running the launcher, entering password, waiting for launcher to process, pressing START, waiting for game to open, choosing your character), but imagine my shock when after all that, after I was finally able to get back into the queue, I noticed I was in the same spot before the 2002 error. I don't know how long it was, but I was extremely surprised. This also went on to happen 2 more times before I was able to finally get in.

It has grace period, that is 60 seconds. Its set to a ridiculously small amount. Consoles cant even load back in that time, also if you get 2002 more than one time, you wont make it, that means back to the end of the queue. Since it's (or should be) just a number in their settings, i dont get why they dont increase it to a more feasible number

[Arohk]

1. I absolutely HATE having to type in my password every single time. I also HATE the damn delay that happens every time I open the launcher..

Use XIV Quicklauncher, (PC only)

[Geirskogul]

FFXIV does undeniably have some really antiquated user interfaces outside of the game.

The fact that the launcher is closed when you launch the game and that there is no auto-login feature is actually mind-boggling. Like, pretty much every single piece of software these days has an auto login feature by default that you need to manually disable if you don't want it. Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battlenet, Spotify and probably even the epic game store (even Tarkov has it!). FFXIV is literally the only piece of software on my computer that requires a login that does not have an automatic login feature and no option to leave the launcher open upon starting the game. There's just no excuse for this in 2021.

Even though i've gotten used to SE's crap interfaces outside of the actual game at this point i have to admit that i think interacting with any FFXIV related services outside of the game is just an absolute pain in the behind. I don't know much about the newly updated mogstation but the old mogstation looked straight out of 2004 and was just awful. Then we have to process of purchasing optional items; you log into the mogstation and click the optional items tab, that sends you to a different site, the square store where you need to log in again, then you put your items in the cart and in order to finalize your purchase you have to log in AGAIN. I mean wtf? 3 logins to purchase a fantasia. I don't think i know of any games these days with microtransactions that doesn't just have it directly accessible in the actual game, and requiring you to enter your details 3 times across 2 different websites in order to make a purchase is just absurd.

And something else i really dislike is the pre-order system. You get 2 different codes. Why? Why do i need a special pre-order and then a second key to avoid being locked out after i've already started playing the expansion, and this key you sometimes don't even get mailed to you, i don't think i've encountered such a bizarre system with any other digital game purchase, ever. With Endwalker i never got it mailed to me. I had to dig up the old pre-order confirmation and click the link to access my pre-order key in order to view the key for the full expansion. All these extremely archaic quirks add up and it's just annoying to deal with. I hope the updated mogstation is a sign of things to come because good lord they're far behind in terms of user interface design outside of the game.

[Packetdancer]

And something else i really dislike is the pre-order system. You get 2 different codes. Why? Why do i need a special pre-order and then a second key to avoid being locked out after i've already started playing the expansion, and this key you sometimes don't even get mailed to you, i don't think i've encountered such a bizarre system with any other digital game purchase, ever.

The reason is because you get the pre-order perks well before they actually charge you for the order. Most games, if you pre-order a thing, they eventually charge you, and when you enter that code you now have access to the thing. They either issue you a "pre-order edition" code when the payment goes through that's different from the later normal retail code (and has early access), or they charge you two weeks early or whatever and then say "if you enter the code now, prior to launch, you get early access and these perks".

However, FFXIV gives you a perk immediately (an XP-generating accessory to let you catch up classes to the cap level prior to the expansion), long before they charge you for the pre-order. If they had you register the entire expansion, they'd either have to charge you the full price immediately, or else not offer that item (i.e., no code until the pre-order was actually charged).

Otherwise, if they had only one code and gave it to you immediately, folks would pre-order, register the expansion... and then could cancel the pre-order and not be charged for it, even though they'd already registered it to their account.

So instead they give you two codes: one immediately (that gives you the XP-generating earring, and the early access perk) and without charging you when you make the order, the second when they actually charge you for the pre-order and the payment goes through (that gives you the actual expansion). If you cancel the expansion pre-order before it comes out, yeah, you still have the earring (and early access during the early access window), but you don't get the actual expansion.

It feels clunky, I don't disagree, but there is actually a (semi-)rational reason to do it that way.

[Geirskogul]

I'd honestly much rather just pay for the expansion in advance and not have to think about it later and fumble around with different codes. I mean, that's what pretty much every other game does. I haven't played WoW in a long time but i really wish FFXIV had a launcher similar to the battlenet launcher. WoW may have gone down the drain along with every other neglected Blizzard franchise at this point but if there's one thing Blizzard does well nowadays it's user interface.