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.

[Obysuca]

"We're going to log everyone out in 20 min to reset logins."

If they were to do that, I'd say just do it without warning, so those afk people can't plan to jump right back on and afk, because I know I'm not the only one who doesn't like spending 90% of the day trying to get on and only getting 1-2 hours on before sleep -.- That pretty much sums up all of Saturday and now what seems to be Sunday, didn't even get on until around 9 last night, from trying since noon

[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.

[cfStatic]

Them doing something like that would probably just put un-due stress on the login / lobby servers, which are already being hammered constantly by people wanting to get in.

[Tyrial]

I beg to differ. Yes... you do. This is why having the game client go unresponsive and error 90k is a rage button. I promise you that if those little selfish sh--err... exceedingly self-motivated diminutive rascals were kicked off after fifteen minutes we'd have to spend a lot less time fighting the error 1017 nonsense. Granted I'd prefer those reported for doing so and found guilty getting a three day vacation but sadly the world isn't perfect. Also your solution has one problematic fault... it likely wouldn't persist past server resets and maintinences and we're having those daily.

People shouldn't get a ban (even temp) for being afk in game for long periods, regardless of how frustrating it is. But I definitely agree with the random server resets/kicking of afk players.

[HamHam]

There wouldn't be AFKer if there wasn't login issues. The reason there are ppl afking is because they don't want to deal with the login problems.

Fyi: right now I'm trying to login into the game and getting error 1017 for 2 hours so far. But I'm not blowing a casket about it.

[XDogSoldier]

hey from 10:30 am to 9:40 pm i've been unable to play. Kudos to those who got online just to leave their toons in world and go about their day. *nerdrage*

[10TailBeast]

Let me be clear: I despise squatters (players that AFK for hours to hold a spot on a server), but constantly shutting down and restarting the servers would be far harder on them. Turning anything off and on in fairly rapid succession is never a good idea.