Impressive launch, so far...Follow

Depends really - They already branched off the storyline path so it already spread people out. EA doesn't spread people out too much if the content supports it, but considering HW areas are mostly FATES and the Main story quests/side quests..so while it does ease congestion, once you're done with an area...you pretty much have no reason to go back to them unless you like the sights. So if that's what you mean by spreading the population, you're correct, otherwise naturally people would have dispersed as is.

The 3 new jobs are what spread the population as most focused on leveling and not the main story and such, but the new areas are large enough they support a large amount of people. The only issue is the game client struggles severely when too many are trying to be rendered.



Had more issues in Coerthas and North Thanalan than I did Western Highlands and Sea of Clouds.



You must be on a tiny server, reading the forums it's actually been confirmed there's bugs with the DX11 client, certain Dravanian NPCs and Bismarck occasionally ceasing to attack. (Hence the hotfix tonight, no bugs means no hotfixes.) So we'll see what they're fixing tonight - The game still has the age old "too many people in one spot, quest markers and npcs won't load on neither map/minimap nor field of view" issue since 2.0, so there are bugs, nothing is ever bug free in MMOs, you've gotten lucky to not get stuck for a day due to NPCs not loading or none offering you quests due to rendering problems so the game thinks they only have a dialog and no quest options. Not to mention the "special FATE" in dravania people got no credit for because....it was invisible to 90% of the people there (that's a bug), so yeah it is fairly buggy but some bugs have been around since 2.0 lol.

Speaking of which, after playing around a bit it does seem that FXAA option is what caused a bit of problems on my end. So overall it wasn't a terrible launch, there are problems but nothing gamebreaking.

Edited, Jun 22nd 2015 8:56am by Theonehio

Not necessarily, much like the dreaded "lag" issue that is usually hardware related based on a lot of people's description of their "lag issue", DX11 works perfectly fine in every other game and application, but whatever technique SE uses for rendering is just being weird for quite a few people but not everyone but their client isn't that ironclad when you get down to it, so they could be hotfixing ome stuff to help with that. Since I'm pretty sure their main reasoning for branching storylines was to ease area congestion.

As for the data center, I've experienced issues on Mana and Aether, so it's not necessarily congestion. As said it's bugs that existed since 2.0 and I'm pretty sure the 'invisible enemy' glitch that exists even inside of instances isn't due to congestion purely, just from a coding and networking standpoint. While you can experience lag, that's a graphical bug that isn't dependent on latency.

I'm on Sargeras which is among the top 3, if not the most populated servers. Day 1 I didn't have much time to play, but my login queue was well over 1000. Day 2 was about the same. I went afk for about an hour with a 4 hour queue and was disconnected when I came back about 40 mins into the queue. Day 3 I waited about 45 mins before I could get in. Day 4 I waited less than 10 mins. Aside from being disconnected from the queue on Day 1 and 2, I was never disconnected from the game once I was logged in. The only other issues were minor 'instance not found' issues which were overcome simply by attempting multiple times. They weren't causing disconnects.

WoW also operates on completely different server tech which is worth noting. Any player can create a group and list that group in the group finder tool. Whoever is accepted into that group is temporarily(seamlessly I might add) moved to the group leader's server until they leave the group. What difference does that make? If players on high pop servers are creating groups and bringing other players to the server... no imagination needed.

To be fair, there really isn't a comparison to be made here. WoD brought an influx of more than 3 million players into and back to the game pretty much overnight. Blizz compensated everyone with 5 additional days of playtime despite real issues only persisting for 3-4 days. How many weeks of free time did SE give to a player base that's a fraction of that size and how much further beyond that compensation did those problems exist?

Blizzard does a lot of questionable things regarding marketing and development on their games(see selling flying mounts in their store for an expansion that doesn't allow flying ). One thing I can say without question though is that Blizzard's response time, transparency with the community and their customer service spanks Square Enix's. Say what you will about the game, but the technical response and service team lead the pack.


Edited, Jun 22nd 2015 7:25pm by FilthMcNasty

Hey me too... small world.

Warlords of Draenor's launch was a disaster. When I was finally able to get connected at all (that was zero fun), I encountered quests that just plain didn't work (quests that gated off the rest of the game btw... sorta important), NPCs and mobs not spawning when they should, objects on the ground not working properly. It was gross. And the lag was unimaginable.

Now, they fixed it of course, and gave everyone like a week of free time to make up for it. But WoD was seriously one of the worst expansion launches I've ever seen.

I have a memory of SE giving everyone like a week of free time at the launch of ARR too, but I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly. I know they did SOMETHING to accommodate the rocky launch, I was pretty sure it was a week of free time.

..Yep. Everyone goes to Balmung. It's kind of like FFXI's ragnarok back in the heyday. When the server pop was 8k at all times, and SE had to restrict the world pass system there.

This is why I'm glad I play on Famfrit. Our server is so pathetically tiny that we haven't had any issues at all.

Not really a small world. Depending on your faction, the odds are pretty high that you'd be on one of a few servers if you wanted to be among many other players who were interested specifically in PvE or PvP.


The 4k queues weren't steady. If you were actually attempting to log into the client at launch you'd see 4k, then down to 2300, then back up to 3700... but if you were able to wait for about 10 mins, those queues eventually settled into more realistic numbers. I'm not trying to say that Day 1 wasn't a grade a *********** because you'd have been lucky to last that 10 minutes before a crash, but that's pretty much a given with any major release.

I don't ever expect to login on Day 1 of any MMO launch without issues. I would imagine that WoD wasn't your first expansion so I wouldn't expect you to either. I do expect the issues to be dealt with in a reasonable amount of time given the circumstances.


5 days. They added 3 million players, had asshats attacking the authentication servers with DDoS and all of the game breaking issues were sorted in 5 days.


I can link you about 3 pages of forum posts solely from developers and solely regarding flying in Draenor. You say that millions of players begged for flying, but you also have to realize that millions of players begged that it remain out of the expansion. Personally, I was one of them.

I can go back and find posts I've made on these forums about how much fun it was to just happen upon treasures, jumping or rope puzzles and even glider puzzles. Despite the total area of Draenor being rather small, it was magnified several times over by the fact that it was worth exploring almost every inch of it. It's also worth pointing out that the end result of ALL of the feedback, both sides of the argument, has come to about the best compromise one could hope for. One of the few great decisions Blizz has made recently, but a great idea none the less.

Look, there were a ton of other reasons WoW lost a bunch of subs. Their inability/unwillingness to do anything about PvP. The purge of job abilities and the streamlining(read: dumbing down) of classes. Class performance being largely based on RNG vs actual reaction and player skill. Developers literally saying "we're nerfing this class because it requires a lot of attention to play it". The fact that garrisons were pushed in the wrong direction and ended up being a great idea(player housing) gone wrong. Gathering professions becoming pretty much useless.

Oh yeah...

Fun fact: A single level 100 character with an upgraded barracks(for the extra followers) and the mental wherewithal to reroll abilities(or select them from the headhunter if they built the inn) could fund their subscription entirely, every month, by doing nothing other than logging in a few times a day for a few minutes to send their followers on missions. Nothing else.

I am no longer subscribed to World of Warcraft. I cancelled my subscription, not specifically due to any of the reasons I mentioned above... but because I have enough gold that I could purchase WoW tokens (at the current market price) to keep an active account for about 3 1/2 years. Subscriber numbers in WoW these days are about as meaningless as 'registered users' in FFXIV

I disagree. Not because I think that SE was more open with JP players, but simply because the channels for communication between the players and developers weren't there. What was absent that you'd often see in WoW's official forums was a direct response to players about something they were giving feedback on or had concerns about.

It's not something that I feel SE owed us. I just feel like it's pointless to just say you have an open forum for discussion and feedback. Meanwhile over on the WoW official forums you see devs and GMs responding to everything from "this sux, fix plox" posts to in-depth ideas and suggestions on how to address player concerns. It's encouraging to know that even if you don't want to participate in the discussion, your voice is being heard and in most cases it's being taken into account.

Any old school RDMs from FFXI out there? Anyone remember how deafening the silence was when SE inadvertently broke enfeebling? How long did it take before you got a response about that? How long before SE even entertained the idea that they had possibly made a mistake? KeanuRDM.gif

Money talks. If you want money, you learn to understand what it's trying to tell you. If you don't want foreign money, don't localize your products to those markets and expect those customers to be content when you don't want to offer up any further support

Totally agree, I personally feel XIV has had more feedback from the Staff when compared to XI. I remember we used to learn so little about what was coming ahead in XI until they actually release the update notes. Now we usually know a good portion of what's coming e.g. Airships, how long have we known about them??? Housing as well, we knew months before the came out. There seems to be a clear content list that they provide fans. PLUS they actually seem to be listening to feedback.

That's a bit of a slant there Nashred. Of course they're not going to answer every single question that's being posed to them - and a lot of the questions are rather... unreasonable.

Of course a group is going to pick and chose what answered out of a flood of questions they feel they can best answer or have answered for. They also tend to address answers when they actually have finished deliberating on the matter back and forth internally.

Perfect example of a delayed answer that people thought SE was just ignoring: The matter about people returning to parties they had been kicked from in Duty Finder. That got an answer - it was one that had been listed again and again and was not addressed for a while, but when the developers/producers finished deliberating it, we got our answer.

So while they share what they want, they do answer the questions that people ask. Just not in always in a timely manner and not every single asinine questions provided.

A lot of the content and content adjustments we've received have been based off of feedback. And I'd much rather see them answer with action than with empty words. I'm good with their methods so far.

Edited, Jun 26th 2015 2:34pm by Hyrist