FFXIV Random Complaint Thread: Look forward to it

[BlaizeAsura]

Asura will be terrible.

[Dathus]

Spoiler: show

http://puu.sh/4cURO.png

Oh fucking good. This bullshit again.

[Seravi Edalborez]

It's probably a bad sign that the launcher + Lodestone are being really slow right now.

Edit: How is there a fucking 100-man queue at 3 AM on NA Legacy server.

[Kuishen]

can't even get past the launcher now. lol

[Dathus]

Edit: Nvm, apparently launcher is dumb.

[amentis]

I feel like a battered wife. I just keep coming back, hoping I won't get hurt again.

[Plow]

Brand new error on ps3. Launcher doesn't load:

The server is not responding.
For assistance with this issue, please visit the SQUARE ENIX Support Center.
http://sqex.to/x4w
[11070][-somelongnumber]

[lexicum]

Never had any login issues on Ramuh until today. World currently full....

[Akiyama]

Servers were getting raped, queues 5 mins after they'd been up. That's probably why the launcher was slow. I just restarted it a couple times and it was fine.

[djzombie]

day 2 of the afk chronicles, got booted overnight, restarted client, downloaded new patch, when i logged in this morning had a queue of 5. logged right in after that.

/afk all day so i can play for a couple hours after work instead of trying to log in for a couple hours after work.

[Intense]

I AFKd over night also, got the boot and updated, but now I can't get back on.

Edit: queued and now in :D

[Artemicon]

Sad times unable to login early morning NA time. Next week can't come soon enough.

[ClassicRed]

*bangs head on desk*

Random Rant/Complaint!

3 days of attempting to login and getting the lil moogle screen trying to login then wham WORLD IS FULL TRY WHEN ITS NOT (how the f am I spose to know when its not full???) And how is a NA server full at 4 5 and 6 AM!?!?! Shouldnt you people be in bed or getting ready for work like I was suppose to be :3!?

Sooo glad I pre-ordered. Soooo glad I wanted to play this with friends to enjoy old memories and create new ones.....>.o

[LD]

Probably said already, but I'm betting a lot of these server problems have to do with the game being dirt cheap for the past couple years and more people picking it up because of that. Of course without real statistics, this is just a guess. Still betting that's what happened. I bet SE isn't getting much out of Box sales, but it should be enough to get the ball rolling on the next wave of content.

As a Legacy Ubermench, I kinda want extra tree trial time for my pain & suffering.

[Necronus]

I still don't understand why people buy MMOs (and other online games like D3/SimCity) day 1. This login stuff is pretty much guaranteed every single time. Always wait until the coast is clear.

[Lucavi]

^ I don't know why you're white knighting in the random complaint thread.

Excuse an issue with game Y because game X and W had a similar problem? Yes, never never progress. Lets never aim higher than the last guy.

[Meresgi]

Saw this on reddit, putting some light on the whole server issues:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...ed_guide_from/

Spoiler: show

I wrote this comment in reply to a post asking 'They refuse to add new NA servers, why? Can anyone explain this?'. I felt as though I could explain this, at least in part, and so I did. And here it is.
I only had about ten minutes to spare to write this up before I went back to scaling our own systems, so I'd love to hear some other people who work in the industry chime in with their experiences, examples, and opinions. Maybe we can get rid of this 'MOAR SURVURS DUH' attitude that some people seem to have.
Edit: Oh, and this post is intentionally dumbed-down, not because I doubt my fellow redditors but because I had to rush through writing it. Obviously the issues are significantly more complex than the examples I lay out here.
As someone who works in infrastructure/servers/networking/IT/etc. for a company that does large-scale multiplayer games, I might actually be able to.
First, not everything scales linearly. Within a given 'world', in the servers that handle people online, you may have one 'server' that can handle 5000 people online at once, but adding a second server may not get you to 10000; two servers together may only be able to handle 9000 people; three servers might only get 12000, four might allow for 14000, and five might support 16000.
This can be due to the overhead of managing multiple characters and multiple interactions. If you have two people in one zone, and you're updating their positions every 1 second, you have to send 2 updates every second per person (updating each person with their official location and everyone else's location), so 4 updates total. If you have 4 people (twice the number of people) you have to send 16 updates per second. If you have 8 people, you're sending 64 updates per second (each 8 person getting 8 updates). This is a really simplified example, but it shows how 2+2 can be a lot more than 4.
So if you have a case like that, you have the option of spending those 'five servers' on one world to handle 16,000 people, or five worlds to handle 25,000 people. This is why the solution to capacity problems in MMOs is usually to open new worlds, and not just to grow existing ones.
Obviously these systems are more complex. A single 'world' is made up of dozens of components (character servers, combat servers, chat servers, instance servers, dispatch servers, login servers, etc.), and each one of these systems could have the same issues, and completely different load profiles and scaling issues. Because 'instance servers' appear to be shared across all worlds, they have to handle the capacity of every single dungeon, instanced fight, etc. for every single NA/EU world concurrently, which means that they scale completely differently than the rest of the worlds.
Another problem those servers had was that because no one could create an instance, a lot of people got backed up at the same points; before Sastasha, before Ifrit, before your level 20 class quest, etc., so now instead of having players spreading out across the level curve, you have huge clusters of people catching up to each other like something out of Amazing Race.
Then they bring the instance servers back up, and everyone rushes to do their instances. All the Ifrit fights, all the lv5 quests, all the Haukke Manor runs. Now suddenly instead of having instances spread out because levels are spread out, you have a huge proportion of players all trying to get into instances at once, and your load spikes, and now no one can get in. Now it's a completely different problem; instead of being unable to handle the common case of instance requirements, you can't handle the case of a large proportion of people online trying to run an instance, all happening at once.
One of the problems with servers is that if your servers are overloaded, it's easy for your monitoring tools to start failing (because the system won't run them because there's too much else going on), and you can have problems logging in. In those cases, you can have servers which hit their capacity in unexpected ways, suddenly, before you have a chance to spot the problem and figure out what's happening. For example, a memory leak that only happens sometimes can take down a server rapidly, and make it extremely difficult to track down because once the server has died you can't log in to debug it.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of their downtime was trying to work around those issues while also adding a lot of debugging information so they could track down what exactly was happening on the server and find the source of the problem (instead of just trying to mitigate it).
So for that instance issue, it doesn't matter how many servers they add to run instances, if they're still going to have them die off too quickly because there's a software bug they need to fix, or because each server adds less and less capacity because of non-linear scaling.
That's just my two cents though. It could be a dozen other reasons.

Excuse an issue with game Y because game X and W had a similar problem? Yes, never never progress. Lets never aim higher than the last guy.

It's shitty, but its quite obvious by now that SE was not expecting nearly this many players and this is a result of that. They most likely could have handled what they believed to be the initial launch playerbase, but had no where near the expectations of what was going to happen. (Yeah they had pre-order numbers i'm sure and beta numbers, but you can't rely on just that data to forecast)

That said, shit still pisses me off I can't get in game lol. At least from the looks of it, expansions of worlds will take place this weekend/early next week so hopefully that will help fix it. Other then that i'm just logging in before work now.

[Lucavi]

Aye, I already have a system in place to keep me in for most of the day, but still, they'll learn something from this, especially with Yoshi behind the wheel.

[CrstyCptSteveWitherspoon]

^ I don't know why you're white knighting in the random complaint thread.

Excuse an issue with game Y because game X and W had a similar problem? Yes, never never progress. Lets never aim higher than the last guy.

I've seen a lot of this mentality. And it's ridiculous. I made a post on OF for devs to see about how STUPID the main story is pre 35~, the parts where you have to deliver tea to soldiers, other stupid meaningless tasks AFTER you've made a name for yourself killing ifrit. It's stupid, and makes no sense how popular the scions say you are. When you get 40+ and start doing the quests, of course there's still fluff, but it's relevant fluff like go do all these little quests because we need this type of crystal to outfit the airship.

One dude goes, that's a MMO standard. Duno why you'd expect different. I didn't bother to comment but honestly, why is it expected to play a game and have stupid filler fluff? I thought SE was going for gold this time but they still missed the mark.

Despite all of this the main story does get good after titan.

[Necronus]

I've seen a lot of this mentality. And it's ridiculous. I made a post on OF for devs to see about how STUPID the main story is pre 35~, the parts where you have to deliver tea to soldiers, other stupid meaningless tasks AFTER you've made a name for yourself killing ifrit. It's stupid, and makes no sense how popular the scions say you are. When you get 40+ and start doing the quests, of course there's still fluff, but it's relevant fluff like go do all these little quests because we need this type of crystal to outfit the airship.

One dude goes, that's a MMO standard. Duno why you'd expect different. I didn't bother to comment but honestly, why is it expected to play a game and have stupid filler fluff? I thought SE was going for gold this time but they still missed the mark.

Despite all of this the main story does get good after titan.

Apologies if I sounded like I was "white knighting" but while yes, any given company can take the time to not screw up, but it seems that the industry as a whole has not yet figured out how to properly launch an online game (shy of getting an excessive number of servers they'll just have to shut down and merge in a month or so). I'm not trying to start some mass boycott or anything, I'm just surprised that people haven't been burned to the point where they just can't wait a few days ... that's all. Even the best launches seem to have issues for about 1 day ... with the bad ones surpassing 2 weeks of major issues.

Heck to be honest its not even entirely about the waiting a few days to buy the game even, the thing I'd white knight is telling people to just sit back and wait. If I did buy FFXIV day one instead of waiting til this Sunday, I probably would have installed ... tried server for 10 or so minutes, read a forum to realize it was belly up, then thinks "welp, day 1 fuck up" and just went and did something else instead of the hordes of gamers spamming "login" on a clearly broken infastructure. As someone who works on systems that need shit loads of maintenance for uptime and operation of large multi-server and high data load systems, nothing is more annoying than a user trying to use the system while we're fixing something. Sometimes you don't want to put a system into maintenance mode and just want the system up "as is" with no one besides IT touching the system.

Anyway ... apologies to anyone who thought a response to the most major complaint didn't belong in a random complaint thread. (Seriously, in case that looks like sarcasm)