Seriously?

[JusticePope]

Let me start out by saying I have been waiting for this game since close to the end of the first version of FFXIV. While I did not hit level cap, I did make progress up to at least level 40. I've been extremely excited and supportive of ARR. I stopped playing WoW shortly after MoP released and managed to pull most of my guild together to join my wife and I in ARR. The betas were excellent, but the more betas that I have played the more frustrated I became. My welling excitement only fuels my frustration, and the recent turn of events is no different.

Let's point out the obvious, no matter how much people say otherwise, this is hardly an early access. The last phase of beta was an absolute mess. My wife was locked out for almost two whole days, and a few friends could not even make a character on the server I was on. I would very much have loved to move to a low populated server, but apparently having a level 40 DRG on a new server is a detriment to its population and well-being. Instead, I have to put up with coaxing my friends into waiting until 2-3am EST to make characters on my server so we can play together.

These problems should have been solved by the end of Phase 4. The server and congestion issues? You know how many people played the last phase of beta. You actually have numbers on how many pre-orders you've sold. You know how many people to expect, yet we're so extremely congested that now I cannot even log in? No queue? This is insanity.

It may also help if you allow a player to choose what server they would like to be on before they go through the process of creating a character, as well as have an indication of what the server stress is. Instead, we go through this process of creating the perfect character (I'm aware we can save data), and then only met with an error saying the server is locked. They should know that beforehand so they don't have to go through with making a character until the server is ready.

Where did the queue go? This is an MMO standard at this point and should not have just disappeared without rhyme or reason.

I had played last night, for what time was even considered playable, barely leveling a new class. Could not do class quests, could not do guildhests or any dungeon at all. I just melted my face off mundane levequests because I hit a wall wherever I went for questing or party play. If I wanted to grind endlessly on random mobs by myself, I would go play an actual RPG game. I had assumed that by the time I got home from work today that these issues with the duty finder would have been fixed only to find that occasionally the NA/EU servers do not update and more often than not I get an error saying the world is full.

The amount of frustration I'm feeling is directly correlated to how excited I am about this game, because I want it to succeed, but this is very quickly not becoming worth the wait. As stated in other threads, early access is not a beta. We're paying for an extra three days before release for a finished product, and that is very evidently not being delivered.

This. Needs. To. Stop.

[Burningtofu]

I feel your sorrow as am I suffering from the same dilemma. Of the early day access, I was able to login for no longer than 8 hours and rest were spent waiting. I have built a PC specifically for this game and I'm a man who seldom pre-purchase a game. And this is the type of problem hinders me from doing so. What makes this even more ridiculous is that this version of FF14 is a redemption to the FF community and so far I it is not looking good. Although, Day 1 on most MMO will suffer these types of problems and we'll look at this and laugh in the future and even forget about it but it certainty did tarnished the FF online brand for me forever.

[JusticePope]

Please. I expect bugs, but I do not expect the game to be unplayable. It's great that you're apparently able to play it without having to select your character and hit the Ok button several hundred times. WoW was inconvenient to play at launch, but it was still playable as well as a myriad of other MMOs. FFXI, AoC, Rift, SWTOR, etc... All fairly playable during launch and their respective early accesses. Nothing in those games was this game breaking, and you think a company like Square Enix would have learned from their mistakes, Blizzard's especially. Nice to see them outdo themselves in the opposite direction though.

[Psychosamm]

What he's saying is totally true, they should have been better prepared for this, now they're scrambling like roaches trying to get things fixed that should've been good to go in the first place. I even tried making a character on the JP server just for funzies and i've been stuck at a loading screen for the last 15-20 minutes. This is one hell of a fail, may as well be beta phase 5 and push back the release date until they get their shit together.

[Whateverfits]

@Valkus LOL! you say this when you do realize that these same errors and problems were around in version 1.0 the 3102 and 90k issues being 2 of them so seconds?? try Years. They have have over 2 years to deal with these problems and at the current are saying "we are dealing with the issue." and go down for maintenance and when its back up are saying "ok issues fixed." and yet the issues are still there.

[Graal]

Valkus, kindly be quiet. Your comments aren't even almost helpful. This post was well thought-out and in no way whiny. It accurately depicts the woes of the general online populace. This, in truth, is more of a Beta phase 5. They really should have made sure the servers could handle the kind of load before declaring this 'early access' to be a privilege for pre-order customers. Square Enix needs to know that this isn't a very good experience to start us off, so that we can know what they plan to do about it. Granted, every MMO has problems early on, but if people never said anything, they'd never get better.