Server restarts to boot afk players?

[Silmina]

I want to play just as badly as any of you, but even rolling restarts will likely crash the lobby server and allow even fewer people to play. Hence why they're not being done, and the sticky stresses how carefully they will be handling the restarts on Wednesday. Any band-aid fixes like afk timers will just take time and resources away from implementing a real solution. I don't like it either, but there are really only two options here: wait, or cancel your pre-order and play something else. How patiently or impatiently you choose to do the former is entirely your own prerogative.

[Ferth]

I want to play just as badly as any of you, but even rolling restarts will likely crash the lobby server and allow even fewer people to play. Hence why they're not being done, and the sticky stresses how carefully they will be handling the restarts on Wednesday. Any band-aid fixes like afk timers will just take time and resources away from implementing a real solution. I don't like it either, but there are really only two options here: wait, or cancel your pre-order and play something else. How patiently or impatiently you choose to do the former is entirely your own prerogative.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the log-in servers are already being hammered by the people unable to get in. That's why nearly all of the notices for the past few days are about emergency maintenances on the log-in servers and log-in difficulties.

Furthermore I think the term band-aid fix is inaccurate. This isn't a band-aid fix, this is like the general anesthesia before surgery. And neither are we asking for them to JUST do this. The priority should be alleviation of the issues right now, as soon as can possibly be done, while long term fixes are being prepared. They are doing the latter and not the former.

If they had a working queue system people would not be trying to log in over and over. If they had an afk boot timer, people would trickle out as they ceased to actively play and new players from the queue would trickle in. Since they have neither at the moment (and don't try to tell me that there is a queue system... it's all sorts of asinine.) they have lobby servers that are being overcrowded by people bottle necked at the character select screen waiting for people playing to log out (which many just aren't doing) or being disconnected.

I don't feel that Square Enix is being pro-active enough about this situation, and a good portion of the community saw something on this scale happening when SE decided that 3 days was long enough for the entire open beta phase.

This issue is a series of poor decisions accumulating into a very large frustating experience for the majority of their player base.

[Silmina]

I don't know if you've noticed, but the log-in servers are already being hammered by the people unable to get in. That's why nearly all of the notices for the past few days are about emergency maintenances on the log-in servers and log-in difficulties.

That is exactly why the log in servers will go down if it restarts. You'll have all those people PLUS the ones booted off the server trying to get back in.

If they had a working queue system people would not be trying to log in over and over.

The entire reason why you're getting a "shoo, go away" message instead of a queue is because queues have to be handled by the lobby server. It would crash entirely if SE did that, and fewer people would get to play.

If they had an afk boot timer

then people would just start taping down the W key. It won't solve anything.

I don't feel that Square Enix is being pro-active enough about this situation, and a good portion of the community saw something on this scale happening when SE decided that 3 days was long enough for the entire open beta phase.

No, they are not. I don't expect anyone to give SE a pass on this, because I'm sure not. But the "solutions" people are offering aren't being implemented because they will make the problems worse instead of better.