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Do yourself a favor and stay far far away from this one for now.
xenogias
Member Posts: 1,926
I'm going to start out by saying this is one of the most fun themepark MMOs I have played in a while. When I'm actually able to play which isn't often.
For now, stay far away from the title though. Why? Because Square is showing a complete lack of ability to handle their servers. This is probably if not without question one of the worst launches to date. The problem started in early access. A 1707 error, world is full. Oh there is a queue system. The amount of people who actually see the queue is so small though that most never even see it. Its not a live queue either. You will see your number in line initially and that's it. It will either let you in or in my experience you will get another error a few minutes after entering the queue. They have restricted each server to 5k people. Seems reasonable right? Well no not really. There is no auto afk boot. That's right, if a server issue doesn't kick you out of the game, or you have a stable internet connection once your logged in you can stay logged in indefinitely. They are also not kicking gold spammers in a timely manner and bots are running rampant. Even after being reported. How do I know? The ONE day I managed to get in without much issue I played for nearly 10 hours before having to go do real life things. As soon as I logged on I was spammed by gold sellers in nearly every chat possible including whisper. The whisper was actually as soon as I logged in. When I logged in the next day after 3 hours of trying I got a tell BY THE SAME SPAMMER. The same with a group of bots. 7 archer bots all killing stationary in the same area. There one day, still there the next and I know a large amount of players had reported them. All of this leads to even larger problems trying to log in. Square claims to be adding more servers this week and upping the amount of players allowed per server in at one time. That's great. But why wait a week to do it? Don't tell me it takes a week to set this up. That's pure bullshit. Smaller companies with less experience have handled the same issues within a day or two.
But no, this is not the only server issues. Half the time you will see your start button greyed out after you log in until it simply says it was unable to connect. This problem has steadily gotten worse over the last week. Don't believe me? Go check the tech forums. Its gone from maybe once a day prime time to several times a day. Not only that but they claim they fix the issue and by experience I can tell you no, they don't. They may bandaid it to work for a bit but the problem quickly comes back. Ok so once you get through to actually get to character selection nope, a good portion of the time then it simply wont find one server list or the other. If its the US/EU list you may as well close the client and try again. It doesn't just sit there and keep searching for the servers. You have to restart the client and hope you can even get to that point again.
Once all that works out for you, you may get VERY lucky and get in (not getting a 1707 error saying servers are full) but most likely you will be spamming the 0 button trying to get a spot in queue (and hopefully not getting an error there) or straight to the game. Oh and once in game you best hope you don't run into a 90k error when switching zones or in a dungeon. That boots you and you get to start the whole process over. Also, don't bother changing characters or making a new one. Changing a character will result in all of the hassle all over again and they have disabled making new characters. To give you an idea on how extreme it can be to try and get in I sat for 4 hours yesterday trying to log in every min or two while watching football until I got pissed off and took a nap. Yes, that's an extreme case and I had several friends get in, in that time. But that was my experience going from noon est. until 4:30 when I gave up.
One last complaint. Don't bother trying to post on the forums unless you have a medium to high level character. I've managed to get to 18 in my limited playtime. Forums are restricted based on character level. I cant tell you when I was finally able to post but even at 18 my posts where restricted to 10. It claims its daily but I hit my limit early yesterday replying to posts and I'm still not able to post today. Even in the tech forums. I tried making a post when I got an error they claimed to have fixed and I wasn't even allowed to MAKE a post in the tech forums. It is probably the worst forum setup I have ever see.
All of that said I would say if you like themepark MMO's and are even slightly interested in FF14 I would highly recommend this one. Just not until you hear the server issues are taken care of. At this point its more frustration than its worth.
Comments
I'm going to buy it once the digital sales resume. I'm assuming they will not resume sales until the server issues have been mostly addressed.
I'm hearing too many good things about this game not to buy it. But I'm glad I didn't pre-order. Instead of spending the Weekend trying to log on, I spent the weekend watching football, walking my dogs, and playing a little WarThunder.
You kinda lost your mojo once you went off onto the bots/gold sellers tangent.
I'm in the same boat.
I love the game, it has almost everything I've been looking for, but I tell everyone I know not to get this game yet. Hopefully, everything will be resolved by next week and I can start recommending the game.
give it a few more days geese free time coming too
i havent personaly seen any gold sellers but im sure once server issues are fixed they will work on them
Wall O'Text crits you for 9999 damage.
You have died.
Just kidding.
I wouldn't be opposed to people waiting. It would make it so there is less competition for server spaces lol. I'm with you OP 100%
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
yeah this game is way too solid for it to do poorly. Sure the servers suck right now but once they fix it you will have the most polished mmo on the market- somethings that developers have failed to do for so many years. even though there are such crippling login problems, i have been waiting way too long for a game of this caliber to come by to just not play it because of my anger towards server issues.
Most memorable games: AoC(Tryanny PvP), RIFT, GW, GW2, Ragnarok Online, Aion, FFXI, FFXIV, Secret World, League of Legends (Silver II rank)
Square stated the fix'll be in on Tuesday. They'll give 7+ days of playtime back to the community.
What more do people want? In essence, I've just played for 7 straight days.. on SE...
Back to playing now.. I came to google something and got caught up in the MMORPG whining again...
You cant even buy the game right now. THey have too many people who already bought it and cant support them.
So im not sure who the warning is for.
The game itself is actually really good...and for how packed the servers are right now..i get no lag, no latency and everything runs smooth.
SO Wednesday they add more servers, give everyone 7 extra days of free game time...and I think allow people to start buying the game.
Its not like you are losing money if you bought it already and cant figure out how to get in...so consider the game launch next Wednesday and consider this EA and pretend you didn't get in or something.
Mind you these problems are due to the games success..its a good game and more people wanted to play it than SE expected...a lot more.
I am one of the lucky few that have had minimum problems. I log on and maybe wait in queue for 10 minutes at most and start playing and having fun.
It is hard for me to empathize since I have had very few problems and I would definitely steer everyone towards playing this game as it is one of (if not the best) games released in the last 3 or 4 years.
tldr?
I'm not reading a wall of text that filled my 30" monitor from top to bottom with no spaces.
I heaven't played ARR yet, but from my experience:
- it's a standard launch for AAA MMOs,
- it won't have any consequences when it comes to determining the overall succes or failure of a game. After a month nobody will care about it. Games like this are designed to last for years and to hold players attention, sympathy and commitment for years, not to be fun, smooth and exciting experience for the first 10-20 hours of gameplay
Regardless of this, the OP is right, there is no reason to start playing now, with all the problems happening and hordes of players swarming low level zones and zerging everything (unless you plan to powerlevel to max, get best possible gear, complete all dungeons and quit the game in 3 weeks).
You won't miss anything if you start to play in a week or two; if the game is so bad that everybody will quit it after 2 months (for whatever reason) than it's not worth playing at all and you're not missing anything. If, on the other hand, it is a rare example of a succesfull, solid MMO, that people will keep playing for years, than starting a week, two or three after official release won't make any difference in the long run.
I'm willing to give them their wednesday server upgrade.
If after that, we start getting stuff amounting to "HOLD ON GUYS WE GOT NEW SERVER STUFF AND WE'RE STILL WORKING ON GETTING IT TO ACTUALLY WORK LOL" through wednesday and thursday, I'm going to go ahead and bail.
Next time someone asks why Developers keep pushing out games before they're fully/properly tested, with horrible launches and poor response time..
I'm going to say "Because there are always apologists ready and willing to make excuses for them, mock or otherwise stifle the people trying to take them to task for it, and saying "Yes! Yes! That feels great! Please, do it again!", and then link them to this thread, and the many others like it.
What incentive do developers have to not do half-assed releases, when so many are willing to happily lap up anything they're fed?
Not sure where the evidence is in terms of "half assed" releases when the issue stemmed from after-release type issues. Basically, they didn't know or expect it, plain and simple. If anyone can foresee future issues and problems with any project they are working on, there would be no need for people to make mistakes etc.
We are all only human and it sucks and it isn't entirely justified but in the end, this is the situation people have to deal with. They can decide with their wallets but they gamble on missing out on a good MMORPG (IMO of course). The one thing I find somewhat fascinating is the amount of time people will burn on other non-constructive activities just because FFXIV is down.
I usually am in the game but today I couldn't but all I can think of is the million other things I want to do i.e. practice programming, practice Chinese, read Economics, play a console FF game because FFXIV reminded me how awesome parts of Final Fantasy is and how truly unique the whole franchise is.
I haven't played anything FF for a while but this MMO has brought me back and reminded me how great FF4, FF5, FF6 were etc. Probably going to try my hand at beating FF3 before they fix this whole mess so I can check out FF Dimensions. Then again, its so much easier to skulk and find other miserable people to share in the misery rather than do something more constructive.
I am constantly listening to people bitch about launch-day/week issues with servers, and it seems kinda insane to me.
Every MMO has this problem. It has nothing to do with not buying enough servers; you literally cannot buy enough servers to catch up with launch-day demand. MMORPGs see as much as five times their usual traffic in the first days of launch; they can either buy 50 servers for 250 severs' worth of population and deal with a world of bitching, or they can buy 250 servers, then watch 200 of them gather dust and cobwebs a week later.
One of these things costs an incredible amount of money up-front and gains nothing. One of them costs much less money and doesn't actually hurt an MMO at all.
It is financially irresponsible to prepare for the day-1 crush, especially in a high-profile game like this. It's not worth it. It doesn't do you any actual good. All the goodwill you buy with your zillions of dollars in servers evaporates in a week... while all the ill will you get by buying only your average estimated population worth of servers also evaporates in a week.
It doesn't make sense to prepare in this way. It just doesn't.
LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
they been testing the new stuff all last week well not all but some of it and some this week
I've been able to play in spots here and there but between work and friends, I don't get a ton of time to game so with my time being limited, I refuse to spend 3 hours just trying to log in. I'm going to wait until this coming up weekend and see if the miracle fix has actually fixed my ability to come home from work and log in and play.
At this point my first month is free so if it's still not fixed by this weekend, I'll give them til the end of the month and if it's still not fixed well, it was $30 down the toilet. I guess I've spent that amount on dinner and a movie before so time will tell. I guess what's frustrating is that this game is so much fun and very addicting. I don't think most people would care so much if it wasn't such a great game, they just need to fix it so people can log in and play it.
So for now I'm just biding my time. I'll give it another shot this weekend and if it's a fail, I'll try again towards the end of the month. If it's still broke, then I won't be paying a sub and may re-visit at another time. I've got Sims 4 coming out in the beginning of next year and EQ Next looks promising. *shrug* We'll see.
Been a long while since I posted a long post on this site. Forgot you have to double space here for the gaps between paragraphs to actually make a difference.
My bitch isn't that the servers are packed. I fully agree with you that its not reasonable for a company to buy a ton of extra servers that will only be needed for a couple months tops. This game has taken it to an extreme though. An extreme that could have been somewhat avoided by putting a simple few fixes in place that they seem to be refusing to do even now. A proper queue? A proper AFK boot system? All standard for any mmo.
Also, mine is more of a warning for people to wait even past Wed. when the game goes back on sale. Myself and many others on the official forums aren't convinced they are going to fix the issue. A lot of it depends on just how much stress the change to duty finder is reduced and how many new worlds they add.
I'm not warning people to stay away for now so I can play. I just don't want them to go through the same frustration so many already are. I plan on making a "servers seem fine go ahead and buy this slightly flawed but awesome game" post come Thursday or Friday if everything is fixed. Most of what I find wrong with the game itself are "quality of life" issues. Server issues aside the game itself is probably one of the most bug/lag free launches to date.
The people who says they are stopping to play are the minority... WOW was the same or worse but of course people don't remember it now, and because of the same issue to many people... but the amount of people who stayed was a lot more than those who left and in FF XIV is the same, so for everyone who leaves because of a week of difficult access, there are many to occupy their space.
So all these bitching posts are really unecessary...
The amounts of bs i read in this forum is amazing, its not even a month of the game launch, was the game so good you guys need to bitch and moan just because you didnt like it or couldnt login when you wanted to?
Well im sorry guys but the vast majority got in and played and the update probability almost everyone will have no problem now lets see.
And, I dont play it, just hate guys bitching all the time about the same thing all over again...