Yea most MMO launches never go smoothly and FF14 is no exception.
So on Saturday I decided to try out crafting so I spent most of my morning weaving and cleaning the house while pressing my weaving macros:
It’s a good thing I didn’t decide to do the scenario because apparently due to so many early access people, the duty finder crashed forcing the servers to go down for emergency maintenance multiple times. Apparently if you wanted to do a dungeon party you had to get in line:
Fortunately I spent my day weaving and chopping trees so this didn’t concern me. I had to go out Saturday night so I logged off in an inn and that was that. So apparently they had fixed the duty finder while I was gone and supposedly when I woke up Sunday morning I was supposed to happily play on my server:
Though in my case it was mostly 10102 followed by 1017. Basically what it comes down to is that the servers are full and you can’t get in and there’s no queue. I decided to give up and went to play the School Wars FD for 6 hours but when I finished a route, 6 hours later I’m still getting 1017. Soo I decided know what, I’ma roll on the Japanese server so I made a quick character to test out the latency. And whadya know, it’s totally fine. Why? Because its like 4AM in Japan and pretty much the server’s empty. There were a few people running around which I later found out were also refugees of other NA/EU servers who decided to give up hammering their main servers and start fresh on the JP one like me.
Yea it was pretty annoying to start over and be forced to skip through all the scenario because I’ve seen it a week ago. It was annoying to lose all my crafting progress and lose all my open beta 4 progress but you know it wasn’t too bad.
By late evening EST time, there was quite a good number of people and even though at first a fate may have been empty, given about a minute, people would flock in and we’d have a decent amount fighting the mobs. Sure it wasn’t as populated or dense as the NA server, but it wasn’t too bad at all. Most people speaking in Shout were in English anyway (though I think the Japanese people got really irritated from all the English talk since no one really spoke Japanese in the shout.)
I ended up getting my remade Arcanist to level 14 within a few hours so given a couple days I can probably catch up to my NA character fairly easily. The only down side of a JP server is:
- Lack of population. Even during peak Japan time (around 9:30 PM) it was pretty much dead. Due to this doing certain FATEs will probably be out of the question.
- Lack of population probably means for crafting it’s gonna be really hard getting any materials or selling any and there won’t be much of an economy.
- Possible lag? I’ve yet to experience much of this. It didn’t really feel any different than being on the NA server to be honest.
The positive points of course are:
- Lack of people means you aren’t constantly fighting for quest item spots. I’ve had some grief grabbing quest item spots on the NA server waiting for others to finish theirs. Also it’s annoying when someone else does the quest at the same time, a monster spawns and you can’t tell whose monster belongs to who.
- Probably less lag due to less people and the different time zones with the Japanese players.
- Probably a more tight knit community of the few English speaking refugees (though since I can speak either language it’s not really a concern to me.)
Anyway apparently the full service is still scheduled for Tuesday. YoshiP posted an apology on the forums but what concerns me is the following:
Although we have successfully addressed a number of serious issues in the past several days, we have nevertheless decided to implement login restrictions for the time being due to the extremely heavy load being placed upon the servers. In this way, we can ensure that the maximum number of players can play the game without risking a sever crash. I know no one wants to wait to log in, but I hope you all understand why we believe this precaution is necessary.
So basically that tells me that due to NA/EU servers being ridiculously popular, we have to limit servers so there will always be a waiting line no matter what until people get bored of the game/quit/population thinning. Typically you need at least a month before this happens so it’s basically telling all NA/EU players to suffer for a month until hopefully enough people quit. What the hell ( ´_ゝ｀)?? I realize it’s an mmo launch and I realize there’s bound to be problems, however I am not seeing a viable solution here other than just forcing people to not play. Some people have started just logging in at the buttcrack of dawn and having their characters idle/sit all day so when they are home, they can play. To me that doesn’t sound fun and I already have a high electric bill from all the A/C use this summer. （；^ω^）
Either way, it seems like the JP servers up time is a lot higher and the team in Japan is probably a lot more “on demand” or reachable than the Canadian team. So even if I can get in early in the morning to my NA server, there’s no guarantee that I will be able to play smoothly after work and who knows how bad it will get come official release. While low population, lack of FATE participants and lack of economy is a concern to me, in the end I may just end up rolling on the Japanese server in the long run. As far as I understand, they have no intention to increase login capacity on each server so the best thing to do is to just spread out on the emptier servers to even out the load.
Bread Master Lee 
I Played RO2 before FF14 as well though I quit after about a month and a half cause it was so buggy and full of crappy pay 2 win updates
I used to play MMO and the last game i played is RO2 which totally a DISASTER. Done 2 raids and i gave it up. But this game sounds really interesting and might as well try the JP server (trauma with NA/SEA server)
Well apparently they were doing some high level fate and the guy came in and wasn’t in anyone’s party doing it like you do a fate => you run up to it and kill monsters and it’s no one’s business to tell you otherwise. So they raged at him and told him to die of cancer or whatever.
If you’re in a party full of people who can’t wait, most likely they will be a shit party and you’ll just get wiped. On the JP server, whenever they mess up, they ALWAYS apologize (unless its obvious they are on a PS3). So yea I’d rather be on JP server and I hope the assholes who came to JP servers cause NA servers are full return to the NA servers and stop causing the JP players grief.
I never heard anyone whining about abusing FATE bugs but I’m mostly in the 35-50 zones (central highlands and mor dhona) and in those zones everyone just forms 8 man pick up groups to kill as many FATEs as fast as possible.
Whenever someone whines to me about watching cut scenes I tell them to vote to kick me which is pretty funny since you can’t.
no problem you can post it here!
and yea I deleted it about 3 months ago?(although this time I did make a post saying I’d be getting rid of it)
it was mostly cause I hated FC2’s image upload (it was seriously stuck circa 1999) and I just didn’t have time to manage a 2nd blog anymore (or the motivation to photoshop screencaps)
1. That’s what I heard.
2 and 3 never apply to me because I’m not permanently on the JP server seeing how NA is full of asswipes who rage if you don’t let them take advantage of FATE bugs and act like douchebags in Duty Finder if you dare watch the cut scene.
I’m still 22 lol!
But that’s because I’ve been simultaneously leveling up my Weaver, Alchemist and Botanist (who are all 17~20) so I’m taking mah sweet time~ XD
Well I got to level 43 so I have a few things I’ve learned.
-Game gets real hard around level 30 compared to what came before.
-Never log out and you can play whenever you want
-If you do get kicked out then it’s horrific trying to get back in
Hi. Mmmm, i was not sure where could i post the question, but since i didn´t firgure it out, i will just post it here: what happened with your fc2 blog?
I was going to check it out today and i can´t find it anywhere. Did you delete it again?
i thought I was following you on wordpress reader but turns out I wasn’t so I added you to my list =D
As an aside and completely out of topic, its that time of the month when new goodies have arrived. Plus I think I got the RSS setup going.
well we just used the Duty Finder (which is basically party matching system) so we didn’t have to wait in line?
I mean we just wait till it matches us up with someone. It took about 1-2 minutes before we got paired up with 2 people. Probably helps that we’re starting off with 2 and only need to find 2 stragglers to join us.
I use to me a MMO player, but I got so tried of the BS that seem to follow NA servers I gave up on playing those games. Although I am curious as to waiting in line for the dungeon party, if you cut in line did you get a connection error? 😀 (NO CUTTING IN LINE FOR YOU – connection lost :P)
Pikachu?! Pikachu?! I choose you Pikachu! *pikapika!*
yea I haven’t really played much MMOs until this one and I really like it which is why it’s annoying.
though oh well ever since I switched to the JP server things have been totally fine so the hell with the NA servers 😆
We’re on Hades! After last night of another 1017 marathon I’m like screw it. The only down side is the duty finder is only within the jp data center. Yesterday I’m pretty sure the 2 ppl we partied with were Japanese but even though I spoke Japanese and English, they were too scared to say anything. Tho I think one guy was on a ps3 and was a noob cause the sasatasha boss room was a mess lolol. Fortunately jp me and pikachu managed to handle it somehow.
I’m sorry but this is just too hilarious with how bad the people on the NA/EU are handling it.
And I used to think my days of ‘suffering’ from Nexon were bad..
I guess its a good thing I dont game as much anymore lol.
Welp, hopefully they somehow get their team together and fix all those dang problems soon :L”
(geeze tab had a problem so I’m not sure if this same message got sent through before but sorry in advance again >.<")
There are the same number of JPN servers as NA/EU servers. But there are way more NA/EU players than JPN players (basically the whole world outside of JPN). Anyone who has even a basic understanding of world population should have figured this out and made way more NA/EU servers than JPN servers. But SE didn’t! What JPN server are you on?
Um no this is not a beta. This is early access for the final release that starts tomorrow 😆
but yes it does feel like a beta doesn’t it.
There’s plenty of free MMOs in asia yes but 90% of them are shit tier 2D card battle buhibuhi titty games.
I guess that floats better with Japanese than Americans though.
Couple of friends on IRC commented about the “maintenance” on the servers. In all honesty, expanding servers isn’t viable in the long run. Basically you’re going to get a population surge on launch for 6 months and then drop to the hardcore addicts. Also, currently this is a beta.
As for the low Japanese population, I’m afraid to say that there are a lot more MMORPGs available in Asia. FF/WoW/TERA may be what the West knows but there are a lot available out here. Just going past the Internet cafes here you can see there are posters for other MMORPGs from China/Taiwan. So basically you have a large number of offerings competing for a rather limited base. Most people will choose one or two to play unless you are a completely rich hikkikomori who can multitask on multiple screens.