What's the point? A rant about the early access idiotics pulled by Square Enix
Stormblood! The new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV has just launched and now it's live for early access members, with people who didn't bother paying the extra $20 for the game able to actually play the game on the 20th of June, 2017 when the game actually launches. However, small programming bugs seem to be the least of our issues today...
After sorting through an issue with my gaming keyboard interfacing awkwardly with FFXIV and not allowing me to move correctly, I found yet another dilemma, one that is lasting for a very, VERY long time and continues to last despite being patient and waiting for it to come around. The main storyline quest instance not but maybe an hour into the game is deliberately bottlenecked to ensure server stability. This doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that maybe 1% of the population on any server has a small chance of getting into the instance at all.
I have tried for a long time now to get into the instance, from spamming the "enter" button, to waiting for a bit and trying again, to relogging and coming on a few hours later, and nothing has gone wrong. Worse yet, my FC just defends SE and shoots down "whiners" who complain about how bad this is. This isn't the worst I've seen, but this is definitely infuriating nonetheless. I paid extra for the early access and now I'm feeling like I just got ripped off.
If they get this fixed by later today, or maybe tomorrow, then this may still be worth it. However, considering that most no one who paid for early access is moving ahead, there seems to be little point to the early access. I want to point out, especially to those who consider early access a "beta test", this is not a game that is under active development. This is a game that is being made by a large scale developer and they would have informed us if this early access was to help playtest and beta test the game. Every indication was that it was early access to FINISHED CONTENT! And less than 90% of the playerbase can't even access to the new content thanks to bottlenecking on the content just to prevent the "server crashes". There are multiple problems presented here.
The first is the server load problem. Square Enix should have set up significantly more safeguards if they were that worried about the servers congesting. Considering the amount of congestion that we've experienced that literally bottlenecking a REQUIRED INSTANCE is necessary to keep the game servers from crashing, then Square Enix did not prepare themselves adequately. They have installed such a tight bottleneck, which is to say, they are letting in so few people on random chance, and it is so tight that I feel that there's nothing anyone can do.
For the record, Square Enix has stated "they are fixing this issue". They should have already fixed this issue, then, if they really were working on it as hard as they promise that they are. They have enough money, judging from all of the preorders for it, and they should be prioritizing the server load, then. What is happening right now is essentially inexcuseable. Sure, there are "other pieces of content" to play, like FATE's or dungeons in earlier content, or things like that. However, for someone like me, this is still worthy of being annoyed to infuriated over. It's simply not right.
You know what a really easy fix would be until they could get themselves out of this rut? Install a queue time onto single player instancing. They already have it for the duty finder, which is how everyone accesses raids and dungeons...why don't they simply do the same damn thing for single-player instances? Because they're uncreative? Lazy? Just refuse to acknowledge their player base? The worst part about this is, because there are already so many complaints, Square Enix is not likely to listen to mine. I have no pull, I'm not a main streamer for the game. I'm not so rich I could just push money to them and have them listen to my suggestions. I'm just an ordinary "dick" who wants to play a game that I paid the extra $20 for and now I can't because I'm locked at a bottlenecked main story quest instance.
If Square Enix doesn't want to end up in serious, serious trouble and lose tons of subscribers, they'd better make this "early access" work. As it is, two days may well be lost on the FOUR DAY early access. That's halving our time. I don't want to make it more unfair for other players and have them push it back, that's a selfish desire and I'm not privy to that. I do want to see some form of compensation for this. If Square Enix doesn't fix this before the big launch, I expect to be refunded or, in some other way, recompensated for this. There's no excuse for this. You're locking people out of content for the sake of "server stability" and haven't prioritized it hard enough to have a good fix for it, Square Enix.
That's it for the rant, you get the idea, I'm done now. It's "whatever", people are white knighting to defend Square Enix, people are showing them the cold hard facts and people still white knight them, so there's not a point to continuing at the moment. I'm just some random nerd getting super frustrated at not being able to ever progress.
PS: On further invesitgation, the $60 had nothing to do with the early access. Anyone who pre-ordered the game got early access. So fine, whatever. I still feel a bit jipped for spending money early to get early access and not actually being able to play the damn game.
After sorting through an issue with my gaming keyboard interfacing awkwardly with FFXIV and not allowing me to move correctly, I found yet another dilemma, one that is lasting for a very, VERY long time and continues to last despite being patient and waiting for it to come around. The main storyline quest instance not but maybe an hour into the game is deliberately bottlenecked to ensure server stability. This doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that maybe 1% of the population on any server has a small chance of getting into the instance at all.
I have tried for a long time now to get into the instance, from spamming the "enter" button, to waiting for a bit and trying again, to relogging and coming on a few hours later, and nothing has gone wrong. Worse yet, my FC just defends SE and shoots down "whiners" who complain about how bad this is. This isn't the worst I've seen, but this is definitely infuriating nonetheless. I paid extra for the early access and now I'm feeling like I just got ripped off.
If they get this fixed by later today, or maybe tomorrow, then this may still be worth it. However, considering that most no one who paid for early access is moving ahead, there seems to be little point to the early access. I want to point out, especially to those who consider early access a "beta test", this is not a game that is under active development. This is a game that is being made by a large scale developer and they would have informed us if this early access was to help playtest and beta test the game. Every indication was that it was early access to FINISHED CONTENT! And less than 90% of the playerbase can't even access to the new content thanks to bottlenecking on the content just to prevent the "server crashes". There are multiple problems presented here.
The first is the server load problem. Square Enix should have set up significantly more safeguards if they were that worried about the servers congesting. Considering the amount of congestion that we've experienced that literally bottlenecking a REQUIRED INSTANCE is necessary to keep the game servers from crashing, then Square Enix did not prepare themselves adequately. They have installed such a tight bottleneck, which is to say, they are letting in so few people on random chance, and it is so tight that I feel that there's nothing anyone can do.
For the record, Square Enix has stated "they are fixing this issue". They should have already fixed this issue, then, if they really were working on it as hard as they promise that they are. They have enough money, judging from all of the preorders for it, and they should be prioritizing the server load, then. What is happening right now is essentially inexcuseable. Sure, there are "other pieces of content" to play, like FATE's or dungeons in earlier content, or things like that. However, for someone like me, this is still worthy of being annoyed to infuriated over. It's simply not right.
You know what a really easy fix would be until they could get themselves out of this rut? Install a queue time onto single player instancing. They already have it for the duty finder, which is how everyone accesses raids and dungeons...why don't they simply do the same damn thing for single-player instances? Because they're uncreative? Lazy? Just refuse to acknowledge their player base? The worst part about this is, because there are already so many complaints, Square Enix is not likely to listen to mine. I have no pull, I'm not a main streamer for the game. I'm not so rich I could just push money to them and have them listen to my suggestions. I'm just an ordinary "dick" who wants to play a game that I paid the extra $20 for and now I can't because I'm locked at a bottlenecked main story quest instance.
If Square Enix doesn't want to end up in serious, serious trouble and lose tons of subscribers, they'd better make this "early access" work. As it is, two days may well be lost on the FOUR DAY early access. That's halving our time. I don't want to make it more unfair for other players and have them push it back, that's a selfish desire and I'm not privy to that. I do want to see some form of compensation for this. If Square Enix doesn't fix this before the big launch, I expect to be refunded or, in some other way, recompensated for this. There's no excuse for this. You're locking people out of content for the sake of "server stability" and haven't prioritized it hard enough to have a good fix for it, Square Enix.
That's it for the rant, you get the idea, I'm done now. It's "whatever", people are white knighting to defend Square Enix, people are showing them the cold hard facts and people still white knight them, so there's not a point to continuing at the moment. I'm just some random nerd getting super frustrated at not being able to ever progress.
PS: On further invesitgation, the $60 had nothing to do with the early access. Anyone who pre-ordered the game got early access. So fine, whatever. I still feel a bit jipped for spending money early to get early access and not actually being able to play the damn game.
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