Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIV: Online, Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, Square Enix

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood's Early Access Has Hit A Few Snags

Early Access periods in games, especially when they function as a pre-order bonus, can hit some pretty significant snags. The unfortunate aspect of early access is that no one in development is ever quite prepared for the absolute dedication and round-the-clock grinding players are willing to put in to anything even remotely new. And since early access periods usually take place on temporary servers, they aren't always the most stable. Players tend to hate that. And much as I would love to say otherwise, the early access period for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood has been an utter nightmare for a lot of very, very dedicated players. The problem essentially boils down to players being unable to access the new maps, unable to enter instanced content like duties and dungeons, and a hell of a lot of camping. The error code kicked back reads "system error occured during event movement" and comes from the server connection being unable to handle the amount of data it is taking in from tons of players attempting to access the content simultaneously. Because all of those players must have an individual instance, the servers just cannot keep up with demand.

Because early access comes with some rather innate built-in restrictions, the flood of traffic just compounds the problem and shuts whole servers down entirely. And there is no easy fix, because it usually comes down to hardware. Square Enix Japan finally got their early access servers working well enough to handle the massive influx of players just a few hours ago, leaving the game down for almost a whole day in Japan. Meanwhile, the problem still persists for the European and North American servers.

With massive new game maps, a slew of new dungeons and trials, plus new playable jobs, there is a lot of content in Stormblood that is completely inaccessible due to the overpopulation errors.

What has ended up happening is that players are just hanging around the questgiver for one of the early instanced quests, and camping. That quest giver is the Bull of Ala Mhigo, Raubahn, who sets you up with the quest "Best Served With Cold Steel." It's content that you can access only about an hour or two into the expansion, so naturally frustration is high. There isn't a lot of side-questing or exploration that can get done at such an early stage in the game, and so the players are naturally in some interesting states. They're all stuck waiting for things to get fixed while they complain, argue, and write bizarre fanfiction in the chat window. Not their fault Raubahn has a lot of fans these days. He's a very popular guy. The memes are absolutely wonderful.

The problem exists even on the least populated servers in North America, which is not the larges playerbase for FFXIV. It's been a bit of a nightmare.

But then, early access tends to do that, no matter the game, publisher, or platform.

Now that the problem is fixed on the Japanese data centers, it's only a matter of time until the fix arrives for the rest of us. In the mean time, could I interest you in some Poetics gear?

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