Why the congestion issues matter - FFXIV rant
I talked some time ago about the congestion problems that plagued the early access opening to Final Fantasy XIV, and with good cause. Of course, I come back today, and it is fine. I can easily skip to the rest of the story, behind those who managed to get through the "walls" that were presented, but there nonetheless. This problem, however, displays an alarming lack of preparation for how many people were going to preorder just to get in. This, in turn, brings me to an important question concerning how they should have been prepared in the first place.
Square Enix would have had access to all of the preorder numbers, regardless of who they were selling it through. The codes had to be entered for the early access before the 16th of June in order for a person to gain access to the Stormblood content early. This, in turn, would mean that they would have a log in their databanks of every single entrant to the early access and should have had time to adequately prepare for the server load. Then they ran into the issue that too many people entering the instanced servers were causing the main servers to crash and that just started things off even worse, as people were unable to progress and were getting impatient. I held my patience in for the two days that this went on, but by the end of it, even I was getting extremely impatient.
The main reason that this was happening to my patience levels was how Square Enix chose to respond. Instead of implementing a queue, like there already is in place for server congestion, they instead opted to bottleneck it with no way for a person to enter except out of random chance. Not having a way to see if I'm going to be getting into the important mission is not okay. It's a means by which I feel that I'm getting ripped off, or worse, flat out ignored/denied by the game company that I gave money to and still give money to in order to play their game.
Idiotic misinterpretations from me aside, I was getting pretty irritated with the waiting process and it felt for a little while, despite it not being the case, that I was just going to have to wait until the 20th of June like everyone else, which was going to cut my content short. I was unhappy, to say the least, and I felt that the preorder was meaningless. It got fixed, so that doesn't matter as much now, but I'm not about to go and apologize for my anger rant. I made it and I'm sticking to it because I think that it was one of the worst ways that this situation could have been handled.
A queue that had a visible wait timer or something like that would have been infinitely better and not that much more difficult to install. Take the servers down for an hour or so to implement it and make sure that it's working before putting the servers back up and go back to work on the game bits and bug fixes that they're already adding. It might just be that simple...then again, maybe it isn't and I'm coming off as an asshole again. Either way, the point still stands that this was not the ideal way for Square Enix to handle a large problem that persisted for 48 hours.
Here's to hoping that Square Enix doesn't do other really bad things, like how they need to rebalance the Red Mages or bring the White Mages back up to speed and what not. Their balance changes have, overall, been good...and the content being delivered is some of the best yet., However, that doesn't really change the fact that I feel "meh" about how they handled that situation. It makes me concerned that they'll take that same "lazy" approach to most everything that they're doing again, which was a problem I had taken with them before. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and let this stand as a testimony of the fact that I'm continuing to pay attention now more than ever.
Square Enix would have had access to all of the preorder numbers, regardless of who they were selling it through. The codes had to be entered for the early access before the 16th of June in order for a person to gain access to the Stormblood content early. This, in turn, would mean that they would have a log in their databanks of every single entrant to the early access and should have had time to adequately prepare for the server load. Then they ran into the issue that too many people entering the instanced servers were causing the main servers to crash and that just started things off even worse, as people were unable to progress and were getting impatient. I held my patience in for the two days that this went on, but by the end of it, even I was getting extremely impatient.
The main reason that this was happening to my patience levels was how Square Enix chose to respond. Instead of implementing a queue, like there already is in place for server congestion, they instead opted to bottleneck it with no way for a person to enter except out of random chance. Not having a way to see if I'm going to be getting into the important mission is not okay. It's a means by which I feel that I'm getting ripped off, or worse, flat out ignored/denied by the game company that I gave money to and still give money to in order to play their game.
Idiotic misinterpretations from me aside, I was getting pretty irritated with the waiting process and it felt for a little while, despite it not being the case, that I was just going to have to wait until the 20th of June like everyone else, which was going to cut my content short. I was unhappy, to say the least, and I felt that the preorder was meaningless. It got fixed, so that doesn't matter as much now, but I'm not about to go and apologize for my anger rant. I made it and I'm sticking to it because I think that it was one of the worst ways that this situation could have been handled.
A queue that had a visible wait timer or something like that would have been infinitely better and not that much more difficult to install. Take the servers down for an hour or so to implement it and make sure that it's working before putting the servers back up and go back to work on the game bits and bug fixes that they're already adding. It might just be that simple...then again, maybe it isn't and I'm coming off as an asshole again. Either way, the point still stands that this was not the ideal way for Square Enix to handle a large problem that persisted for 48 hours.
Here's to hoping that Square Enix doesn't do other really bad things, like how they need to rebalance the Red Mages or bring the White Mages back up to speed and what not. Their balance changes have, overall, been good...and the content being delivered is some of the best yet., However, that doesn't really change the fact that I feel "meh" about how they handled that situation. It makes me concerned that they'll take that same "lazy" approach to most everything that they're doing again, which was a problem I had taken with them before. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and let this stand as a testimony of the fact that I'm continuing to pay attention now more than ever.
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