Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

I really wanted to try it before I buy but I got kicked off and now I too am getting error 3102. Sigh, at least I got a couple hours in of random fun.

I do hope they get this all sorted at least before the end, all the people not in a rest area and can't get back in would be missing all the rest exp between end of this beta and launch.

Nehrak_sl said:

I really want to know what the census numbers are for total concurrent connections, unique accounts, etc.

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there was a japanese tweet that they had 150k concurrent users playing last night, across all servers

spronk_sl said:

there was a japanese tweet that they had 150k concurrent users playing last night, across all servers

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Er, I meant to say total connections. Just an idea of the open beta interest, really. 1mil beta apps from P3 includes duplicates, so seeing just what a general census for an OPEN beta is would be interesting, given how things are going now.

spronk_sl said:

Its funny reading things like the somethingawful forums, where Square apologists constantly say ITS BETA THIS STUFF IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN or WOW AND DAOC HAD SHITTY LAUNCHES TOO ALL MMOS ARE LIKE THIS! Fuck no, I can't think of a single bad MMO launch in the past 6 years - swtor, Rift, TERA, GW2, etc all worked great during their open betas and launches (yes swtor choked signups hard for the first 12 hours and made way too many servers but they all worked well). This is also not a random stress test period either, this is supposed to be "look how good our game is!" open invite, and its gotta be turning off most people that they can't play with friends.

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Good thing you said 6 years there, because I remember the WoW launch as the worst mmo launch aside from AO (which was just outright broken). Sure, content was there, but I still remember it beingmonthsbefore the queues no longer took 30 mins to an hour++. Also remember trying to loot and get stuck in crouch animation for 5-10 minutes each time.

My personal experience so far in this game has been
- P4 opening day, some difficulty logging on for the first 30 or so minutes. Once I got on, no problems.
- No lag ever in game
- Booted twice, but only ecountered one queue so far. 517 players, took less than 10 seconds.

Never had to use their forums, so guess I never had to get annoyed with that. Not saying you are not right about them having horrible servers and what not, but your experiences are not shared by everyone. So where I disagree with it being a "bad" launch is that once you are in game, it works pretty flawlessly. I consider that better than having a perfect forum only to have the actual game being laggy and broken for months, which wow was and turned out to be the largest mmo in history (ff14 will not be that, but doubt too many who are actually interested in the game will quit just because some hickups in open beta).

I think this game will be bigger than they anticipated. Word of mouth does a lot. A lot of people I knew logged into WoW after they tried it out and told their guilds to try it. I know people from school that were never into MMO's who are buying the pre-orders now because they can play this on PS3. I really don't think anyone is anticipating how big this could potentially be. It's unfortunate they're not handling the open beta better, because this was their really big chance to take a chunk out of WoW. For those of us who have been fortunate enough to play, we are mostly enjoying it (some people hate it, most love it.. small complaints about fedex questing, shitty map, etc). I tried to setup my fiance, but I'm going to pre-order it for her anyways. Worst comes to worst, I have an extra account to sell/give away.

I would rather have loot lag than 3102

Droigan_sl said:

Good thing you said 6 years there, because I remember the WoW launch as the worst mmo launch aside from AO (which was just outright broken). Sure, content was there, but I still remember it beingmonthsbefore the queues no longer took 30 mins to an hour++. Also remember trying to loot and get stuck in crouch animation for 5-10 minutes each time.

My personal experience so far in this game has been
- P4 opening day, some difficulty logging on for the first 30 or so minutes. Once I got on, no problems.
- No lag ever in game
- Booted twice, but only ecountered one queue so far. 517 players, took less than 10 seconds.

Never had to use their forums, so guess I never had to get annoyed with that. Not saying you are not right about them having horrible servers and what not, but your experiences are not shared by everyone. So where I disagree with it being a "bad" launch is that once you are in game, it works pretty flawlessly. I consider that better than having a perfect forum only to have the actual game being laggy and broken for months, which wow was and turned out to be the largest mmo in history (ff14 will not be that, but doubt too many who are actually interested in the game will quit just because some hickups in open beta).

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Got booted offline once during the day Friday, had my character logged in for 30 straight hours after that before logging off and back on once last night to fix music. Game never lags, runs like a dream. Haven't experienced any 3102 bug yet, maybe I was lucky. Story is decent, the combat is a little slower, but not enough to make it feel like it's crawling or anything.

I definitely recall the WoW launch being stuck in looting/crouching position, EK/Kalimdor crashing randomly all the time, etc. That wasn't even open beta either, that was launch.

The WoW open beta was pretty smooth. But the hype went into over drive for launch and they were totally unprepared. My first server choice, Archimonde, I never could login to play after the first day because the queue was like 10-15 hours long.

I think at least the first week of WoW was unplayable for me, I kept getting kicked off and when I was on it was a major clusterfuck. At least in this game you can beat on other players mobs and still get credit

Journal entry day 16 of Aug 2013:
Spend my evening refreshing server list so I can choose Gilgamesh.

Day 17 of Aug 2013:
Normal day but spend some of it refreshing server list so I can choose Gilgamesh.

Day 18 of Aug 2013 early entry:
Morning spent refreshing server list so I can choose Gilgamesh, not even sure I want to play the game or just wait for Wild Star...

Man0warr_sl said:

The WoW open beta was pretty smooth. But the hype went into over drive for launch and they were totally unprepared. My first server choice, Archimonde, I never could login to play after the first day because the queue was like 10-15 hours long.

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Loot lag was definitely in OB but the 8 hour long server queues didn't start until launch. I was fortunate with Shattered Hand, despite all the guilds on it they never had unreasonable queue's after the first couple days.

I fear if this game blows up Gilgamesh is going to be the Archimonde/Blackrock/whatever else but hopefully the locked server thing they're doing will help prevent that.

spronk_sl said:

Its funny reading things like the somethingawful forums, where Square apologists constantly say ITS BETA THIS STUFF IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN or WOW AND DAOC HAD SHITTY LAUNCHES TOO ALL MMOS ARE LIKE THIS! Fuck no, I can't think of a single bad MMO launch in the past 6 years - swtor, Rift, TERA, GW2, etc all worked great during their open betas and launches (yes swtor choked signups hard for the first 12 hours and made way too many servers but they all worked well). This is also not a random stress test period either, this is supposed to be "look how good our game is!" open invite, and its gotta be turning off most people that they can't play with friends.

Square is just completely out of its depth here, and almost certainly live is going to be pretty bad too as far as servers go. Their forums are constantly down, and a quick 15 seconds tells you why: its running a badly configured vBulletin 4, all static content is being served off dynamic apache servers (very server intensive for NO reason), and there are no absolutely no CDN servers (massively fast static content cache servers) at all. I'm sure their FF14 backend servers are just as poorly architected. While we don't really know why, I'd guess their japanese dev team is pretty far out of touch with the modern day infrastructures that NA/Eu/Korean/etc dev teams work with. So yeah, there is a nice nostalgia upside to a team that is stuck in ideas from 10 years ago, but the downside is fantastically bad server design.

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As someone who runs nginx/php-fpm/(memcached/redis)/mariadb/(sphinx/elasticsearch) setups for a living, and helps run a vB4 based forum that as of this minute has 450 users and 1500 guests online... Dude. You'rereallynitpicking their webserver setup. It's also pretty crazy to claim that Apache can't be used to serve static content in large amounts (Hell, for a while after Apache 2.4 was released, it probably had BETTER performance than nginx). It's certainly much easier to do it with nginx, or to use varnish in front of it (Largely because Apache defaults are terrible and the old sendmail style config makes it a pain in the ass to get corrected)... but we're talking about the forum for a game that was pretty unpopular for a long time, and one that wouldn't have had nearly as many people try to use it if something hadn't gone wrong with the game. And I doubt the people doing their web infrastructure do their game infrastructure. And neither party does development, which is almost certainly the group "responsible" for the character limbo issue..

This is the first time they've had nearly this many people on the servers. Stress tests never live up to the real thing. The problem here isn't that this is happening in the open beta, the problem is that it is happening in the open beta that is a week away from launch.

Is their shit fucked up? Yes. Is there reason to worry? Yes, because it's so close to (re)launch. Does their forum woes have fuck all to do with the issues they have with the game? No. Making wild claims about their game server backend based on some half-true stuff you pulled out of the air is as far on one end of the spectrum as the people going NO WORRIES IT'S BETA WILL BE FIXED BY RELEASED is on the other.

Lvl 15 gear.

Looks like their forums are back up. 6876 posts in the 3102 Issue thread.

Dude I write firmware for EMC server processors and I could write some long technical rebuttal too but truth is I don't really know how they work. Fuck I am getting drunk

I have found the pre-alpha version of this bug: