(09-04-2013, 07:12 PM)The_Wanderer Wrote:(09-04-2013, 05:29 PM)Kaln Wrote:(09-04-2013, 10:00 AM)erosskye Wrote: Well now it's truly an official fail launch. I was with them for a while but not adding an afk kick an seeing people get errors that kick them from the game and their characters remain in game indefinitely making it impossible for them to log back in really seals the deal on this one.
-sigh- It's comments like these that upset me.Â
It's not a fail launch. It's an unpredictably -amazing- launch, as far as SE is concerned.Â
These problems are coming up now, because none of the betas were an accurate picture of the load they'd have. We didn't have log in issues in P2/P3. Well. Not issues related to server load, atleast.
Open beta (P4) had some, but they were handled. EA had some, but they were handled.
The game launched -ONE- week ago, and they have more than double, probably more than triple the people trying to log in now than they did in the betas and EA. EA had -no- sign that this was coming, and they're scrambling around trying to get their shit together. They're doing the best they can, given the circumstances...Â
A game should never be considered a failed launch, untill atleast a month in. Deciding it within a week? You're not even giving it the chance it deserves.
I would disagree, betas will never show the true numbers, as not everyone likes beta testing. They could easily get an idea of the pre-orders, which would represent the EA people. And from glancing through the internet you could tell the hype for FFXIV:ARR was pretty good. That should have gave them a better idea what was going to come. Heck, they struggled in EA. Pre-orders, regardless of what game, are usually only a small proportion of those who will actually buy the game.
Sure, they're doing the best they can in the current circumstances, but that's no excuse - they should have been a lot better prepared. Bugs I can deal with, but locking people out of the game and not having a proper queue system to log in, especially considered they've launched more than one MMO? That's disappointing imho, considering they were re-releasing this as an "apology" for what 1.0 was.
I'm not saying they should have had 100 servers at launch... but where were their contingency plans?
They've said a few times now that they weren't given the numbers for copies sold from other retailers, and there's no way they could have predicted this huge influx before the start of early access. Browsing around on the internet for hype is also not a good indicator of potential customers.
Fact is they could only account for digital downloads from their own store, digital downloads which cost £5 more than their physical counterparts. Add to that, even if they had access to the preorder numbers from other retailers, such as Amazon, I wonder how many people, like me, preordered a couple of days before early access, waiting to check out the open beta first.
What's happening right now is their contingency plan. I mean how were they supposed to prepare for certain specific failures, when these failures only appeared when the game went live?
If they were able to predict that these problems would arise, they would have fixed them before they became problems, you know? I mean you can be sure that there's supposed to be a working login queue and that you're not supposed to be kicked by error 90k, and if these errors didn't exist, there would be no need to AFK either.
So what do you do? You identify the problems, and fix them, which is exactly what they're doing now and if you read through their announcements, you'll see it wasn't as simple as not enough servers.
SE screwed up, but they want to fix this as much as we want them to fix it and from my experience, being able to log in twice during peak hours first time, as opposed to waiting 30 minutes spamming numpad 0, it seems we're finally getting our solutions.