New Character Creation

[Himea]

Yep I'm reaching max level and am on the wrong server still.

[Headwarp]

Ok, chiming in here. Squeenix - you guys have made a gem of a game. I'm so glad that you guys did not go with the F2P money grab scheme and put effort into creating a game worth paying a subscription for. But you guys are running it all wrong. First you halted sales of digital distribution after releasing on the 27th. Why? Because 1.5million beta testers wasn't enough to indicate that this game would be somewhat popular? Then you started with the character creation BS. So, I have to ask, how does me having more than one character on a server change it's population in any way shape or form? No matter what.. I can only play the one character. Which is all you need in this game but if someone wants to start a second character he's only playing ONE.. so the server population is the same no matter what.

Now the OP is precisely why I came to the forums. I've been playing mmo's for over a decade. Anarchy Online, Ragnarok Online, Everquest, WoW, SWTOR, and even some of the newer f2p ones.

The character creation limit is BAD. You are stopping people from playing with their friends.. it's that or in order to play with our friends, each time a new friend comes we all have to create new characters on a new server and abandon all the time spent playing an mmo. Unfortunately time is a required investment into an MMO and when you as developers begin to screw with my time and money I begin to get a bit frustrated.

Here's the deal, I want to keep playing this game. I want to pay the subscription fees. But It's pretty pointless if none of the friends I invite to the game can play on the same server as the character I've already invested hours/days eventually months into playing. What you need to be doing instead of dividing people from their friends, is afk timeouts and server queues. Serisouly, if you cannot host the population of the servers the answers is NOT to stop new players from joining the server, but limit the amount of current connections. This is a TRIED AND PROVEN METHOD. WoW, the most successful MMO of all time has already PROVEN this. So what if players have to wait in queue to join a server? That's a sign of a growing population and helps to seed the market and keep economics in an affordable range.

You guys are going about the launch of this game all wrong... halting sales and character creation limits ARE BAD and are going to end up pushing players away who bring friends with them. Some of us will continue to bring friends months from now, years from now, as completely new players. At this rate all of your servers are going to be restricted from creating new players..and how many of those slots will be in use by people who aren't even playing in a month or two from now?

Server queues, afk timeouts.. SURE .. these are understandable, but EVERYTHING ELSE YOU ARE DOING BECAUSE OF YOUR UNEXPECTED AMOUNT OF PLAYERS IS ONLY A DETRIMENT TO YOUR PLAYERBASE AS A WHOLE. The only people who DONT mind these restrictions are people who have no friends to bring with them to the game.
Please... hire me... I'll tell you exactly what you're doing wrong and how to correct it.

[possiblythinking]

I am on Moogle EU; we've had almost permanent restrictions, which I think is known to this thread at least. Just the other day I created a 2nd character at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning, and at least 4 guildies and friends who signed up for the game after launch have signed on with their first characters last weekend. Some did so during work hours in the week, and one did the same as me and created his at 5:00 am or so over the weekend. It's possible to get on servers with your friends and guild; it just has to be done way outside peak. Bear in mind that this will increase peak load and queues though, so it might be better to get your friends to transfer to a lower pop server when server-transfers become available.

In response to the above post; everybody loves to use WoW to justify their point of view, but let's try to maintain perspective, please. WoW launch queues were absolutely horrendous, and the community complained bitterly. If there had been any viable alternatives to the game at the time, it would have almost certainly lost potential subscribers. In the 9 years since its launch, Blizzard have raked in boat-loads of cash and have massively upgraded their servers. In fact, and I stand to be corrected on this, but I seem to recall that the profits for their 1st year went entirely into upgrading their hardware, and they still introduce new servers with each new expansion to cope with increased load. People avoid joining high-pop servers because of queues. Hell, even in real life situations people would rather do something else than queue. Our time is precious to us.

Personally I prefer the integrity SE are demonstrating by temporarily not selling something you couldn't play and saying so upfront; "we're sorry but we just can't accommodate more people in good conscience on certain servers". What they need to focus on delivering to mitigate the problem of being over-popular is providing players with options by introducing server transfers; much dissatisfaction will be avoided.

A final note: people who know nothing about computing seem to think you can wave a magic wand and the technology and hardware will do whatever you want. There are tangible physical limitations on what can be accomplished and unless you're an expert on standing up an enterprise-level integrated infrastructure topology over a WAN which supports real-time data replication across multiple locations and incorporates secure connection points from the web, with syndicated load-management, just stop.

[Madorian]

It just happened to me for the second time... on Shiva
The first time I just had to wait a day.

Now it happened again. Tried to delete two characters I wasn't playing anymore but that didn't help at all, though -_-
How long will these restrictions continue?

[Himea]

In response to the above post; everybody loves to use WoW to justify their point of view, but let's try to maintain perspective, please. WoW launch queues were absolutely horrendous, and the community complained bitterly. If there had been any viable alternatives to the game at the time, it would have almost certainly lost potential subscribers. In the 9 years since its launch, Blizzard have raked in boat-loads of cash and have massively upgraded their servers. In fact, and I stand to be corrected on this, but I seem to recall that the profits for their 1st year went entirely into upgrading their hardware, and they still introduce new servers with each new expansion to cope with increased load. People avoid joining high-pop servers because of queues. Hell, even in real life situations people would rather do something else than queue. Our time is precious to us.

Everyone forgets the years when WoW was unstable as hell. I remember a period when my server was down for an entire week as they upgraded the hardware and kept having complications. When Burning Crusade launched, a lot of people couldn't even log in for days. Wrath of the Lich King launch had servers crashing every two hours. It took them eight years, four tries, and the most successful mmo to date to get a smooth launch for MoP - and now everyone just complains about how the game is dying.

People will always complain when things don't go perfectly for them, but the fact of the matter is that if SE hadn't halted sales then NO ONE would have been able to play the game. The character creation restrictions during peak hours are to prevent more server instability because they're running at maximum capacity. This thread is specifically addressing the fact that select servers were never becoming available, and the constant restrictions has forced people to either play on different worlds or suffer wasted game-time. The restrictions are clearly being lifted as worlds slowly become available more often, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people lost two weeks and/or are stuck on a different realm without their friends.

[ciarann]

Funny how the gold spammers and porthacker toons are always lvl1, but we cant make new chars, hmmm!

[Kology]

I'm kinda having this same problem.(Couldn't update EU/NA List then..) Yesterday I was able to play on the EU/NA Servers and played on Midguardsormr, played a good solid few hours, got to lvl 9 and logged off. Today It won't update the list and I have a character created on that server. What the hell? Lol.

[zeusterloo]

Sure would be nice if i could talk to my party members(those with mics)....I know that PC users can use skype but those of us that play on PS3 would love to be able to talk to each other over PSN

[FizT]

Ok, so I had my server and even my FC all picked out as I was downloading the game; checked the website - showed the server was accepting players. Make the first toon ... bam. Shows my chosen server is not accepting new players. Tried multiple times with the same result. It's Leviathan, btw. Tried with the second character, after I'd fooled around with this one on a different server most of the day ... it's always the same: the website character restriction list doesn't begin to match the result ingame. Most frustrating.
/ sigh
Fiz

[Zanial]

Really what FizT said is what I came here to mention. It's just irritating that they show one thing on the website as to which servers you can create characters on and it's a completely different list in game.