FFXIV Random Speculation/Question thread III: Where's my beta invite?

[Maguspk]

That's dumb, so the 1 day, 5 hour ETA is not going to change. Awesome. Guess I'll be playing Thursday then, how retarded.

[plue]

That's dumb, so the 18 hour ETA is not going to change. Awesome. Guess I'll be playing Thursday then, how retarded.

I'd take Thurs over Sep 22?

[rithridan]

I had to go find a new driver for my video/display card. Apparently the most up to date ATI Driver (10.6) was having issues and was crashing when I tried to start the Beta or the Benchmark, but after installing 10.4 both are working fine.

I recently reinstalled my Windows 7 box and also had the same issues with the more recent ATI Catalyst drivers. Not just with the FFXIV Benchmark but also in QuakeLive and WoW did I either get full on crashes or major artifacts. I'm not sure which ATI Catalyst driver I'm using right now (at work, so can't check) but I know I downloaded every driver from 10.1 and onwards so it was one of those.

[LD]

I'd take Thurs over Sep 22?

Don't try to excuse poor design with a 'it's better than nothing' argument. We're supposed to be testing this game, not waiting to DL it. The fact some people could be pushed into the next phase because of it is a loss for the players AND SE.

[Seshat]

I spent a good 10 hours downloading the torrent, it finished, moved the file the the FFXIV beta folder in my documents, popped open the official downloader and its telling me I have to re-download, basically. What am I doing wrong? I don't want to wait 75 hours on top of the previous 14 total trying to get this to work 3 different ways.

[bluefan]

Well, in the last 3hours, I've connected to 15 more seeders...yet my speeds still hovering around 30kB/s. At this rate, I'll be done sometime during the 2hour break

[Hyan]

I think there's a new update today?

[Seshat]

Yeah.. Looks like they JUST updated it so now all the new people who just spent hours downloading, redownload your torrents etc. -_-; So much for playing in 3 hours.

[Gokulo]

Not like servers will be stable at first, and there's also queues. Probably the first couple of hours will be horrible.

[bluefan]

Hahaha, oh man. Good thing I decided to stay up a bit later

Going to be lots of angry new testers in a few hours when they wake up XD

*Edit
The file people want is H2010.07.12.2000. Not H2010.07.09.2000.

[Hyan]

Aye, some guy on the EU forums was bitching about no one being able to help him when it was 6am GMT.

[Loaf]

H2010.07.12.2000 took me like 10 seconds to download and a minute to install. I think they're passed making the testers/people preparing for testing download an entirely new set of data each time.

edit: It's good to see they made some changes, though. Hopefully some of the major complaints have been fixed. If they can make a difference that quick than maybe we can hope for a decent launch.

[GameDragon]

Does the client not work for ANYONE? Everyone is complaining about having to redownload the entire thing on torrent. I just ran the client and updated in about 3 minutes.

- If the client is crashing, open the config and change the Shadow detail. Highest gives problems.
- If you're getting poor download speeds, then open up some ports.

[Loaar]

Don't try to excuse poor design with a 'it's better than nothing' argument. We're supposed to be testing this game, not waiting to DL it. The fact some people could be pushed into the next phase because of it is a loss for the players AND SE.

It makes ZERO difference to the test if it takes people 2-5 days to download the patch. Having an extra 20,000 people online for todays test isn't going to change anything in the grand scheme of the testing schedule.

All the new people whining about not being able to get into todays test when they got access a few hours ago need to go die in a fire and stop clogging up the test forums with whining.

[Hyan]

Does the client not work for ANYONE? Everyone is complaining about having to redownload the entire thing on torrent. I just ran the client and updated in about 3 minutes.

Considering like 60k testers were added, it's not that many people really. It just feels like it because "everyone" is complaining on the forums.

Of course it's unfortunate and hopefully SE is still working on it, but we are still talking about marginal numbers here.

All the new people whining about not being able to get into todays test when they got access a few hours ago need to go die in a fire and stop clogging up the test forums with whining.

It's better than I thought actually, although it's still in the morning so...

Most people are polite about it, but sure there are some of "those" cases... I guess it's much worse on the NA site lol.

[LD]

Tests are every 2-3 days, so it makes a difference if a DL takes 2-5 days. Of course, I'm sure you've already made up your mind, but what's the point of inviting beta testers if a lot of them can't test it? Wouldn't a massively multi-player online game in its testing phases benefit from having a massive amount of multiple players accessing their online data effectively in order to play their game? If you're saying we only need so many, that's a slippery slope, you may as well say it should have never included non-SE employees and they could have just bought a set of comp archetypes.

Anyway, the fact remains that this is a major problem what I felt was a weak point of FFXIV's update system; Torrents reduce their server load, but they're unreliable without a large number of people. Granted, WoW does the same, but their system has a slightly better master seed.

[Hyan]

Isn't there only a 4h downtime between tues and thursday test this week? And if it wasn't for the network maintenance (!), it'd be the same case for sat test I guess. We're getting very close to 24/7 server upkeep.

[LD]

It's interesting that you bring that up.

On the one hand, the longer tester periods and shorter duration between tests makes a long DL time even worse since you could lose all the extra time you would have had. It really depends on the DL and how long they'll use this schedule.

On the other hand, if they go to full time quickly, it won't be different from any other MMO.

At any rate, the DL client is still a system that needs streamlining; It's the gateway to the game, you can't do anything without it. We can't just gloss over its problems and then come retail we're dealing with the same ridiculous wait times for a 500mb-2gb dl.

[MaachaQ]

It makes ZERO difference to the test if it takes people 2-5 days to download the patch. Having an extra 20,000 people online for todays test isn't going to change anything in the grand scheme of the testing schedule.

All the new people whining about not being able to get into todays test when they got access a few hours ago need to go die in a fire and stop clogging up the test forums with whining.

My download finished about an hour ago, and I was one of the new testers added today. I used the official downloader though, don't have a bittorrent client on this new laptop and download was going well enough I didn't bother to install one ^^;

Excited to join the fun and make sure the game will be what I hope it will be before I buy it.

[brand]

It's interesting that you bring that up.

On the one hand, the longer tester periods and shorter duration between tests makes a long DL time even worse since you could lose all the extra time you would have had. It really depends on the DL and how long they'll use this schedule.

On the other hand, if they go to full time quickly, it won't be different from any other MMO.

At any rate, the DL client is still a system that needs streamlining; It's the gateway to the game, you can't do anything without it. We can't just gloss over its problems and then come retail we're dealing with the same ridiculous wait times for a 500mb-2gb dl.

To be fair, I don't think they are planning to have the client as a commercial download. Considering that the installer only installs the update program and a few assets, the majority of the 3.35gb is the client itself and not the updates, which to this point, I don't recall going over 300mb, the majority being small <20mb fixes.

There may be nothing to fix from a retail standpoint.