Technical Difficulties

[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!

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 trout like this that really smurfs 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 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]

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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]

[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.