Technical Difficulties

[Skyblade]

Warning: This post contains a lot of incoherent ranting.

Ok, so I've spent the last four hours trying to set up FFXIV, and fighting with Square the entire way. I'm a little frustrated, and I need a place to vent.

Square Enix has, without a doubt, one of the worst web systems I've dealt with in almost ten years.

Who designed their website? Who thought making people have three different accounts was a good idea? Who thought forcing people to register games twice, after playing email tag several times was a good idea?

Why is there no link to the downloader on their website? Why is their no link to any of the code redemption pages that you need in order to play the game? Why are none of your various accounts able to communicate with each other to tell the system that you have access? Who thought having no indicator as to your Square Enix ID anywhere (including any of your account pages after you log in, or any of the pages that it sends you if you tell it "I've forgotten my ID") was a good idea?

I have been so frustrated. What, in other system, is a simple, logical process has been turned into a massive wild goose chase through several different web site systems, through five emails, and to three Google searches just to install the frelling game.

I did finally get it working but, seriously Square, what the hell is up with your website?

[Aulayna]

Yeah their account management system and website design is attrocious. We've really been spoilt by the likes of Steam and Battle.net.

[Bierhumpen_Kukki]

apparently were getting a new page called mog net to handle our accounts.

[Skyblade]

apparently were getting a new page called mog net to handle our accounts.

Yes, because that's what's needed. Another new site. Seriously?

I think that's how this started. Square never learned to rebuild a site, they just tack on a new one whenever they find something their current site can't handle.

[Rostum]

I've only ever needed one account on one Square Enix website to play this game... Maybe I'm missing something, but I've never had any trouble since they introduced the Square Enix Account Management System. Isn't there only two separate account management sites? One is for FFXI and FFXIV services, the other is to just buy from their online store and register games you've bought.

However, if they can just combine all of that into one easy-to-access account management system (I'm assuming this is what Mog Net will be?) similar to Battle.net or Steam, then I'm all for it!

P.S. Not sure why people had trouble, but Square just emailed me the PSN pre-order code to input into my PS3 and I had no issues at all.

[Del Murder]

Once you get your SE account set up it's pretty easy, but until that point navigating their site is a chore.

[Yeargdribble]

Currently my wife is completely unable to register.

It took her pre-order code, but we were getting Error 3 (apparently a region problem) even though at that point you've already told the site you're in the US. So reddits had a fix... you log into your profile and change your language to US English and try again.

Well, we managed to try that, but it was giving her fits saving the profile saying that now her real name was required... fine. Then it said her user name... the user name to the profile she is currently logged in on and editing the profile for, is invalid. It won't save the language option.

So try again and it shows her having the game registered in her account, which means it apparently took her 18 digit pre-order code (though we don't know if it counted as EU or US), but never forwarded her to the page with the 20 digit RAAU code.

She has no way to access it and hasn't gotten the e-mail either.

So we just don't know what to do. I really thought SE was getting better about this. I mean... it's still way better than POL... but after this cluster****... not by much.

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

If it was successful with the 18 digit code, then it would have loaded the RAAU code page next telling you to copy it and that there would be an e-mail sent with it as well as instructions on how to register it. Also, make sure that the URL is the NA one since even the EU one will show the USA Flag for the English language option (weird, I know), or at least it did.

[Loony BoB]

Currently my wife is completely unable to register.

It took her pre-order code, but we were getting Error 3 (apparently a region problem) even though at that point you've already told the site you're in the US. So reddits had a fix... you log into your profile and change your language to US English and try again.

Well, we managed to try that, but it was giving her fits saving the profile saying that now her real name was required... fine. Then it said her user name... the user name to the profile she is currently logged in on and editing the profile for, is invalid. It won't save the language option.

So try again and it shows her having the game registered in her account, which means it apparently took her 18 digit pre-order code (though we don't know if it counted as EU or US), but never forwarded her to the page with the 20 digit RAAU code.

She has no way to access it and hasn't gotten the e-mail either.

So we just don't know what to do. I really thought SE was getting better about this. I mean... it's still way better than POL... but after this cluster****... not by much.
Raise a ticket or post about it in the official XIV forums (which are back up now, no more beta forums). *nods* A few people have posted in there with issues, not sure how much success they've had but I know the dev tracker includes devs replying about the issue somewhere...

[Yeargdribble]

Well, we gave up and since I was busy all Saturday with gigs, it ultimately didn't matter. I was only able to get the site to respond to my 18 digit code again Saturday morning and it went straight to my RAAU code... never got a email confirmation.

So luckily that got sorted out, but like I said, I had gigs all day Saturday, so after getting home at around midnight and getting some sleep... I wake up to us both dealing with 10102 or 90000 errors upon attempted to log on. We've got a busy week of gigs coming up and we're not sure when we'll have time to play next. Today was sort of our window.

I guess we'll make the best of it and do some prep work while we wait and hopefully that can afford us a tiny sliver of time to play during the week. As frustrating as it is, we were never planning to play hardcore so we're trying to just roll with it and not be too frustrated. So long as we know both of our accounts work, that's good enough for now.

I just hope SE gets their stuff together so they don't sink this ship again. I'd hate for the first days of release access to be like this, so I hope they get it all worked out during early access.

[Loony BoB]

To be fair, downtimes in the opening week are something you kind of expect. As you say - so long as your accounts are alright, the rest should sort itself out within a week or two. The game itself, when playable, seems to be excellent... which means 1-2 weeks shouldn't be a dealbreaker when you deal with years of MMO time.

[Yeargdribble]

To be fair, downtimes in the opening week are something you kind of expect. As you say - so long as your accounts are alright, the rest should sort itself out within a week or two. The game itself, when playable, seems to be excellent... which means 1-2 weeks shouldn't be a dealbreaker when you deal with years of MMO time.

I certainly agree. Sadly, the younger, more entitled generation views even downtime in a beta as a sign that the game isn't worth their time. I only recently started noticing just how strong the anti-sub model contingent has grown. It seems a large number of people think it's an archaic model doomed to failure and they are too indignant to consider paying for such an MMO.

If you take that attitude coupled with downtimes at launch, I'm afraid the less objective and experience players are going to balk at the game. We live in a time where if the first few pages of a book, minutes of a show, or hours of a game are instantly ultra gratifying, people don't care enough to see it through.

That said, I think that this is a game that's going to cater to a very specific crowd and that crowd will stick it out even in an unhealthy Stockholm syndrome way. And hopefully, being a bit more modern and way more polished than most, it'll pull in some of the less die hard FF types. I just would hate for word of mouth to be so bad at the beginning that nobody wants to give it a try. And right now, there are plenty of people not even willing to try due to the checkered past of this game's launch and the way FFXI was.

I think (perhaps wishfully) that SE will stick to their guns on the sub model and not cave like so many other MMOs. As I turn into a grump(ier) old man, I like to think of the sub model as potentially culling and curating the userbase into a place less inhabited by annoying twats.

[Del Murder]

No downtime is acceptable when you're paying monthly for something. I wonder if this continues they will make the game free for the first few months like they did with v1.

[Loony BoB]

No downtime is acceptable
What!? Even FFXI had maintenance times.

EDIT: And yeah, I'm sure the sub will stick. I think they said before that for many MMOs, there is a more urgent need for results and they go F2P because they were always designed with F2P as a backup in mind. With SE, they don't have to worry about the third party investors wanting instant results and they have a "subscription or death" perspective.

[Del Murder]

Oh, is that what we're talking about? Those were during the wee hours of the night and lased only a couple hours. I thought we were talking about days and weeks here.

[Loony BoB]

A lot of emergency maintenance goes on at the moment, generally 2-3 hours at a time (this one just gone lasted only an hour in the end). It's kind of expected at the launch of an MMO while they fix bugs as fast as possible, but yeah, people are having a fit. The more worrying part is when people can't access servers when the game is live, which might warrant something like one month free sub but tbh it's not even launch day yet so I don't see the big deal.

[Ouch!]

Anyone expecting any online game to work perfectly from the get-go has clearly never paid attention to any launch (go back and take a look at how atrocious World of Warcraft's launch was). Servers are structured to handle expected loads of users distributed over certain periods of time and to handle a bit more than peak membership during primetime hours. When a game first launches, everyone and their mother tries to jump right in at the same time, and it causes overload. It's not reasonable for us to expect companies to spend significantly more money to make the servers capable of handling the number of concurrent log-ins that happen during title launch when those numbers of users will probably never log-in concurrently ever again.

[Del Murder]

Yeah you'd have to have a stick pretty far up your butt to complain about downtime in a pre-release.

[comma]

They should have three or four different launch days, and have a lottery to determine which users get to start playing on which days. Better, they could sell a limited number of each launch day, or stagger the price to make earlier launch more expensive.

I don't really care, because I'm probably not going to play this game until further down the road.

[Endless]

Yeah you'd have to have a stick pretty far up your butt to complain about downtime in a pre-release.

I'll reply with this (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/67274-Your-Customer-s-Trust-Confidence-and-Loyalty?p=1061289&viewfull=1#post1061289):


This particularly goes out to the apologists and people who say "its an mmo launch, what do you expect?"

If we, collectively, stopped making excuses for companies, and instead held them to a higher standard, no one would ever say "its an mmo launch."

Because mmo publishers would know that even on day one, their customers wouldn't put up with this mess. Have your servers and data centers in place, and stress tested for longer than 3 days before any start of early service.

[comma]

Why would they build their server structure based on the first couple days of launch? Silly.

The early access was probably a measure to help alleviate some of the initial server stress. Imagine how much worse it would be without it. Not to mention Phase 4 carrying over, and the extra day before Phase 4 they gave to previous beta participants. They have released in stages, and it's not really that bad.

So what if they have to do some maintenance every day? You're not paying a subscription fee right now, are you? The whole point of giving you free access and delaying the subscription fee was because they know MMOs just start off poorly.

[Yeargdribble]

This particularly goes out to the apologists and people who say "its an mmo launch, what do you expect?"

If we, collectively, stopped making excuses for companies, and instead held them to a higher standard, no one would ever say "its an mmo launch."

Because mmo publishers would know that even on day one, their customers wouldn't put up with this mess. Have your servers and data centers in place, and stress tested for longer than 3 days before any start of early service.

This comes straight out of that entitlement mentality mixed with a good dose of ignorance. Like comma said, it would be ridiculous for them to build spend so much money to set up servers for a one-time ultra load that will unlikely last more than the first 2-3 weeks of the launch of the game. It's like buying 10 gallons of milk at the store just in case you might need them all before the next trip to the store when it's very likely you won't and they will just expire, wasting money.

People make this argument without understanding (or caring) how the business and logistics end works. It's pretty much the same with early or day-one DLC. People don't realize that there is a point that production on the launch game has to be finalized to go into printing discs and that the team may have time between that finalization and the launch to make additional content that couldn't possible be put on the disc. There's also the issue that the numbers tell them that most DLC gets bought close to launch by people who chew through the content and want me. If you wait months, less people care.

I guess a devil's advocate position would be that an MMO could potentially maintain more subs if they did account for huge numbers early on, but I really doubt that's the case in reality. The people who leave and claim downtime in the first month was an issue would've likely left anyway. Even if there is significant downtime in that first outing, there was probably enough up time for them to get a taste as see if they liked it.

They probably didn't and that's why they are leaving, or they are the type of serial MMOist who plays all the MMOs, but only for about 1 or 2 months. These were never long-term subs to be counted as a loss. So the ROI for server overkill just isn't there.

[Endless]

This comes straight out of that entitlement mentality mixed with a good dose of ignorance. Like comma said, it would be ridiculous for them to build spend so much money to set up servers for a one-time ultra load that will unlikely last more than the first 2-3 weeks of the launch of the game. It's like buying 10 gallons of milk at the store just in case you might need them all before the next trip to the store when it's very likely you won't and they will just expire, wasting money.

C'mon, do you really believe what you're saying? Really? Sure you want to take into account that after x weeks/months your audience is going to be lower (*), but we're in early access, with even less players than you'll have during the first few weeks of release, and yet the whole na/eu platform is crippled. What is it going to be after the floodgates are open, then? There'll be even more strain on the instance servers, because they are used left and right and center due to all the quests that require spawning a mini instance of the map and the forced dungeon runs for quests, and having people in early will do nothing to alleviate that. What letting people in earlier does, though, is help spread them over zones, the regular outworld ones, which so far behave a lot more like they should compared to anything instanced.

Worse, you're submitting the most enthusiastic players (the pre-ordering ones, who give you money before you release your product) to the crap of copy-pasted maintenance excuses, who, instead of being thrilled and recommending the game, will be disappointed (or worse) and recommend others to wait until the fad's over (or actively tell them to forget it).

Right now, the whole instance infrastructure is under-scaled and unable to cope with the load of just early access, to the point they actively prevent players from even logging in the NA/EU servers. When I log in and I fail to get the server list, even though it's up and others are playing, it's not a weird connection problem, it's SE throttling very aggressively who gets to enter.

What annoys me the most though, is not just that it doesn't bode well for the next two weeks, it's that it feels like SE wasting a perfectly good system, and world, and even mechanics. Instancing key parts of quests is a bloody good idea, but if you can't make your hardware cope with it, dammit, you deserve pissed off fans.


People make this argument without understanding (or caring) how the business and logistics end works. It's pretty much the same with early or day-one DLC. People don't realize that there is a point that production on the launch game has to be finalized to go into printing discs and that the team may have time between that finalization and the launch to make additional content that couldn't possible be put on the disc. There's also the issue that the numbers tell them that most DLC gets bought close to launch by people who chew through the content and want me. If you wait months, less people care.

Amusingly, one of the biggest companies to produce a MMO (guess which) has the guts to flat out can a game and cancel it, or can a game and restart it from scratch, or delay a game/major patch until it's polished, because sometimes, you have to take the time, and sometimes, it just won't work and half-baking it is worse for your reputation than coming out and admitting it was a failure. And while it could be said of that company in the past that "patch day no play", that was 8 years ago, and it was most often fixed by the day after. Surely SE could learn from theirs and others' mistakes?


I guess a devil's advocate position would be that an MMO could potentially maintain more subs if they did account for huge numbers early on, but I really doubt that's the case in reality. The people who leave and claim downtime in the first month was an issue would've likely left anyway. Even if there is significant downtime in that first outing, there was probably enough up time for them to get a taste as see if they liked it.

(*) It feels to me like a weird business model where you expect high first day sales but not to loyalize your user base and instead rely on lack of caring and/or frustration to cull it to levels you can manage (levels which seem to be at "lower than the number of early accesses we have now"). Surely a high-audience of loyal players is better than a medium audience of loyal players, but it feels like they don't even care or don't even try. (Point in case being the number of servers : 25 for NA/EU, 25 for JP(/AUS) when the sales as of Aug 10 are 560k for NA+EU and 180k for the rest of the world (http://www.vgchartz.com/game/35106/final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn/). EU alone has more units sold than JP, but has to play on servers located in NA/JP)


They probably didn't and that's why they are leaving, or they are the type of serial MMOist who plays all the MMOs, but only for about 1 or 2 months. These were never long-term subs to be counted as a loss. So the ROI for server overkill just isn't there.

Just because some failure situation is common place doesn't make it okay, be it us accepting that "oh it's usual release issues" when you'd return that laptop within the day if it behaved like the servers do or them (MMO makers at large) not trying to find new ideas that will make serial MMOers want to stay.

[Mirage]

Why would they build their server structure based on the first couple days of launch? Silly.


Because servers are leasable, which lets them return them to whoever they leased them from if it turns out they didn't need as many servers after all. As long as they build server software that is scalable, and lets them increase or decrease the amount of hardware in use depending on what they need in the future, which is a very smart thing to have in mind.

[Elpizo]

The problem is that SE can't afford to have these kind of problems. ARR is already a second chance as it is, if the coming weeks after launch are going to be like this with them still having to iron out major problems with their servers, players are not gonna be happy. If they already have this many problems with the servers now, what will it be on tuesday when the non-preorder players stream in? I'm genuinely fearing for a potential disaster here. Sure, shout "you're just impatient! This is normal for MMO launches!" all you want, but angry players are angry players, and angry players will spread the word. It'll give ARR a bad reputation, which it can't afford.

SE already made a big gamble remaking this game as it is, if the second launch fails too because of angry players due to server problems, then I'm pretty sure it's game over for XIV for good. I don't even want to imagine what kind of situation SE will find themselves in if that happens. =/

[Baloki]

I'm of the mind that it's an utter shambles, not only have I paid for the time I'm supposed to be playing (by the fact I've shelled out for a pre-order when I have a copy of the beta 4 software which would allow me to have just paid the subs instead come Tuesday) but S-E themselves cannot communicate anything! The issues might not be as bad if we knew what the hell was going on within a few minutes (or gods forgive, in advance) but not single squeak to give us an idea of what's going on. Then you've got the rate limiting, fine but let us know via the loadstone or something which worlds are being limited due to issues so we know to come back later instead of getting nonsense error messages and having to try and figure it out ourselves.

Finally the producers have said the following as of a short while a go (nearly 2 days after this all started):


[EU] Character Creation Limitation (Aug. 25) (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/66679-EU-Character-Creation-Limitation-%28Aug.-25%29?p=1054897#post1054897)

[EU] Character Creation Limitation (Aug. 25)

Hello, this is FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Producer and Director, Yoshida.

The maximum expected population limit is nearing for each World, and unless the current World simultaneous connection amount decreases, we are unable to open release the limitation.

In case we do release the limitation, there is a high chance that the corresponding World will crash or cause issues, and we are thinking that it will be difficult for us to release it for a while. We please ask you to consider playing in a World that has a low limitation.

We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause and ask to continue with your cooperation.

This just makes me worry as they SOLD OUT the collectors editions on Amazon, so the math wasn't hard to do to figure out they might get in this situation, and then come live it's going to get about 100x worse. As someone's said previously dropping in temp servers (hell Amazon cloud it?) isn't expensive compared to reputation at this point.

Also why did no-one limit the amount of characters that could be created on any one world if they knew there might be capacity limits instead of allowing them to be over subscribed?

Seriously, shambles!

[Rostum]

Anyone expecting any online game to work perfectly from the get-go has clearly never paid attention to any launch (go back and take a look at how atrocious World of Warcraft's launch was).

I pay attention to a lot of MMO launches, and I expected this to go fine. For the most part, MMO launches are fine. You can't compare this one to MMO's that released a decade ago. One would want to believe after a decade of this thriving genre that they wouldn't have similar problems that a 9-10 year old MMO had when it was first released.

I think making up excuses such as "Well it happened with this game and this game!" is also a pretty poor attempt at white knighting. Look at all the other MMO's in recent years (I'm talking the majority of them, by the way) that have had very minor issues at launch. So minor that you could probably just consider them smooth launches.



This comes straight out of that entitlement mentality mixed with a good dose of ignorance.

I'm sorry, in the real world do you just bend over and let people have their way with you when you're paying for a product or service? Early Access is something one gains from already paying for the game or spending money to pre-order it (keep in mind Legacy players are a small population compared to newer players).

So in essence, a lot of people who paid for Early Access (with no hint of it being another beta phase) just wasted their money. They were promised to be able to play the game earlier than the release date. So how are they, ignorant or not, going to keep trusting this company?

I don't know that much about server architecture and the plethora of problems that can come from it, but only having a three-day open beta to test and fix these major issues (as in, people not actually being able to play the game for long periods of time) and then just launching straight into what is essentially the release of the game that people paid money for, does not really seem like a good way to attract more customers.

MMO players as a whole are probably the most finicky video game customers you could ask for. If you look around, people look at ARR and still make comments like "The original was so bad why would anyone play this?", and these current issues are not helping.

So it doesn't matter what the problems are, what kind of procedures Square Enix need to go through in order to fix them, or how ignorant people are, angry customers are angry customers and the company can not afford to piss off any more people. Especially when critical errors (I'm not talking about queuing) preventing people from playing a game they're paying for should not​ be happening in this day and age.

Edit: And like Baloki said, the communication is absolutely appalling!

[Tavrobel]

Guys, you've got it all wrong. The login screen is actually a boss. You can only progress through the game if you can find a way to beat it.

In reality, the game is really difficult. No one can complain that the Final Fantasy games are too easy now.

[Elpizo]

It appears they've pushed back the release, if the Lodestone is to be believed.


Early Access Period
August 24, 2013 (Saturday), 2:00 a.m. to August 29, 2013 (Thursday), 11:59 p.m. (PDT)


Since I believe launch was supposed to be on August 27, "Early Access" until August 29 can only mean they pushed back the release. This is really, really not a good sign.

[Jiro]

It would be somewhat hilarious if ARR is a flop because everybody was excited and crashed the servers. But honestly, I don't think it's been too shaky of a start. I had trouble getting into an instance but I just went and did something else and it was working again before the maintenance.

I get that people are upset though. This is SE's second chance and it might feel like they're squandering it. But are MMOs even possible to launch completely perfectly? Yoshi-P and crew have performed a goddamn miracle to remake this game within the time frame they have, so I'm happy with what I've got right now.

[Del Murder]

I can see complaining at launch or a few days after, but we're still in pre-launch. As long as SE does something to make sure people aren't paying monthly for a game that isn't working, I don't see the big deal. Launch dates are pushed back all the time. Know what should have had its launch date pushed back a lot? The original FFXIV. :p

[comma]

Why would they build their server structure based on the first couple days of launch? Silly.


Because servers are leasable, which lets them return them to whoever they leased them from if it turns out they didn't need as many servers after all. As long as they build server software that is scalable, and lets them increase or decrease the amount of hardware in use depending on what they need in the future, which is a very smart thing to have in mind.Server structure ≠ number of servers.

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

It appears they've pushed back the release, if the Lodestone is to be believed.


Early Access Period
August 24, 2013 (Saturday), 2:00 a.m. to August 29, 2013 (Thursday), 11:59 p.m. (PDT)


Since I believe launch was supposed to be on August 27, "Early Access" until August 29 can only mean they pushed back the release. This is really, really not a good sign.

Nope. That is about people who might get their game late due to making problems. More of a breathing room for Early Accessers whose actual game doesn't arrive right away so they have time to put in the code for the actual game.

As for the issue at hand, it does not bode well especially since this is mostly a problem with the NA/EU servers. I wonder what the level of communication between Montreal and Tokyo is and if that is hampering communication with the fanbase in general?

[Rostum]

I can see complaining at launch or a few days after, but we're still in pre-launch. As long as SE does something to make sure people aren't paying monthly for a game that isn't working, I don't see the big deal.
But people are paying for it, unless they're a Legacy member (of which most are not). Early Access is a bonus for people pre-ordering the game. In product development and marketing, you do not shaft your early adopters especially by making false promises.

For myself, I'm just annoyed with the lack of communication. Also, why does there need to be two separate official Twitter accounts for Final Fantasy XIV? Makes no sense.

[comma]

I thought first month of subscription was free.

[Rostum]

Is it really that hard to understand?

People are paying money to pre-order the game because they were offering an Early Access bonus. Because people are not getting a chance to play during Early Access, their money is going to waste. These people are either paying for the full game, or have put down a deposit that they can't get back.

[comma]

And they did get early access.

[Yeargdribble]

Is it really that hard to understand?

People are paying money to pre-order the game because they were offering an Early Access bonus. Because people are not getting a chance to play during Early Access, their money is going to waste. These people are either paying for the full game, or have put down a deposit that they can't get back.

They aren't paying more for the game to have it pre-ordered than if they bought it on launch day. No money is being wasted. Early access is a bonus, not even a required service.

Once the game goes live and you start ticking down that 30 days of free game time, then you can argue that money is being wasted, but during early access that doesn't fly.

Sure, people pre-ordered hoping or expecting early access, but they literally have lost nothing from pre-ordering versus buying on launch day.

[Del Murder]

Unless pre-ordering cost more than regular ordering then those people aren't wasting any of their money. It's still bad on SE's part that they promised something to their customers and haven't yet delivered.

[Aulayna]

The whole situation is frustrating I agree.


I'm of the mind that it's an utter shambles, not only have I paid for the time I'm supposed to be playing (by the fact I've shelled out for a pre-order when I have a copy of the beta 4 software which would allow me to have just paid the subs instead come Tuesday) but S-E themselves cannot communicate anything! The issues might not be as bad if we knew what the hell was going on within a few minutes (or gods forgive, in advance) but not single squeak to give us an idea of what's going on. Then you've got the rate limiting, fine but let us know via the loadstone or something which worlds are being limited due to issues so we know to come back later instead of getting nonsense error messages and having to try and figure it out ourselves.

The communication hasn't actually been that bad and is getting a lot better really. It seems most of them time they have to wait to translate a PR statement from Japanese though.

The rate limiting and issues have all been communicated quite regularly on the Lodestone and they've posted in-game chat announcements once widespread issues have started cropping up. On day one they made the mistake of not actually putting follow-ups in chat about when maintenance was starting but they've sorted that out too.

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Procedures during Periods of High Congestion (Aug. 21) (http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/c08a7c975e7b078f584590b953fabd684a45bc7c)

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Login Limitation After Emergency Maintenance (Aug. 25): Follow-up 4 (http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/1e6c50b2ff4b05caa208b08a024c0a28a094ab16)

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Regarding the Instance-Related Issues (Aug. 24): Follow-up 3 (http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/fef6c72b0588bf6088501be79c3247552ea0f823)

Heck just:

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Maintenance (http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/category/2)

In general.


I pay attention to a lot of MMO launches, and I expected this to go fine. For the most part, MMO launches are fine. You can't compare this one to MMO's that released a decade ago. One would want to believe after a decade of this thriving genre that they wouldn't have similar problems that a 9-10 year old MMO had when it was first released.

I really don't know what MMO launches you've experienced but as someone who generally checks out new MMOs as and when they come out I can probably name... two... smooth launches from within the past 5 years.

SWTOR had serious queue and congestion issues at launch. GW2 in Europe was plagued with server instability for the first week or so. Neverwinter had congestion issues and instance server problems followed by the Astral Diamond market exploit which pretty much crippled the game economy and forced them to do a complete rollback of server data. TERA you were lucky if you could even login within the first week without being disconnected after 5 minutes and having to wait in a queue again. Defiance had a lot of lag and loss of data problems. Firefall which is still in "open beta" is being plagued with lag, game mechanics just stopping working completely etc.

[Loony BoB]

Aye, just want to repeat what has been said earlier: You have paid nothing for early access. It is a free bonus for buying something else. You can argue the case however you like to, but it was a free bonus. The cost of the bonus is exactly £0.00 on top of the money you spent on the pre-ordering of the game. If you were a Legacy player, then you had it already and arguing that you spent money on a pre-order because of the early access is stupid because you already had early access. :p You could then argue "but I paid to be a Legacy member" - you paid to play the game, and you got Legacy member status for free as a bonus. Bonus, bonus, bonus.

I love that the game is doing so freaking well that it has waaaaaaaay exceeded demand.

The only things I do agree on are that they could really use an additional server or two and that the communication could be better. I want to know what they're actually intending on doing, personally, but I don't think they'll ever give us that kind of information. I want to know how far apart the supply and demand is, and what they intend on doing about it. So far they haven't detailed any intentions at all. They've said they're trying to fix it, but what about the long term ramifications of having so many people want to play the game?

The one upside of all of this is once the server populations stabilise and everything is running smoothly again, it looks pretty likely that they are going to have those remaining members stick it out with FFXIV and that FFXIV will be turning a nice profit as they hover around capacity. :p

[Formalhaut]

Aye, just want to repeat what has been said earlier: You have paid nothing for early access. It is a free bonus for buying something else. You can argue the case however you like to, but it was a free bonus.

I guess the thing here is that when when you give people a bonus, and then not give them the means to access it, they get pretty pissed. It's like giving someone a present (in this scenario, let's imagine it's a birthday) with a giant huge lock on it.

I'm sort of with both sides here, though, to be honest.

[Loony BoB]

Don't get me wrong - I have no complaint about frustration and I'm complaining as much as anyone about the whole thing. Yet I'm not complaining about how "I paid for this!", I'm complaining that "I want to play the game but I can't!" - I don't care if the game were free, I just wanna plaaaaaay xD

[Baloki]

Actually the way it was advertised it wasn't a "free bonus", it was part of the features you get for pre-ordering. I paid in excess of £40 for my pre-order to get the additional items, early access and first months subs (plus the narly art book), as this is what was advertised. If I'd have chosen to wait until release to purchase I'd have just paid the £10 monthly subs. So I have paid for early access, just like anyone else who purchases the full retail game.

As I have said though, it's the communication that's been really getting me, they've planned maintenance and instead of warning most of the time, they've just booted us, made us wait a good while (upto an hour in some cases) before letting us know what's going on. It's improving slowly, but then they come out with vague, "wait until it's quieter" demands without giving us any easy

[Loony BoB]

Actually the way it was advertised it wasn't a "free bonus", it was part of the features you get for pre-ordering. I paid in excess of £40 for my pre-order to get the additional items, early access and first months subs (plus the narly art book), as this is what was advertised. If I'd have chosen to wait until release to purchase I'd have just paid the £10 monthly subs. So I have paid for early access, just like anyone else who purchases the full retail game.

As I have said though, it's the communication that's been really getting me, they've planned maintenance and instead of warning most of the time, they've just booted us, made us wait a good while (upto an hour in some cases) before letting us know what's going on. It's improving slowly, but then they come out with vague, "wait until it's quieter" demands without giving us any easy
No, you haven't.

You paid £40? Then you must have got the Collector's Edition. You can get early access with the standard edition of the game, so you didn't pay £40 for the early access, you paid £40 for the goodies. And you got the game you paid for and the goodies you paid for. The pre-order bonuses are bonuses for people who pre-order, and they are free. The standard edition of the game cost me somewhere between £13 and £18 to pre-order, which is probably about the same price as it will be at launch. As for "but I could have got the CE version cheaper if I'd waited" - I'd be surprised. Last I heard it was selling for a handsome fee on eBay since it sold out at various stores. :p

Early access was quite clearly advertised seperately to the Collector's Edition. On the product page thrown around on their site, the pre-order bonuses were even listed on a seperate page.

[Baloki]

Actually the way it was advertised it wasn't a "free bonus", it was part of the features you get for pre-ordering. I paid in excess of £40 for my pre-order to get the additional items, early access and first months subs (plus the narly art book), as this is what was advertised. If I'd have chosen to wait until release to purchase I'd have just paid the £10 monthly subs. So I have paid for early access, just like anyone else who purchases the full retail game.

As I have said though, it's the communication that's been really getting me, they've planned maintenance and instead of warning most of the time, they've just booted us, made us wait a good while (upto an hour in some cases) before letting us know what's going on. It's improving slowly, but then they come out with vague, "wait until it's quieter" demands without giving us any easy
No, you haven't.

You paid £40? Then you must have got the Collector's Edition. You can get early access with the standard edition of the game, so you didn't pay £40 for the early access, you paid £40 for the goodies. And you got the game you paid for and the goodies you paid for. The pre-order bonuses are bonuses for people who pre-order, and they are free. The standard edition of the game cost me somewhere between £13 and £18 to pre-order, which is probably about the same price as it will be at launch. As for "but I could have got the CE version cheaper if I'd waited" - I'd be surprised. Last I heard it was selling for a handsome fee on eBay since it sold out at various stores. :p

Early access was quite clearly advertised seperately to the Collector's Edition. On the product page thrown around on their site, the pre-order bonuses were even listed on a seperate page.

Actually on Game it was listed as one of the included features, not a bonus.

[Loony BoB]

Then rage at GAME for inaccurately listing it as an included feature when it's actually a pre-order bonus, I guess?

Although to be honest you have had early access, just not as much as you'd have liked (I'm in the same boat there). To my knowledge the game has still been up more often than down.

[Endless]

Just for accuracy sake:

Using the SE store's prices, PC version, boxed
ARR collector: 59.99€ (you can get it for 49.90 on amazon fr though)
ARR standard retail: 24.99€ (can be found at 19.59)
-> price of the CE extras: 35€ (30 euros if you used Amazon).

But wait, there's more.

ARR most expensive sub for a month : 12.99€
-> real price of box + pre-order bonus + activation (I guess? not even sure for phase4/legacy/people-who-preordered-then-cancelled-after-code-was-used, I'll find out in a few days or next month as phase4 if it ever asks me for a code that's physically in the box): 12€ (7.40 if amazon)
-> Same if you go for digital retail, except you don't get the box (and you don't get cheaper prices, too).

[Baloki]

Then rage at GAME for inaccurately listing it as an included feature when it's actually a pre-order bonus, I guess?

Although to be honest you have had early access, just not as much as you'd have liked (I'm in the same boat there). To my knowledge the game has still been up more often than down.

You chose to pick up on the point I didn't care much about so you be the one raging man!

[Loony BoB]

I just assume Candlejack got you in that post because when you were making your second

[comma]

Square Enix apologizes for Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn's early access launch | Polygon (http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/26/4659012/square-enix-apologizes-for-final-fantasy-14-a-realm-reborns-irksome)

[Loony BoB]

The comments on that article are generally great - most people are in agreement that the game itself is great, and for me this is one of the most important things. What's worse than an MMO launching with horrible connection/login issues but great gameplay? An MMO launching with no connection/login issues but bad gameplay.

Once the initial connection/login issues are sorted out - and they will be - we'll all be logging into a fantastic game. Also, most people seem to be having less trouble today. Here's hoping that the fact it's a weekday launch works in it's favour, they'll have until Saturday before the crowds really pack in. >_>;

[metagloria]

I just assume Candlejack got you in that post because when you were making your second

:clap:

[comma]

The comments on that article are generally great - most people are in agreement that the game itself is great, and for me this is one of the most important things.Polygon is generally a really nice place, I guess because it's not old enough to have a bunch of diehard fanboys in there complaining about everything. They often have articles regarding feminism and sexism, even, and the comments are usually pretty positive, while it'd be the most miserable, bitter flame war on any other gaming site I can think of.

So I'm not sure the comments on Polygon are representative of the whole community. Most people are probably enraged.

What's funny to me is, I'm kind of glad I canceled my preorder before the early access so that I didn't have to put up with this nonsense. I might buy the game in a couple months.

[Loony BoB]

On the upside, I logged out today and logged back in immediately afterwards without any trouble. Launch day is today, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes this evening, but I won't be around for much of it because my Mum's coming over for dinner. :p

[Jiro]

Apart from the crazy high wait time for duty finder, I haven't had any problems all day.

[Loony BoB]

It'll all come down to American prime time, but honestly I think the majority of people pre-ordered.

[SkyRender]

You guys that are playing are lucky! I tried a few times to login since Monday, but I keep getting error 1017. I wish there was a queue for waiting. After I try a few times I just give up and play some LoL, or go do something else. My poor PUG is still only level 17!

[Loony BoB]

You're still getting the problems even now? :( Bummer. I suppose it was always going to get worse as the day wore on, though...

[Jiro]

Couple of my friends can't do shit thanks to PS3 codes not working... that's kind of a big problem.

[Elpizo]

I can't redeem my bonus code for my CE items. Keeps saying "Invalid Code". The help service says it's because of the stress on the servers and I just have to try again later. Never mind that I've been trying all day so far. They can't even get the servers for their websites working right?! Has SE totally lost all touch with reality? You'd think this is the first time they launched an MMO, but they've come off years of experience with XI. How can they mess it up this bad with their servers, especially when they knew how many people they were going to get, given how there's no way they didn't know the number of pre-orders. I'm utterly baffled by the incompetence, I must admit.

[Loony BoB]

They've actually never released an MMO on a global scale to my knowledge. FFXI's release dates were different depending on both region and console...

JP May 16, 2002, PS2
JP November 7, 2002, Windows
NA October 28, 2003, Windows
NA March 23, 2004, PS2
EU September 17, 2004, Windows
NA April 18, 2006, 360
JP April 20, 2006, 360
EU April 21, 2006, 360

The only experience they have of an MMO launch on a grand scale is FFXIV 1.x, and they had a single datacenter for that launch, so this is still something new in a lot of ways.

[Elpizo]

Be that as it may, one's still left to wonder how they were so badly prepared for the EA with the servers. That they might experience some problems on launch day, when it's difficult to predict just how many people will play, that's one thing. But for EA, they knew how many people they were going to get. I cannot believe SE wouldn't have numbers on the amount of pre-orders. How could they not prepare their servers for that amount of people? Didn't they test them to see if they could handle it? Isn't that what a beta is for, among other things? I can't understand it. How can a team that has shown such competence the past few months in developing ARR trip over the most basic, fundamental part of an MMO? And just before release at that! :confused:

Now they're saddled with frustrated pre-orderers who feel betrayed due to the problematic EA period, coupled with frustrated CE buyers who can't redeem their CE codes for their promised items, coupled with frustrated players who can't play on the server they want due to the player limit, etc. ... All because nobody at SE thought it was a good idea to give those pre-order numbers to the development team so they could get an estimation on the number of players they were going to get, so they could prepare their servers accordingly?!

I apologise if I sound like I'm whining, but it just baffles me how they could make such a glaring error, with Final Fantasy XIV of all games! :O_O: I mean, if there's any game in SE's line-up right now that can't afford even the tiniest bit of bad PR, it's FF XIV.

[Del Murder]

Yeah, I'm staying away from this for a while.

[Carl the Llama]

I'm a little bit vexed, and I honestly think they are favouring JP servers, they say to try making a character on another world so I did that and there was only one world I could select to create a new character on and when I finished making the character I got instant 1017 error (world is full), I then tried making another character on a JP server... instant access, tried on a few of the JP servers and got instant access on all of them.

TBH its shit like this that really fucks me off, if they have instant access servers for JP then they should switch over some of their resources to over loaded servers. I only saw 4 servers on their whole list that I couldn't make my character on.

[Ouch!]

The servers are entirely different data centers on opposite sides of the world. It's not so simple as diverting resources. The JP servers are running smoothly because they've been stress-tested since early December 2012. The NA/EU servers have been operational for a combined... three weeks at this point?

Edit: Additionally, here's a post on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1l7n5x/why_servers_suck_a_simplified_abridged_guide_from/) by server technician about a probably reason why we're having difficulties, and why it's not so easy to fix as "add more servers".

[Carl the Llama]

The JP servers are running smoothly because they've been stress-tested since early December 2012. The NA/EU servers have been operational for a combined... three weeks at this point?

Well if they should have been stress testing all servers from December then, they put more time into the stress testing for the Japs then they are basically saying the Japanese are more important to them then us, and when 2/3rds of your customers are not from Japan, you should at least give an equal amount of time to stress test to your biggest share of customers, not prioritizing the minority.

[Mirage]

I would be surprised if the NA and JP servers weren't identical in terms of software and hardware, so a stable JP server should mean a stable NA server. I guess it's more an issue of not having enough of those servers to keep up with all the users.

[Ouch!]

I would be surprised if the NA and JP servers weren't identical in terms of software and hardware, so a stable JP server should mean a stable NA server. I guess it's more an issue of not having enough of those servers to keep up with all the users.
Basically this. There was no reason for them to bring in the NA servers until they started testing importing of legacy characters in phase three. Phase three should have been far more rigorous in stress testing new servers, and phase four should have been longer to account for this possibility. Given that the JP servers were stable, they probably expected that the NA servers would be as well and got caught with their pants down.

Based on what Yoshi-P has said in his official addresses on the issues, the issue is because too many players are attempting to log onto the densely populated (read: Legacy) servers. It's causing high volume in localized places which is causing servers to crash. Because of the way that the servers are structured, the downtime is causing a bottleneck so that players are all trying to access the same content at the same time and crashing the instance servers. This in turn crashes the rest of the NA/EU servers as they all share that server structure to utilize cross-server match-ups via the Duty Finder.

When everyone stops logging in at the same time and the population gets spread across the in-game world and across content instead of clogging the newbie territories, and server population in general evens out, everything should run fine. In the mean time, we get to deal with the consequences of a bottleneck without an easy or quick solution.

From what I've been able to observe of the official launch day, everything has gone relatively well. There have been far fewer reports of major issues (especially during European prime time earlier today). It's mostly people experiencing log-in queues and full worlds. And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself. As explained in the post above, you can't just add another server and double the population maximum for Sargatanas.

SE's biggest mistake seems to be that they severely underestimated how much of the new player population would want to jump in on Legacy servers. They probably expected more new players to want to start on new servers, thus better distributing the total population of players more evenly. It's likely that it isn't the case that they were unaware and unprepared for the number of new players (they did, after all, have the preorders to gauge by) but rather that the distribution of those players is non-ideal and they weren't prepared to handle that.

[Carl the Llama]

SE's biggest mistake seems to be that they severely underestimated how much of the new player population would want to jump in on Legacy servers. They probably expected more new players to want to start on new servers, thus better distributing the total population of players more evenly. It's likely that it isn't the case that they were unaware and unprepared for the number of new players (they did, after all, have the preorders to gauge by) but rather that the distribution of those players is non-ideal and they weren't prepared to handle that.

If that is the case, then why when I tried to make a new character on a different server were all servers but 1 unable to take new applications? Not that it matters, cause I am one of those legacy players you mentioned, why should I give up my character with levels and money just so I can log in quicker?

[Tavrobel]

THE POOL IS STILL CLOSED GUYS THE GAME IS REALLY HARD I CAN'T EVEN FIGURE OUT HOW TO LOG IN THAT'S HOW HARD IT IS

In other news, data expansion as early as next week.

I'd wait until a few days after they add space. That is, if you aren't concerned about not losing hours that you're paying for.

[Ouch!]

SE's biggest mistake seems to be that they severely underestimated how much of the new player population would want to jump in on Legacy servers. They probably expected more new players to want to start on new servers, thus better distributing the total population of players more evenly. It's likely that it isn't the case that they were unaware and unprepared for the number of new players (they did, after all, have the preorders to gauge by) but rather that the distribution of those players is non-ideal and they weren't prepared to handle that.

If that is the case, then why when I tried to make a new character on a different server were all servers but 1 unable to take new applications? Not that it matters, cause I am one of those legacy players you mentioned, why should I give up my character with levels and money just so I can log in quicker?
Did you skip over the part where I mentioned that because of the way they've structured the servers to support cross-server duty-finder that they've already reached the part where all of the servers are crashing?

[Freya]

47235
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is so popular they are having to halt sales! Sorta. It seems due to the overwhelming amount of players, servers have developed issues. To try to help get a foot ahead of their maintenance they have halted sales on digital sales of the game. This Notice was issued:


Important Notice About FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn - Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn, we are currently experiencing extremely long wait times for users to be able to log in and play. As a temporary measure, we will halt sales of FINAL FANTASY XIV: A REALM REBORN’s digital download products so we can accommodate all of those wishing to play. We are working to expand our server capacity in the coming days.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Launches are usually headaches for MMOs, and many fans are frustrated by these issues. Some like to look on the bright side though, launches like this sometimes mean the game is a hit. That's not always true but we can always hope so! Square Enix is working hard on getting servers back up and running. They are preforming Emergency Maintenance as well as this halt in digital sales. Hopefully we'll be able to play this shiny new game in all it's working glory soon.


[source] (http://na.square-enix.com/us/blog/important-announcement-final-fantasy-xiv-realm-reborn-digital-downloads)

[Del Murder]

Good news and bad news I guess!

[Miriel]

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

[Jiro]

Friend of mine is unable to join any of the NA servers, they're just not taking characters. Weird and frustrating. I hope it sorts out soon, and they offer world swaps in the future.

[Freya]

Yoshida did say in his recent interview (http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/08/26/the-past-present-and-future-of-final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn/) with playstation blog that world transfers would be available


PSB: Will it be possible in the final version of the game to switch a player character from one server to another?
Yoshida: Yes, we’ll be providing an optional world transfer service!

[comma]

Yoshida did say in his recent interview (http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/08/26/the-past-present-and-future-of-final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn/) with playstation blog that world transfers would be available


PSB: Will it be possible in the final version of the game to switch a player character from one server to another?
Yoshida: Yes, we’ll be providing an optional world transfer service!For a fee.

[Jiro]

I think a free would be appropriate in this instance. It's just been so damn rough :(

[Tavrobel]

I think a free would be appropriate in this instance. It's just been so damn rough :(

... but, but, but, the money.

[Aelitalily]

LOL Oh My! I have been gloating at a friend of mine saying that the release date will be late, there is no way FFXIV team will be ready on time (I played a lot during the pay-to-play phase before the game officially died and became "reborn") and it seems like they might of been better off waiting at this stage. During the old pay-to-play times the developers, in particular Yoshi-P had been making promises they simply couldn't keep within the outlined time-frames, always in their attempts to be on time they would fail miserably releasing half-completed content. I can only imagine that he has the right intentions, just not the means to carry it out, I do believe he must have a difficult job.

What saddens me about the experience (thankfully I am not in a position to play currently) is the concept of the importance of taking the time to get things right the first time. I am 100% certain after all this build up fans would of been much happier had FFXIV taken longer to be released if they could be assured that the finished product (and customer experience) would be better for it in the long run. This seems to be the same problem/issue that has arisen for this game time and time again =/

I do think it will be one of the most epic mmo's in time to come, I am just grateful that I don't have a pc to play on yet so I don't have to suffer like the rest of the fans at the moment. I hope we can all have patience and that the developers will work hard on getting the game RIGHT eventually... It would be such a waste if it flopped now, it is a beautiful creation! :3

[Formalhaut]

I do believe he must have a difficult job.

Not just because he is both producer and de facto championing spokesperson for the entire project :p

[Dr Unne]

Friend of mine is unable to join any of the NA servers, they're just not taking characters. Weird and frustrating. I hope it sorts out soon, and they offer world swaps in the future.

Yes, when I tried to play yesterday, every NA server was full.

Right now the number of people playing and the number of hours people are playing are both very high. Later, a lot of people will quit and a lot of people who still play will play for fewer hours, so the servers won't be as stressed, and I imagine registration will open on the currently-full servers again. It would be bad if SE added a bunch of new worlds that later ended up being ghost towns due to not enough players in them.

[Ouch!]

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.
Oh you know what I meant. At this point when they've told us that certain servers are at capacity, if you jump onto a server that's full, you shouldn't expect to play. That's kind of how this stuff works.

Edit: For anyone who is wondering why Square Enix has been so overwhelmed and caught with their pants down on the success of the MMO, the most ever concurrent connections for a Japanese-produced MMORPG was approximately 150,000 prior to FFXIV launch. They broke the record with 187,000 concurrent connections and expect that number to soon hit 200,000. Sure, the news about the servers being full and crashing could hurt them, but as we're seeing, this is very easily spun into a good problem to have.

[Omni-Odin]

Ya this has been a little bit of a bummer. I was pretty excited to get going but by the time I did the only servers still accepting new characters were Eu Servers. I made a character just to check out the game, but I was hoping to get on Sargatanas (NA) with pretty much all EoFF. I'm on Odin (Eu) now.

On a not-so-sidenote however, this game is super-smooth and has FF written all over it. The graphics are top-notch as well as the UI imo. Good stuff SE. I can't wait for the NA servers to open back up.

[Yeargdribble]

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

[Mirage]

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

I'm doing the same. I'd stop doing it if I actually had a queue to sit in when trying to re-enter.

[Yeargdribble]

And really, if you picked a high-population server like we did, then you've nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Oh yes. Nobody to blame but the players themselves.

In my case, I'm certainly partially to blame. I've pulled the douche move of keeping my wife and myself logged in to avoid 1017. It was so frustrating to have an ultra tiny window early this week to play and ultimately not being able to play at all. So now, I keep us on to make sure that if we have a tiny window of available time, we can play.

Of course, this is at the expense of others trying to log in while I'm idling in the inn. I feel a little bad, but the Venn diagram of time that my wife and I actually have time together simultaneously is vanishingly small this week.

I'm doing the same. I'd stop doing it if I actually had a queue to sit in when trying to re-enter.

Same. The queue exist, but it's apparently very short and very broken. Sometimes if I even get lucky enough to get in the queue, if it's over 20, it'll just disconnect me anyway.

Here's hoping they get the new data center stuff up soon so everyone can play. We had a friend that was super interested in playing, but by the 12th hour of open beta he couldn't make a character on our world... a few hours later he couldn't make one at all. Now he doesn't seem interested since there are still major problems going on.

[Loony BoB]

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Following on from Ouch!'s earlier post about concurrent connections, they've now hit 230,000. Blimey!

I don't feel bad about idling in the inn, personally. It's the only way people can leave friend requests and tells on my screen when I'm not logged in, and without an accepted friend request I can't send them mail nor can I add them to the Linkshell or Free Company. So... yeah. Fix all these little issues and I might feel a lit-- actually, no, I still won't feel bad. I paid to play the game, I should be allowed to idle in the inn for as long as I like if that's how I want to play. I like seeing the LS chat when I get back to the PC.

[Carl the Llama]

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Following on from Ouch!'s earlier post about concurrent connections, they've now hit 230,000. Blimey!

I don't feel bad about idling in the inn, personally. It's the only way people can leave friend requests and tells on my screen when I'm not logged in, and without an accepted friend request I can't send them mail nor can I add them to the Linkshell or Free Company. So... yeah. Fix all these little issues and I might feel a lit-- actually, no, I still won't feel bad. I paid to play the game, I should be allowed to idle in the inn for as long as I like if that's how I want to play. I like seeing the LS chat when I get back to the PC.

Lucky you, I got booted off at around 9pm yesterday and was unable to log back in the entire night, when I tried to log on this morning I still got loads of 1017's so right now I am just losing my shit with them not implementing a decent que system or an auto dc function especially if said afker is only going to play for a few hours in the evening then afk for another 18+ hours.

[Loony BoB]

Said afker isn't using the resources which are bottlenecking the situation (duty finder instances) and SE have stated they are monitoring things 24/7 to allow increases/decreases to server populations based on resources used. This is why the devs aren't that bothered about the afk'ers. Let's put it this way... they set the world capacity at 3,500 and then boot all the afk'ers, say 500 of them, so it's 3,000 people online. The demand on the duty finder server? Exactly the same. So they adjust the world capacity to 3,000 with no afkers instead of 3,500 with afk'ers. Nobody wins. The resources required for an afk'er are pittance compared to the resources required by an active player. If the devs really felt that the afk'ers were causing these problems they would have done something about them a long time ago.

The problems lie with the stresses caused by the duty finder, so they need to sort that out instead of coming up with scapegoats that do nothing to fix the problem. If they implemented afk booting, all it would do is result in more people logging in which would take up more stressful resources in one minute than the afk-in-the-inn member would use over hours.

Also, just to make matters worse, you end up with a feature that naive people will think will magically solve the problems and it won't, and when it doesn't, how do you think these people will feel? Happy that an afk boot is in despite still not logging in, or even more frustrated that they still can't log in despite an afk boot? And now they're competing with people who come back from afk, too, for placement on the server, and the lobby server goes under further stress (after the duty finder server or "instance server", the lobby server appears to be going under more stress than any of the other servers), and the problems exaggerate.

People need to stop making assumptions without any consideration for/understanding of the the actual issue. Jealousy of those who are online is not going to make your problems any better. Instead, let SE deal with the real issues and know that they are the ones with likely very stressed out heads and perhaps (at worst) careers on the line, while all you have on the line is the ability to play a game as often as you like. I trust they are doing everything they can to optimise the number of people who can play the game short of making it financially unviable.

[Cloudane]

Classic Square. They're really not having a lot of luck with FFXIV are they?

I was hoping to pick this up yesterday, but couldn't even find a retail copy anywhere. You would think by now that anyone launching anything popular would realise that you should estimate demand and then multiply your estimate by at least 3. Even Apple figured that out eventually :P

[Loony BoB]

Classic Square. They're really not having a lot of luck with FFXIV are they?
If anything, things are going better than they could dream of - they have so much demand that they can't keep up with it. Unfortunately for them, the demand came about far later than was ideal meaning they couldn't accommodate it in a hurry.


I was hoping to pick this up yesterday, but couldn't even find a retail copy anywhere. You would think by now that anyone launching anything popular would realise that you should estimate demand and then multiply your estimate by at least 3. Even Apple figured that out eventually :PNo, people were sceptical at best about FFXIV for a very long time. In fact, it wasn't until a couple of weekends before (early access) release that the interest shot up notably and it wasn't until the week of release that demand shot through the roof. Even here at EoFF people were cautious with their optimism - even me! But the game itself seems to appeal to the vast majority of people that actually are able to play it, so they're definitely doing something right.

I loved the reddit page Zach linked earlier, particularly for this link I found in it: Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22final+fantasy+xiv%22#q=%22final%20fantasy%20xiv%22%2C%20%22a%20realm%20reborn%22%2C%20% 22final%20fantasy%2014%22%2C%20FFXIV&geo=US&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q)

[Carl the Llama]

Said afker isn't using the resources which are bottlenecking the situation (duty finder instances) and SE have stated they are monitoring things 24/7 to allow increases/decreases to server populations based on resources used. This is why the devs aren't that bothered about the afk'ers. Let's put it this way... they set the world capacity at 3,500 and then boot all the afk'ers, say 500 of them, so it's 3,000 people online. The demand on the duty finder server? Exactly the same. So they adjust the world capacity to 3,000 with no afkers instead of 3,500 with afk'ers. Nobody wins. The resources required for an afk'er are pittance compared to the resources required by an active player. If the devs really felt that the afk'ers were causing these problems they would have done something about them a long time ago.

The problems lie with the stresses caused by the duty finder, so they need to sort that out instead of coming up with scapegoats that do nothing to fix the problem. If they implemented afk booting, all it would do is result in more people logging in which would take up more stressful resources in one minute than the afk-in-the-inn member would use over hours.

Also, just to make matters worse, you end up with a feature that naive people will think will magically solve the problems and it won't, and when it doesn't, how do you think these people will feel? Happy that an afk boot is in despite still not logging in, or even more frustrated that they still can't log in despite an afk boot? And now they're competing with people who come back from afk, too, for placement on the server, and the lobby server goes under further stress (after the duty finder server or "instance server", the lobby server appears to be going under more stress than any of the other servers), and the problems exaggerate.

People need to stop making assumptions without any consideration for/understanding of the the actual issue. Jealousy of those who are online is not going to make your problems any better. Instead, let SE deal with the real issues and know that they are the ones with likely very stressed out heads and perhaps (at worst) careers on the line, while all you have on the line is the ability to play a game as often as you like. I trust they are doing everything they can to optimise the number of people who can play the game short of making it financially unviable.

If what you are saying is true (I would like the source on that info btw) then why at 10:30am was I still getting 1017? I find it hard to believe that there are that many people doing duty finder at that time of day to cause such a bottleneck that you describe.

[Aulayna]

The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore it's that servers can crash if there are too many people in densely populated areas - such as the starter areas, which is why they had really limited capacity at the start and have gradually increased them as the population has spread out across all areas. Even if you are on the server doing nothing you are still consuming resources that is preventing someone else from logging in.

Also worth noting is they haven't ruled out kicking people who are AFK. They have openly said they are considering it but are waiting to see what the situation is like after the hardware upgrades this week.

[Loony BoB]

Don't ask me to explain why you can't get in - I'm not on the phone with Yoshi and I don't think he'd have the time to look into individuals. ;) I disconnected at something like 8pm on a weekday and got back in immediately with a queue of 18. Perhaps a lot of people in America are staying up late on Sunday night playing the game?

As for sources...

Yoshi, in his "Further Details on Access Restrictions" post in General Discussion of the official FFXIV:ARR forums...

The restoration of crashed servers is usually followed by a rush of players attempting go log back in, which, in turn, puts a straing on our lobby server, and can ultimately have an adverse affect on all of the Worlds.

To prevent this from happening, we felt the safest course of action would be to limit logins.
This is why you get 1017 at all. They limit logins rather than putting you in a queue that might never end because of the strain such an unlimited queue can cause on the lobby and subsequently other worlds.

However, we would like you to know that the restrictions are under constant surveillance. We are currently monitoring login numbers on all Worlds 24 hours a day, and actively removing/applying restrictions as soon as we detect even the smallest fluctuation in concurrent connection numbers.
...so, monitored 24/7, as I said. If they feel they can let you in, they will.

In addition to increasing the number of Worlds, we are also optimizing the Duty Finder (party matching) management servers in an effort to reduce server load and ensure better stability when using this feature.
Here he acknowledges that the Duty Finder is a problem, which pretty much everyone and their uncle knows if they look into the problems that the servers have experienced and looks through more of the dev posts. Seriously, dev posts are great.

From several users on some of our more congested Worlds, we have received requests for a feature which automatically logs out characters who are AFK for an extended period of time. We are actively looking into the implementation of such a feature, but have decided to first concentrate our efforts on increasing the number of Worlds and optimizing the Duty Finder servers.
This is where he says that the Devs feel that the overall number of worlds and the Duty Finder servers are more important than an auto-afk-kick.


The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore it's that servers can crash if there are too many people in densely populated areas - such as the starter areas, which is why they had really limited capacity at the start and have gradually increased them as the population has spread out across all areas. Even if you are on the server doing nothing you are still consuming resources that is preventing someone else from logging in.
The resources being used are absolute bugger all compared to the resources that would be used by an active player. Like... less than 1% of the resources. Going by what has been stated in Zach's link where a bunch of server admins for similar games are posting, the amount of resources used by someone in a small area single-character instance are tiny compared to someone through Duty Finder. I wouldn't be surprised if one character in the duty finder would have the same cost as hundreds of users in their inns doing nothing. And again, this is the only way I can get friend requests. I dare say there would be around 10-20% fewer people in our LS - perhaps even 30% fewer - if I couldn't receive friend requests. No afk = No friend request = No LS/FC invite. I know we have other leaders but they aren't always online and I'd much prefer the simple ability to add friends who are offline, have them accept when I'm offline, add them to the LS/FC when they're offline, etc. etc. This would go a very long way towards me altering my opinion on AFK'ers. I do agree that AFK'ers in the cities are annoying, though - that's why I insist on returning to the inn.

Oh, and there are still issues with the duty finder. The "stories" haven't stopped - the lower caps on server population are a direct result of the resource-intensive things such as (as you stated) the starter areas and (as I've mentioned) the duty finder. It's repeatedly mentioned by server gurus walking the forums and, it seems, reddit that the duty finder is a massive resource hog. I mean, think about it - they're adding a few more worlds, right? They have 25 servers and one duty finder covering all 25. If they add a few more, they say this will create a need to split the duty finder for the data center. Now, if you were to split those few worlds' populations amongst the existing servers, that would cause a similar problem for the duty finder (as it's the same total population regardless of being spread over 25 worlds or over 28 worlds). Therefore, it's a reasonable conclusion that the duty finder is still restricting the world capacities.

Also worth noting is they haven't ruled out kicking people who are AFK. They have openly said they are considering it but are waiting to see what the situation is like after the hardware upgrades this week.
They're actively looking into it, which is a shame because it's clearly just to pander to the masses and won't actually have any huge benefit. If anything, it could have an adverse effect in that of the servers which actually struggle most - the lobby and the duty finder - the lobby would actually have an increase of activity. This is the main reason I think they're not prioritising it, actually. Think of all the information required to log in (more than you might think) compared the information required for a character to idle in their inn.

I'd happily have them afk-kick anyone who idles in the busy areas, though.

[Aulayna]

Yes but the Duty Finder isn't the ONLY problem.

He even specifically addresses this in the same post:


At the game’s start, however, while everyone is still at a low level, the majority of players are concentrated in the three city-states and surrounding areas. This can not only lead to a lack of enemies to slay (preventing quest progression), but also see area servers overloaded, and ultimately lead to crashes.

Fortunately, differences in total individual play time, login times, and character/class progression will eventually lead to players being more spread out within each World. Once this happens, there will be less need for both login and character creation restrictions.

This is why people are complaining about AFK'ers. The Duty Finder alone isn't why there are limitations in place and when you AFK you are still using resources that are preventing someone else from logging in, even if neither of you touch the Duty Finder. The whole "I'm not using the DF so it's okay" argument is a half-truth really.

Now I'm not going to get on your case about it as I did it myself all weekend so I could avoid the login errors, but I will full well admit that I intentionally did it knowing full well I screwed people over by doing it (heck there were people in our own LS that couldn't log in due to people like you and me being logged in but AFK for hours on end) and not trying to justify it with a selectively quoting or paraphrasing dev posts in a way that makes it sound like no big deal.

And of course upgrading the hardware is more important but if the issue persists and they don't see further upgrading hardware as financially viable barring a continued surge of demand following digital sales re-opening, then they will shift those development resources to putting in that autokick-AFK feature because they haven't openly said "we're not doing this."

[Loony BoB]

Yes but the Duty Finder isn't the ONLY problem.

He even specifically addresses this in the same post:


At the game’s start, however, while everyone is still at a low level, the majority of players are concentrated in the three city-states and surrounding areas. This can not only lead to a lack of enemies to slay (preventing quest progression), but also see area servers overloaded, and ultimately lead to crashes.

Fortunately, differences in total individual play time, login times, and character/class progression will eventually lead to players being more spread out within each World. Once this happens, there will be less need for both login and character creation restrictions.
I acknowledged that the starter areas were part of the problem! But I must have misread your post, I thought you said "The issue isn't related to the duty finder anymore" when you said "The issue isn't just related to the duty finder anymore" D= My bad.

This is why people are complaining about AFK'ers. The Duty Finder alone isn't why there are limitations in place and when you AFK you are still using resources that are preventing someone else from logging in, even if neither of you touch the Duty Finder. The whole "I'm not using the DF so it's okay" argument is a half-truth really.
Hence I said that I don't mind AFK'ers in busy areas being booted. :D The problem isn't AFK'ers, it's the volume of people in starter areas which AFK'ers happen to be part of... so boot those in the starter areas, but don't make the people like me sitting in my inn room using sod all resources suffer for it, because I need my LS people to be able to add me. Or, if things go well, don't boot anyone if the new servers solve the problem.

Now I'm not going to get on your case about it as I did it myself all weekend so I could avoid the login errors, but I will full well admit that I intentionally did it knowing full well I screwed people over by doing it (heck there were people in our own LS that couldn't log in due to people like you and me being logged in but AFK for hours on end) and not trying to justify it with a selectively quoting or paraphrasing dev posts in a way that makes it sound like no big deal.
I genuinely think that AFK'ers in the inn are not "part of the problem". If they booted all the AFK'ers that were barely draining their resources they could get in, what, four to five more people in the duty finder? They're not going to up the server capacity count by four or five. I am not 'screwing over people' because if there were 1,000 of me booted, the server load wouldn't change, and all that would happen is the server capacity would be lowered further to avoid the stress of 1,000 more people who were actually active. The problem is not the AFK'ers sitting in their inn, the problem which Yoshi himself conceded was that he never anticipated such a demand for the game and they need more servers to cope with it. The AFK'ers are not at fault for that and shouldn't be booted. We're getting new servers, that should solve all the problems. Why kick people then?

And of course upgrading the hardware is more important but if the issue persists and they don't see further upgrading hardware as financially viable barring a continued surge of demand following digital sales re-opening, then they will shift those development resources to putting in that autokick-AFK feature because they haven't openly said "we're not doing this."
They've openly said that the login problems should disappear, and in a shocking twist, I believe the people who know what they're talking about. If the problems don't disappear, enable auto-kick for those who are draining resources, sure. But you can bet I'll be in my inn and having some kind of macro that makes me rotate an inch every 15 minutes until I can get my friend/LS requests made while I'm not logged in. :p

[Winrey]

Many of you out there likely chose a server during Phase 4 or Early Access and have friends, family, or guild mates who can’t join you due to the character creation lockouts. I have friends in this situation as well and I wanted to find out what, if anything, next week’s datacenter upgrades would have in store for people in this particular situation. New worlds are great and all for the overall health of the game and population distribution, but what about getting on servers where your friends are already playing? There are world transfers planned for mid-September, but there is also a chance that, at least on some servers, players may not necessarily have to wait that long.
One of the main culprits of server congestion and instability has to do with the game’s Duty Finder tool. This tool allows players to find players for group content game-wide, at the moment. But it’s this very aspect of the tool that has been causing many of the issues players are experiencing, loading the world servers such that they can’t accept additional logins or new character creations without risking detrimental effect to the server as a whole. As part of the server work going on this week, Square Enix will be breaking up servers into groups for the purposes of the Duty Finder, think World of Warcraft’s Battlegroups, for example. Once this is implemented, Mr. Yoshida tells us that world servers should be much less taxed and this will both allow for upgrades in the server concurrent user cap (so more players can login at once) and also ease restrictions on character creation.
Mr. Yoshida also touched briefly on the notion of queues and an AFK idle kick. The team is willing to look into an AFK kick or queue system, but as of this moment, they are devoting 100% of their efforts towards getting the aforementioned additional servers and server changes implemented this week. We were also told that while players may be seeing tons of other players idling around AFK, the vast majority of players logging in are actually playing, they’re just putting in some crazy hours.
It’s also important to note that if you are in a Free Company, you will not be able to transfer Free Company data with the initial implementation of server transfers in mid-September. Even if your entire FC decides to move to a new server, you will be starting from scratch as far as your Free Company progress goes.

[Dr Unne]

I've disconnected a couple of times and got straight back in without issue. I think the problem - at least during EU peak hours - has started to dissipate.

Yesterday it took me about 200 attempts to log in. Protip: You can hit 0 on your keyboard over and over to do the login process. I was hitting it every couple minutes absentmindedly while playing a DS game for about an hour before it worked.

It's 1:43 PST right now and I can't log in again. I'm not too upset. They said they might give us another week free trial to make up for the time no one could play this week. That seems fair.

EDIT: Yep, one hour later, completely unable to log on.

[Rostum]

Yeah you can try and white knight this all you want, but they should ​have been a lot more prepared than this. People spending money on a game, and a week later still can't log in to play.

They're an incredibly large global company, dealing with a global market using one of the most prominent franchises in a multi-billion dollar industry. That's why they should have been prepared. Let's not even get into over a decade's worth of real-world data for these situations.

[Loony BoB]

Yeah you can try and white knight this all you want, but they should ​have been a lot more prepared than this. People spending money on a game, and a week later still can't log in to play.

They're an incredibly large global company, dealing with a global market using one of the most prominent franchises in a multi-billion dollar industry. That's why they should have been prepared. Let's not even get into over a decade's worth of real-world data for these situations.
The problem was that everyone and their uncle were "undecided" until Phase Four. As pointed out earlier, the demand didn't jump up three fold, it jumped up five fold. Everyone was saying this relaunch would be fairly doomed because of the tainting that came about from 1.x's launch, and that the game would lose out significantly because of that alone. It doesn't look like any of these predictions (which were happening until Phase Four) came true. They made a game that is better than they thought, if anything.

Also, they overestimated Tomb Raider's sales and many others, so it makes sense that they would opt towards being conservative on this occasion.

[I Don't Need A Name]

I'm not really against Square at the moment, they're trying to fix things and that's fine. I just don't understand how they can say that, in Early Access, they weren't expecting there to be that many people logging on. Surely they knew exactly how many people would be logging on because you only got in by pre-ordering, so the pre-order figures would've shown them the number of people ready to play..

[Loony BoB]

I'm not really against Square at the moment, they're trying to fix things and that's fine. I just don't understand how they can say that, in Early Access, they weren't expecting there to be that many people logging on. Surely they knew exactly how many people would be logging on because you only got in by pre-ordering, so the pre-order figures would've shown them the number of people ready to play..
Not exactly. Legacy players were automatically given early access and early access was still procurable via pre-order until about two days before early access launched (I'm also hear that people could actually pre-order and get early access codes while early access was going on) and while Japan got a limited number of pre-orders available to them, NA & EU had unlimited pre-order codes. You predict based on pre-orders up to a certain time (and based on marketing). But when everyone orders just a day or two before early access starts, then you certainly can't magic up the additional servers at the click of your fingers. You have to pay for them, you have to wait for delivery, you have to set them up, you have to stress test them, etc. etc.

Some people might suggest (going by what I'm reading around the rest of the internet, not here, so this is a slightly unprovoked rant within this thread :p) that you can always get servers at the drop of a hat, too, but that's not the case - there are lead times for such things, especially when you want the exact specification as your others servers which at a launch time they will want. There is a global queue at the server manufacturers and they will be waiting on parts from other parts manufacturers on occasion. Sometimes you simply can't get the servers on a next day delivery, even when you're Square Enix. I work for Computacenter who sell to some of the largest banks in the world including HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Halifax Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland. I think we spend high hundreds of millions of pounds at Lenovo ever year. And sometimes we have to tell the banks they will have to wait for their servers because there are none and there is a queue. We can escalate at Lenovo or HP or wherever and do everything we can to make things happen, but this stuff simply doesn't happen overnight. This is something I've been dealing with since the day I got my job over eleven years ago. I wish we could get things turned around that fast!

Sorry, the IT worker in me just gets a little annoyed when people assume things are that easy. SE is a major company in this world and they do their marketing. Sometimes it's not right, but I'm pretty confident they will be doing a far better job at it than the likes of us. And when it goes wrong because of inaccurate marketing (and a very unpredictably high market at that which couldn't have been predicted based on what was being said around the internet by users before Open Beta) then the IT side of things will not be solved at the drop of a hat.

[Rostum]

The problem was that everyone and their uncle were "undecided" until Phase Four. As pointed out earlier, the demand didn't jump up three fold, it jumped up five fold. Everyone was saying this relaunch would be fairly doomed because of the tainting that came about from 1.x's launch, and that the game would lose out significantly because of that alone. It doesn't look like any of these predictions (which were happening until Phase Four) came true. They made a game that is better than they thought, if anything.

Who's "everyone"? Also companies like these have teams dedicated to market researching and forecasting sales, they get paid lots to do it too...

[Loony BoB]

Seriously, you were looking around the internet and seeing rave reviews and lots of excitement before Phase Four? Because for the majority of things I was reading, a lot of people were very cautiously about any optimism placed, many places were citing "But 1.x may have tainted the name too much", stuff like that. And as pointed out, pre-orders shot up very, very late.

I'm personally surprised by the level of interest - I spent a lot of time nagging people to try to play the game and now people are arriving by the e-truckload trying to get in. Going by how extremely cautious the optimism was just a month or two ago, I struggle to see how they could have looked at the EU/NA market and have thought "yeah, our MMO is gonna rock the MMO community and we're going to need so many servers!" I mean, even the diehard reporter of FFXIV over at Joystiq was always cautious and wary when discussing the game. People weren't willing to get hyped and with no hype, the game was probably not expected to do so well.

They get paid lots to do it and they still didn't anticipate this. That could be seen as bad marketing, absolutely - and it probably was to some extent - but I trust people who are paid that much to do a better job than I would have done.

[Aulayna]

A box sale != A CD Key activation

A CD Key activation != +1 concurrency 24/7

1,000,000 boxes sold != 1,000,000 concurrency at any one point in time

Sales forecasts and figures alone aren't reliable indicators of peak concurrency. There are a myriad of other factors.

Really as someone who's worked with MMOs for the past 6 years I could go into a lot more detail about this but I get the feeling it'd just be a fruitless endeavour.

We can't login, it sucks balls and made me very sad last night when I couldn't play. But, they're working on it to the best of their ability. Not really much more that can be done beyond that and no end of bashing Square Enix on an internet forum will get things fixed any faster than they possibly can be fixed.

[Loony BoB]

Really as someone who's worked with MMOs for the past 6 years I could go into a lot more detail about this but I get the feeling it'd just be a fruitless endeavour.
But it would be insightful! If you'd even want to, anyway. :D

[Rostum]

Really as someone who's worked with MMOs for the past 6 years I could go into a lot more detail about this but I get the feeling it'd just be a fruitless endeavour.

Not really much more that can be done beyond that and no end of bashing Square Enix on an internet forum will get things fixed any faster than they possibly can be fixed.

Or you could cut the passive aggressiveness, please... Or maybe I can join in! "I'm sorry, we could just discuss and/or use a public forum for things you want to discuss and/or use a public forum for in the future, perhaps."

I honestly doubt Square Enix pays their forecast and research departments a lot of money to get their consumer interest from eye-balling news websites, or count up box sales and do some munted math. It goes far beyond that. You need to keep in mind here that they are a large global company dealing with an extremely large global market with one of the most prominent franchises in the industry. They should have been prepared, they weren't and now unfortunately they could pay for it (and so will their loyal consumer base like (unfortunately) myself). In any other industry this would just be unacceptable, and sometimes I wonder why gamers bend over and take it.

People keep saying that this is like every other MMO launch. It isn't. If it were this wouldn't be as big news as it is right now. I've been following a lot of major MMO releases over the last decade, and in this later half of the decade either none of them had any issues at all, or it only took a few days to fix those issues - not over a week or two!

In the end, they should and could have been prepared to deal with this issue days after not weeks. However, I'm willing to bet this is just more internal issues in the company that have dragged on from previous management (like not communicating with the consumers at all, or just general lack of foresight and stubbornness (remember that Tanaka fellow?).

I also just wanted to say that whilst the "AFK kick" feature won't relieve server stress, it'd still allow for more players to actually play the game than those that would just leave their characters idle for 8+ hours at a time. Sure, it's a short-term feature easy enough to implement, but it might have helped settle down angry consumers and angry reviewers. I'm also completely dumbfounded they don't have a working queue system, which would also help alleviate people's current perceptions (probably more so than the AFK kick feature).

TL;DR - I like discussing and bickering about stuff that is affecting me right now, deal with it. 8)

[Loony BoB]

Really as someone who's worked with MMOs for the past 6 years I could go into a lot more detail about this but I get the feeling it'd just be a fruitless endeavour.

Not really much more that can be done beyond that and no end of bashing Square Enix on an internet forum will get things fixed any faster than they possibly can be fixed.

Or you could cut the passive aggressiveness, please... Or maybe I can join in! "I'm sorry, we could just discuss and/or use a public forum for things you want to discuss and/or use a public forum for in the future, perhaps."
Please, Rostum, drop the personal attacks and sarcasm. :p I'm sure Aul wasn't meaning for any offence to be made.

I honestly doubt Square Enix pays their forecast and research departments a lot of money to get their consumer interest from eye-balling news websites, or count up box sales and do some munted math. It goes far beyond that. You need to keep in mind here that they are a large global company dealing with an extremely large global market with one of the most prominent franchises in the industry.
Do tell us at which point they went wrong, then! You clearly have more of a mind for it than the professionals. ;) Seriously, reviews and comments do matter, and sales do matter. If there is an unpredented and unanticpated and unpredictable increase in demand very late in the pre-order process, they can't magic up additional infrastructure at the drop of a hat. They openly stated that they got it wrong, but that was down to unexpected demand. They simply did not expect this many people to be playing the game. I trust that they did their absolute best to ensure they could get maximum profit, it's their business to.

They should have been prepared, they weren't and now unfortunately they could pay for it (and so will their loyal consumer base like (unfortunately) myself). In any other industry this would just be unacceptable, and sometimes I wonder why gamers bend over and take it.
...have you ever played an MMO launch before? O_o Every launch has an issue. In FFXIV ARR, it just happens to be the issue of "too many people like the game". When you have a game that people are willing to spend hours clicking buttons just to play, you know it's a good game. I don't think they will pay for it and I think you're just enraged because the problem is affecting your ability to play. I kind of expect a bit more level headedness out of you given your experience with MMO's. I'm told this is pretty standard across the board for all successful MMO's in, well, MMO history.

People keep saying that this is like every other MMO launch. It isn't. If it were this wouldn't be as big news as it is right now. I've been following a lot of major MMO releases over the last decade, and in this later half of the decade either none of them had any issues at all, or it only took a few days to fix those issues - not over a week or two!
It hasn't been a week since launch. And I'm genuinely interested in which of these successful MMO's had a successful major launch without bugs or whatever. From what I'm reading, the game itself is one of the most bug-free launches ever. Unfortunately the demand is huge, so they are adapting. They have got their servers, they are getting them prepared, it won't be 24 hours before they're up. Which, by the way, is a week since launch. Not "over a week or two". :p


In the end, they should and could have been prepared to deal with this issue days after not weeks. However, I'm willing to bet this is just more internal issues in the company that have dragged on from previous management (like not communicating with the consumers at all, or just general lack of foresight and stubbornness (remember that Tanaka fellow?).
Sigh. It's easy to come up with scapegoats when you're on the outside. It seems to me that the game is a huge success, people are enjoying it and there are few bugs of note. Because of this, the demand to play the game is huge, because they know the game is good. Because of this, we have the issues we are facing. As for why they couldn't get it all up within days - they are getting it fixed within days. They had to buy the servers, they had to stress test them. Servers are not available at your local Tesco, and Square Enix is not going to bump up the queue for servers ahead of any of the other global corporations that buy them every day. I can't stress this part enough because it's my job to buy these things for companies and I speak with Lenovo to try to jump ahead of the queue on a regular basis. You simply can't. If the world's largest bank can't, why do you think SE can? Servers are not delivered on a sameday service. They have already increased the number of worlds, I'm sure at least twice, and they are having to do it again. This means they are getting servers on top of their backup servers. This is high demand. This could be construed as poor marketing, yes, but it is not a quick fix on the lines of "Oh, we'll just pop down to the local and whip out a server from the bartender's butt".

I also just wanted to say that whilst the "AFK kick" feature won't relieve server stress, it'd still allow for more players to actually play the game than those that would just leave their characters idle for 8+ hours at a time.
Again, this would increase stress and thus they would have to lower the headcount once more, making it relatively redundant. From what I've read from the more technically knowledgeable people out there and also going by my own knowledge of servers, the afk crowd probably have such a small impact that it wouldn't be worth their time to implement an AFK autokick, and if they do it would be better off as an extremely temporary measure until the subscription period begins and the populations suddenly drop. And, again, it may be worth simply forcing people to go to their inn to idle so people don't have to constantly load up the afk'ing characters. In 1.x, you could only get rested bonus by going to your inn, and very few people AFK'ed around aetheryte.

[Endless]

In a more positive note : FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Server Congestion and Trial Period Extensions (09/03/2013) (http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

[I Don't Need A Name]

Am I the only one who found the amusement in reading
Technical Difficulties
>> Endless
on the forum top? xD

In all seriousness, I just can't wait until SE finish their maintenance and sort out the congestion and quieten all the people who are crying about their consumer rights. I know people already who are screaming blue murder and are saying they're inches away from emailing SE and asking for a refund. That's the problem when it comes to the retail business. The consumer always jumps onto the hate-wagon, cries blue murder and tries to sully the name of the company and those who support them and don't just wait patiently for the inevitable recovery and fix. From what I hear from 1.x, the game was truly enjoyable once the initial problems were sorted out and everything was back on track again. People just need a little patience..

[Jiro]

I preordered the game like 48 hours before early access started. The following day, 5 of my friends got the game on my recommendation. You can't always prepare for people that come out of the blue. Mind you, I haven't been able to get into the game for the past couple days so the problems are persistent and that's annoying, but I had homework to do so I guess it's not all bad :p

Just an a

[Aulayna]

I honestly doubt Square Enix pays their forecast and research departments a lot of money to get their consumer interest from eye-balling news websites, or count up box sales and do some munted math. It goes far beyond that. You need to keep in mind here that they are a large global company dealing with an extremely large global market with one of the most prominent franchises in the industry. They should have been prepared, they weren't and now unfortunately they could pay for it (and so will their loyal consumer base like (unfortunately) myself). In any other industry this would just be unacceptable, and sometimes I wonder why gamers bend over and take it.

Analysts can (and often do) get it wrong. I really wish I could give you numbers here but I have to respect my employment NDA so all I can say is when one of the biggest brands in the industry can exceed even it's own extremely lofty "best case" expectations that they thought there was no chance in hell of meeting - then it can and will happen to others.

As for other industries there really aren't that many online services that will be hammered by a few hundred thousand people the minute the switch is flicked. The very comparable thing I can think of right now is ticket sales for major sporting events and concerts which have the exact same problems when they get hammered at the same time. Even things like the Google App store run incredibly slowly when a hot "killer app" gets released.

Let's not forget that Square Enix isn't exactly the best of gauging these numbers either when something like Tomb Raider which sold metric buckloads was considered to have underperformed.

You can even see in Yoshi P's posts the concurrency figures they were planning for, which were by no means modest in relation to 1.x and they still surpassed them. The gaming press argument may feel superfluous but it is very true that there had been a massive surge of interest in ARR between Phases 3 and 4 of the beta once the NDA got lifted - by which time a lot of the hardware and contingency plans were probably in place.

They've openly admitted that they got it wrong, the producer has even written a heartfelt apology for it, they are giving people an additional 7 days of free game time (which comes at a loss to their bottom line) in response to these issues. They are doing the best they can in response to the situation and to their credit aren't fobbing people off with bulltrout like EA and Maxis did in the wake of the Sim City launch. It's also a lot more than what Gameforge DE gave European TERA players in the wake of ongoing issues (to the point that TERA EU was at one point several patches behind the KR version and 2 or 3 patches behind the NA one)


People keep saying that this is like every other MMO launch. It isn't. If it were this wouldn't be as big news as it is right now. I've been following a lot of major MMO releases over the last decade, and in this later half of the decade either none of them had any issues at all, or it only took a few days to fix those issues - not over a week or two!

I already addressed this in a response to your last post where you said this. ARR has only been out for a week. The GW2 in Europe example I gave it took them over two weeks to sort it. SWTOR at launch it was practically impossible for me and my friends to get online at the same time for around the first two weeks. Neverwinter I lost an entire days worth of progress due to server rollbacks they had to preform in response to an economy breaking exploit they hadn't found out about during testing.

Firefall is STILL plagued by problems and has been in open beta and willingly taking peoples money for far longer than A Realm Reborn has been on shelves.

Even WoW got hit by unexpected demand related issues when Cataclysm was first released and had a couple of very major bugs that had to be rectified post launch.

Then there's also other recent always-online client/server games like Diablo III and Sim City, that whilst not MMORPGs, have had similar incredibly bad launches.

Acting like ARR is a travesty the likes of which haven't been heard of in years is just frankly far from the truth.


In the end, they should and could have been prepared to deal with this issue days after not weeks. However, I'm willing to bet this is just more internal issues in the company that have dragged on from previous management (like not communicating with the consumers at all, or just general lack of foresight and stubbornness (remember that Tanaka fellow?).

Again I addressed your claim of there being "no communication" in my previous post.

Server hardware doesn't suddenly appear out of thin air overnight. Especially when that hardware is being housed in a data center whereby things like contracts sometimes have to be re-negotiated or their technicians may actually also be busy dealing with other problems at the same time. It's not a case of pressing a magic button on a desk and everything is resolved.

Even the entire process of getting the hardware has to go through budgeting and approval first.


I also just wanted to say that whilst the "AFK kick" feature won't relieve server stress, it'd still allow for more players to actually play the game than those that would just leave their characters idle for 8+ hours at a time. Sure, it's a short-term feature easy enough to implement, but it might have helped settle down angry consumers and angry reviewers. I'm also completely dumbfounded they don't have a working queue system, which would also help alleviate people's current perceptions (probably more so than the AFK kick feature).

The thing is, there is a queue. I have been in it had to wait for it from position 561 before. However if the realm is at capacity and it already has a set number of people in the queue it will simply reject any further additional requests to join that queue. However due to the ongoing issues with lobby servers it can sometimes cause the queue to get dropped as well as the lobby and login servers themselves are struggling to keep up with the demand of people spamming them.

A lot of reviewers are actually holding off on publishing reviews until these issues are alleviated. Even with all the issues the game is still getting largely favourable user reviews on sites like MetaCritic which normally get negative review bombed as soon as a situation like this has opened up.

The situation isn't great, no. It's frustrating, it sucks. However SE aren't burying their heads in the sand over it and waiting for it to blow over. They've communicated it, Yoshi-P himself has been very honest and open about it and they've already taken steps to compensate people for it. The issues are annoying and in an ideal world they wouldn't happen, but sometimes people get things wrong and rather than spurt out hyperbole and making sweeping negative assumptions I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For now.

No-one's trying to argue that the situation isn't unacceptable or ideal - however a lot of people are trying to provide reasoned responses to your claims of "I don't understand how" or "I'm dumbfounded as to why."

[Dr Unne]

Guild Wars 2 was broken for at least a week [1]. For those who managed to log in, people were often kicked into overflow servers and disconnected, forming parties didn't work, etc. The in-game Trading Post was shut down for weeks. It got sorted out. Same for Diablo 3 [2], the servers for that game were going up and down like a yo-yo at launch. If Blizzard of all companies can't make an online game that works for 100% of users on day 1, what chance does SE have?

Has anyone else here ever played an MMO with real issues? Like days-long downtimes, weekly rollbacks, databases lost without backups, lag to the point of unplayability? I'm often shocked at how smoothly modern MMOs manage to run.

EDIT: ...

[1]: Guild Wars 2 Is Off to a Bumpy Start - Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/08/25/guild-wars-2-is-off-to-a-bumpy-start/)
[2]: Diablo III woes plague launch day players | Crave - CNET (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57434871-1/diablo-iii-woes-plague-launch-day-players/)

[Rostum]

Good stuff.
Thank you! ;)

[Tavrobel]

Maintenance in thirty.

[comma]

Seriously, you were looking around the internet and seeing rave reviews and lots of excitement before Phase Four?Absolutely. I feel like it kind of blew up during Phase 3. There was a lot of hype, a lot of talk about how much better it was, a naysayer here and there, but the overwhelming majority thought it was going in the right direction and was a very solid game. It totally ramped up, and I wasn't surprised that things came to a head during Phase 4 due to the good stuff people had been saying everywhere.

[Jiro]

Well a free week of play isn't a bad way to make up for the troubles.
(http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

[Endless]

Well a free week of play isn't a bad way to make up for the troubles.
(http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

*cough*


In a more positive note : FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Server Congestion and Trial Period Extensions (09/03/2013) (http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

[comma]

Well a free week of play isn't a bad way to make up for the troubles.
(http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)Cool, thanks for the news, Jiro.

[Cloudane]

It was difficult enough getting hold of a copy! Online ordering was disabled (and I didn't want to download 12GB via ADSL anyway, it's slow and like a quarter of our monthly cap) and the boxed version is as rare as rocking horse poo. But it's finally on its way...

There's nothing like the excitement of a launch. I remember running around for hours in Everquest after finally getting on, trying to find just one thing alive to kill. People had figured out where each bat spawns and were stood on the spawn points waiting. People were screaming at each other across the shout channel for kill-stealing. It was glorious :)

Didn't get a chance to try phase 4, but loved 3 and looking forward to playing release.

[Jiro]

Well a free week of play isn't a bad way to make up for the troubles.
(http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

*cough*


In a more positive note : FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Server Congestion and Trial Period Extensions (09/03/2013) (http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/66dc7211d03e3676e0ecbdc5a0afea11e7c857de)

Didn't see that post, whoops :monster:

[Johns53ton]

I know the dev tracker includes devs replying about the issue somewhttp://reouge.blogded.com/1.jpghttp://reouge.blogded.com/2.jpghttp://reouge.blogded.com/3.jpghttp://reouge.blogded.com/4.jpghttp://reouge.blogded.com/5.jpg

here...

[Cloudane]

So I can get on, but seem to have a choice

Full servers
or empty ones
Full servers I can't get into
Or ones where you go to the smegging INN OF UL'DAH and there's NOBODY there!

[Tavrobel]

Most people don't afk at inns.

[Loony BoB]

So I can get on, but seem to have a choice

Full servers
or empty ones
Full servers I can't get into
Or ones where you go to the smegging INN OF UL'DAH and there's NOBODY there!
It should be noted that you don't get to see 'everyone' until a starter quest is completed. Until then you'll be the 'only' player you'll see. Beyond that... the other servers will more than likely fill up pretty efficiently over time, I wouldn't worry about it just yet.

[Cloudane]

So I can get on, but seem to have a choice

Full servers
or empty ones
Full servers I can't get into
Or ones where you go to the smegging INN OF UL'DAH and there's NOBODY there!
It should be noted that you don't get to see 'everyone' until a starter quest is completed. Until then you'll be the 'only' player you'll see. Beyond that... the other servers will more than likely fill up pretty efficiently over time, I wouldn't worry about it just yet.

Ohh! I didn't know that, didn't get time to get past the starter stuff last night. That explains it :P
I don't recall that happening during the beta so it fooled me.

[Mirage]

I know it was the same in beta phase 3 and 4. I'm not entirely sure about phase 2, and I have no idea about phase 1.

[Cloudane]

I may not recall it happening, but I guess it did :)

[Aulayna]

Well BoB, you enjoyed it whilst it lasted.


[Implementation of Auto-Logout]
Because there are so many users attempting to login even when the maximum allowed number of concurrent logins has already been reached (in other words when login restrictions are in place) we have now implemented an auto-logout feature. In an attempt to provide as many users as possible a chance to login, characters that appear to be inactive for thirty minutes will be automatically logged out of the game.

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Regarding Details of Recent Maintenance (Sep. 12) (http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/669b39bba3c17a90c58e9ea8eaec2bd2b247f8e4)

[Mirage]

30 minutes, huh. Can't even make dinner without losing my entire chat log.

[Del Murder]

Tape an arrow button down on your keyboard.

[comma]

30 minutes, huh. Can't even make dinner without losing my entire chat log.Can't you export the logs? I remember them touting that you can export them to review "for strategy analysis" and stuff like that.

[Jiro]

Right now my only strategy involves kicking gil sellers in the fucking balls. God they are annoying.

[Tavrobel]

30 minutes, huh. Can't even make dinner without losing my entire chat log.

If you've spent any time in one of the main cities or Coerthas, you might not be too upset about losing the log.

[Mirage]

30 minutes, huh. Can't even make dinner without losing my entire chat log.Can't you export the logs? I remember them touting that you can export them to review "for strategy analysis" and stuff like that.

Doubt that's gonna happen automatically before it logs me out.

[comma]

Why do you want a chat log from when you were away from the game?

[Del Murder]

To make sure nobody is talking smack about him, of course.