Final Fantasy XIV: Error Early Access / Beta 5

After beta 4, beta 5 turned out to be a nice huge fiasco as well, with no less than 4 downtimes and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people not being able to login to their servers.

What's even funnier is that SE appears to have no clue how to fix the problem based on how they're running and trying things randomly... I think the main differences between how FFXIV: EEA on Saturday and Sunday is that on Saturday, everyone could login but not do any instances, while on Sunday, only a select few could login, but everyone on could do instances. This leads to the hilarious antics of some people hitting level 40, while others spend 18 hours on the login screen!

Here's the typical FFXIV early access player's experience (courtesy of Vanh!): Hitler's FFXIV Early Access experience

So here's what we do know about FFXIV's early access:
1. The "queue" is useless. 90% of the time there is no queue and it outright rejects you
2. If you do get in the queue, you have a 90% chance of being kicked out anyway after waiting for a few seconds
3. While the NA/EU servers have been popping up and down like a beginner scuba diver, the JP servers have been rock solid
4. The only other thing that was kinda productive is that SE has been rebooting the NA/EU servers once in a while, which *sometimes* lets other people login to the server. They seem to have appeared to have given up doing the reboot thing as of today
5. Yoshi-P seems to be out of ideas and has issued an apology at http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/68427 In his apology, he re-iterates that they have decided to implement login restrictions for the time being due to the extremely heavy load being placed upon the servers. Basically... they have no idea what to do next xD

I took a quick look and popped in on one of the JP servers (Hades to be exact) to see what it was like over there. No problems creating a character, logging in and looking around. In fact, I had to search Limsa for a while after getting out of my initial cutscenes before I started to see people running around. They have maybe 1/20 the number of people on Hyperion's area running around and absolutely no shouts. And no, this was not the middle of the night. It was around 11am Japan time xD In fact, if I saw a server like this during any MMO launch, I'd worry that the game would be a failure from how few people there were during the launch period.

The side effect of all these login problems is that now people are not logging off when they do RL stuff. Instead, they remain AFK in the inn, or even in town. This leads to what I'm now calling the "Sword Art Online" syndrome. Unlike in SAO where players are trapped in the game, in FFXIV: SAO, people willingly stay in game 24x7!

Given the lack of communication all day today, and with launch less than 24 hours away, I'm pretty confident that this problem will go on for at least a few more weeks. Unlike during beta 4, they did not add more servers. Nor have they announced any more "potential fixes" for the login problem. The only thing Yoshi-P has said that there will be "severe login restrictions" and he hasn't said for how long. I'm expecting that to be as long as it takes for people to either give up on the game for the immediate future, or move to JP servers. They announced that server transfers will be coming in September... I wonder if they'll actually let people into the JP servers? That would be interesting. My current impression is that not only did they not expect this sort of response to FFXIV, but also they did not have any contingency plans beyond opening the initial 25 servers. They also appear to not have a way for the duty finder to scale further, hence the "severe login restrictions".

I *did* manage to get some gameplay in so... I managed to make it to GLA32, and as part of that, unlocked Paladin. I also managed to get my chocobo companion! (Level 30+ quest that you can pick up from Camp Tranquil). I'll probably do another post later this week about my impressions about general gameplay and compare it to other MMOs now that I've gotten quite a bit more experience under my belt. This would cover the gameplay and leveling experience, and not the endgame experience (which IMO determines the long-term health of any MMO)

Anyway, here are some pics!

Mulling around waiting for a party

The PGL story is quite amusing. I highly recommend it

Another CS of speeches

Flashy flashy special effects!

Joining Maelstorm (again)! Mainly due to the uniform color and sharp Chocobo barding. Supposedly the armor for each GC has a different emphasis as well, but I mainly don't like the yellow/blue of the other two xD

Yay my chocobo! Lalafells get a large chicken xD

A semi-good looking armor set for GLA. Too bad I only used this for about 45 minutes D:

This was cute. Did a DF TTR where there were two identically dressed mages (ACN & THM) with the same last name behaving like twins

Ramuh! (This was an in-game screenshot, not any concept art or pre-rendered or anything)

I think our lunch salad is talking :o

Just for fun, I've also made a few other characters... probably going to level them from 1-15 just to see the main stories of the other two cities. This is my ARC Miqo'te

Short-haired version of Ascy on Hades. Interestingly, even a new character has that "tattoo" in the upper back. I thought it was only for characters who were created during the 1.0 period. I guess it's all 1.0 accounts?

Ya! Gladiators vs. everyone else! (The GLA story is kinda cute, but is a classic FF-type story. Not as funny as the PGL or THM stories)

Victory poses!

Smashing rocks, just like in prison. Is Yoshi-P trying to tell us something?

Zurar's dream lifestyle!

Ick... that's bloated!

That's it for now! Side note, if you want to play on a JP server (since those are literally up 24x7, no problems logging in and stuff), I'm on Hades!

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