Square Enix planned 'conservative' relaunch for Final Fantasy 14, due to original game's failure
"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates for this one were decidedly conservative," producer Naoki Yoshida said.
Once again, Square Enix is apologizing for Final Fantasy 14. A Realm Reborn is the second launch of Square Enix's Final Fantasy MMO, and the launch has been plagued with server issues. Why was the company so inadequately prepared for launch? Their answer: they didn't expect so many people to forgive them for Final Fantasy 14 right away.
"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates for this one were decidedly conservative," producer Naoki Yoshida said. "We believed that there would be a more gradual rise in users over the opening weeks and months."
Instead, the servers were overwhelmed by players that wanted to be there on day one. According to Yoshida's calculations, the total number of concurrent connections would be over 300,000. However, each world server was designed to support a maximum of 5,000 concurrent connections. "When more than 5,000 characters log into a World at once, there is a higher risk of server crashes and login errors. The restoration of crashed servers is usually followed by a rush of players attempting to log back in, which, in turn, puts a strain on our lobby server, and can ultimately have an adverse affect on all of the Worlds," Yoshida explained on the game's forums.
So once again, Square Enix must apologize over Final Fantasy 14. However, this time it's because the game is too popular. Given the dire situation Square Enix found after the first release of the game, perhaps this is a much better problem to have.
-
Shacknews
replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Square Enix planned 'conservative' relaunch for Final Fantasy 14, due to original game's failure.
"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates for this one were decidedly conservative," producer Naoki Yoshida said.-
Knowing nothing about the franchise, it's an odd game. But holy shit, is it popular. The servers are packed. Most players are helpful as well.
I have no idea what the game as in store, I'm only level 10. I think I prefer the desert city to the forest one, but my cat dude can't take the ballon to the desert city until he hits level 15 (I'm an archer at the moment). Also, the other class I want to multi class in, the Gladiator, is only available in the desert city. *sigh*
-
Yeah, you play your starter to 10, then you can try out the other classes in your city and see if you like them better. Getting *any* of them to the point in the story where you move to other cities is fine.
So, don't feel too locked-in and keep in mind that there's a lot of cross-class abilities that are useful to each class, often coming from several others. -
How are you over the age of 10 and know NOTHING about final fantasy? There like 50+ games and 20 years worth of time in that franchise!
-
Maybe he never owned an NES. Or SNES. Or PS1. Or PS2. Or PS3.
-
That's pretty much my reason.
-
My mind is just blown that you're a member on shacknews then. Did you start with the XBox, or have you always been a strictly PC gamer?
-
I had a Genesis, a N64, and a Gamecube. PC mainly throughout, though.
-
-
-
-
Even if he played every single player FF game it wouldn't tell him anything about the MMO, except maybe the story.
-
Yeah but he said he knows nothing about ff. I wouldn't have batted an eye if he said I know nothing about ff-mmos.
-
-
Haven't owned those consoles and I do not like Japanese games, at all.
-
-
-
How is it that they have a registration system requiring the entry of a key, either from your physical purchase or your electronically delivered purchase, before you can activate your account and log in to the server? How could they possibly not know how many people were ready to log in?
I mean, even if you ignore physical purchases, you can get an *idea* of how many people will be playing based on digital sales, which should be giving you immediate feedback. But that's all ignoring the fact that they must know precisely the number of keys that were redeemed. How was it a surprise at all? I'm honestly baffled.-
It's a surprise in the sense that in gearing up to do this, they didn't expect such an immediate and positive response on release.
Sure, someone knew a week or two ago "Holy shit, we've sold so many new keys", but by then it was too late to fix pre-launch.-
I don't buy it. There must have been indications via the beta that things were going sideways, and in fact their (admittedly poorly timed) open beta showed that they were not prepared for the influx of users.
I don't really care, I'll play the game once the servers stabilize and we'll see if it manages to hold my attention, but I'm tired of these huge gaming companies saying "Oh gee, we couldn't possibly foresee that there would be so many people who wanted to play our game" when it feels an awful lot more like "Let's not spend any money on launch servers, people can suffer through the pain of launch month, and they'll all forget about it in a few months and we'll have saved some pennies!"-
To be fair, they're right. Spending a ton of money on servers that will only alleviate the added load for the first month or so doesn't really make sense.
-
There were indicators, and they reacted to it. They issued their high congestion policy right after the open beta so they knew there were going to be issues. But increasing capacity isn't just a simple flip of a switch.
The login restrictions were put in place so that they could allow as many people as they could play the game with little issue and it actually worked. If you got in there was no latency to speak of and the majority of the duty finder issues were taken care of within the second day of early access. They just dealt with the overcapacity issues a bit different than past MMOs. Rather than just jamming as many people as they could until the severs were bursting at the seams where a bunch of people were getting shitty performance in-game or the servers crashing every few hours they went the route of only running at the capacity they knew they could deliver at the time.
-
-
-
-
Yesterday's maintenance fixed the server issues, and I gotta admit, this is a damn good classic MMO.
-
[deleted]
-
-
