"A Letter To The Producer"

[Barenor]

Dear Mr. Yoshida and whomever else this may concern.

Let me start this letter off by saying you have taken a previously absolutely terrible game and given it new life, kudos to you and your team. The game is quite enjoyable to play and has very much going for it. Beautiful graphics, both environmental and character wise, very high detail, Runs great, responds great, encourages players to both go at it on their own and at the same time interact with other players.

Now for the true purpose of my letter. Sir this launch, the open beta, and early access were all a complete joke in the MMO world. Yes I quite often hear the excuse that "these problems are normal" "This is the same as any other MMO at launch". To you and the people who make statements like this I have this question, Why do you want to look at FFXIV:ARR in the same light as any and every other MMO? isn't the purpose of releasing a new game to set higher standards, to provide experiences no one else can offer?

You are at the point in this software's life where it is now publicly released, and available to all, yet you can't even provide a reliable service to the supporters of your game to allow them to play, and experience your vision for them, or to allow your customers to enjoy the hard work you and your teams have put into reviving this game from its previously terrible existence.

I fear, no I know this letter will fall on blind eyes and go unnoticed or be flamed into oblivion but I care not. I am genuinely frustrated with the availability of this service, and the low standard of service which has been established and apparently deemed acceptable by the powers that be. You brought this game back to life, it seems like you've even set it on the road to being successful, but the current service, or lack thereof is going to crush peoples interest in this game... again.

I understand that you were ill prepared for the hordes of players who actually wanted to come play your game, I understand that it's difficult, no, impossible to be completely prepare for this kind of demand on your servers. But there are any number of steps you and your team could take to remedy issues plaguing your customers ability to log in after a hard day of work, and just relax and enjoy the game, either by themselves or a group of friends. I am speaking specifically to my frustration: ERROR 1017, "This World is currently full. Please wait until and opening is available and try again."

You have a number of things you can implement to soothe players like me, and help us get in to play. I have provided you a nice list of ideas below:

1. Implement and maintain a queue system for players trying to connect for all servers at all times. This is a standard in the industry and any other high traffic game these days, it is also a great form of communication. You're telling the player "Hey the servers full, wait behind all these other players and you'll eventually get in and be able to play" which is great! it's telling me what's going on, and handling my connection for me, instead of booting me back to the title screen with no other option, but to try to get in again manually. Meanwhile each attempt I make is traffic to every server and the lobby server as my client pings for available servers and queries information such as whether or not I have a character on the server.

2. Implement AFK log out timers that cannot be bypassed via a players client configuration. Too many people will remain logged in and AFK infinitely just to avoid having to try and struggle with issues such as 1017. Yet again this is a standard and good practice for any MMO host these days, you're clearing out room for the people who actually want to log on and play rather than hosting servers full of lifeless corpses. This is a good idea and shame you have not implemented something like it.

3. I've heard a rumor somewhere that you either made a statement or it a statement was misinterpreted to say that you asked "Why don't they just move to a less crowded server?" There are several problems with that statement. I began playing with several other real life friends, and in the time we have been able to get in and play, we've made progress, and bypassed many unskippable cut scenes which we have all experienced already several times before, and do not want to waste time sitting through them again, once a cut scene has been experienced on any character on any server, it should either be skippable or not play again without a prompt, but that's a discussion for another time. Long story short, my group and I do not want to start all over again, only to risk the same problem following us, never actually getting resolved. The second thing I would like to point out, just how exactly are we supposed to tell whether or not a server is high population, low or even medium population? We can't.

4. Due to your inability to prepare for such a massive influx of players and maintain reliable services, why not as a good gesture offer up character transfers to less populated servers for a temporary amount of time to ease the strain on different overly populated servers. I've heard the money grubbers at SE are afraid of investing more money into more servers for fear of losing players and no longer needing the infrastructure. Well if you're not going to give us character transfers, why not try reallocating system/hardware resources from less populated servers to more densly populated servers, of course i know very little about the actual functionality behind the scenes of an MMO and I can only venture to guess or offer my own opinions.

Needless to say I greatly enjoy playing this game, and i'm semi hooked, I haven't been excited about an MMO in quite some time, but I looked forward to playing yours, believe me it was a tough sell to even hook my interest in the first place. I wrote this letter purely to channel my frustrations and try to offer something constructive for a change instead of feeding the fire of rage and vulgarity I know I can sometimes be.

Thank you for reading,
- Mike

[Myrik]

I posted something similar o this.. and just received a warning notice on my account and a notification that my post was deleted.. so rather than having their team fix issues they are spending it giving warnings to people because they are not satisfied with they customer service or the poor standards in which they have released their product to the world.

[Ashrynn]

"At Square Enix Our Motto IS : Don't Ever Admit There's A Problem"

[Kaiten]

Candid views with many great suggestions. +1 to you Mike.

[Vexray]

On that note. Im posting a petition regarding the horrible 1017 and login queue, feel free to sign it, maybe well have /warnings together LOL http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l-Queue-System

[Zefie_M]

There is one simple thing every company in this industry should realize.

Your customers and your fans are the ones paying your bills, you should probably listen to them.

[Begeta]

of course i know very little about the actual functionality behind the scenes of an MMO and I can only venture to guess or offer my own opinions.

That was arguably the most rational thing you said OP. I'm not now nor will I "flame" you for your opinion. Instead I'll offer mine..
After reading the countless posts, rational & raging, I have yet to see one person point out the possibility that based on past experience, SE anticipated the population at launch to be significantly lower than what it was. Now looking at it from SE's and investors standpoint, this is outstanding. This means that the product itself is a success. I for one feel this is something to be proud of. Now clearly there are many issues that need to be addressed and that, as has been stated by Yoshi, the devs, and community moderators, is happening. Are you receiving instant gratification? Absolutely not. Should you expect to? Not if you consider yourself to be a reasonable person. Truth of the matter is these types of issues happen with every major MMO release without fail. To say that Yoshi and the dev team should have had the ability to break this industry norm is just plain ignorant. Now I fully expect cries of "white knight" in response to my post and to those people I say -Try being a little less
self-important and understand that everyone else spent their money on this game as well and still show patience knowing that the problems will pass and good times will be had by all.

[Misledz]

I completely agree with this, However I would like to add on a bar, which is not too difficult on their bar or a small text that says "Low | Med | High | Full" so we have an idea what to expect and how to deal with it. I utterly despise the idea of having to spam click buttons just because the server queue isn't sure if you can go in.

-Another would be a free world transfer for the first time, then bill the second use and so on, this creates less congestion and familiarity with the system.
-Aethernet crystal names. I can't stress this enough and many have complained as to how inaccurate the teleport names are, infact saying "Bismarck" instead of "Culinary Guild" makes it confusing. It's not like you can tell your first time friend in the giant lopsided town to click on a location name he is completely unaware of.
-Chat bubbles. I know they're trying to avoid spam with the whole chat windows but I would like to see chat bubbles as this makes it easier to read. I tend to pay attention to little details like a squirrel so I tend to keep everything as it is, and seeing someone type something important, then washed away with "X has poked you" "X laughs hysterically" followed by giant names just eating half of the lower right corner of your screen.

These are just my 2 cents.

[NamidaTekika]

I'm curious what "less populated" servers you're talking about.

When 18 of 19 NA servers are locked for char creation...that doesn't really imply there would be anyplace for people to GO to with a transfer =p

[Barenor]

Thank you for the supportive responses, we're all a part of this mess and having to put up with this together and i've done my share of raging over the early access and beta periods deffinitely. I just feel like they could be doing so much more to at least ease the pain for us the player/customers and make our experience better. instead of trying to provide us options and helping us help them through some of the options I listed above, they have chosen to simply place limits and restrictions on our servers, leaving anyone who isn't logged in AND CAMPING/AFK/NEVER LOGGING OFF is left to bang as the door and rely on luck to try and land an open spot on the server.

I'm just tired of having to deal with this, I just want to play the game, WE ALL just want to play the game, thus why we all rage about what we're experiencing and demand answers or solutions. I'm glad I was able to share my thoughts and see positive feedback from other posters, I know i'm not alone in my frustration, but part of my frustration stemmed from the very people claiming "this is normal for any MMO launch".... yeah.... I'm not satisfied with that response, i'm just not willing to accept it or let it slide anymore. Keep trying to log in everyone! XD