Final Fantasy XIV Online has dropped its latest expansion, Endwalker, and it is popular. So popular in fact that wait times have proven a topic of controversy for players and Square Enix alike, going so far as to see the game publisher actually suspend sales of the game going into the holiday season.
Did Square Enix have to make the move legally? And why do I think this one of the more positive gaming news stories of the year?
We make the Endwalker wait times melt away…in Virtual Legality.
#FFXIV #Endwalker #Wait
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:35 Legality and FF XIV’s Terms of Service
17:27 Square Enix Pulls FF XIV Sales and Ads
29:43 Conclusion
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Discussed in this episode:
“Response to Congestion (as of Dec. 15)”
Final Fantasy XIV News Post – December 15, 2021
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/e7388986bc24d5a1337e0beed057f7b5b78b9bb3
“Got a question for the awesome [Hoeg Law]…”
Twitter Thread – December 15, 2021 – Ginger Prime
https://twitter.com/delmontyb/status/1471201778704297984
WorktoGame Videos
https://www.youtube.com/c/WorkToGameVideos
Final Fantasy XIV User Agreement
Updated – December 24, 2019
https://support.na.square-enix.com/rule.php?id=5382&la=1&tag=users_en
“As a lawyer, I have to say, you can sue anyone for anything…”
Twitter Thread – December 15, 2021 – Dallas
https://twitter.com/Kaslo25/status/1471208276419297280
“Announcing Server Enhancements and the Temporary Suspension of Digital Download Sales (08/28/2013)”
Final Fantasy XIV News Post – August 28, 2013
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/e3a37c6c1c83ed7fc1e26a7a9d1308da98f95947
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“Virtual Legality” is a continuing series discussing the law, video games, software, and everything digital, hosted by Richard Hoeg, of the Hoeg Law Business Law Firm (Hoeg Law).
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We make the Endwalker wait times melt away…in Virtual Legality.
(And yes, I know that the suspension is of the base game, but it is all Endwalker related.)
We’ve had 20 years of mmo launches… many of them with huge queues. Anyone complaining about the queues is insane and has been living under a rock for the history of mmos.
I've been able to log in with 20 person queues, but I'm logging in at 5 am when I start taking my various brain medications (ADHD, anxiety), so it's not that bad. I have a couple of hours to play before I need to start getting things done. As far as the server issue, Yoshida said in June that they were doing what they could to increase the servers, including trying to basically throw more money at the problem, but because of the semiconductor shortage (thanks, Crypto bros) physical servers don't exist. The shortage is why there's a shortage of new cars, why video cards are INSANELY expensive, and why the Xbox X/S and PS5 are horrendously rare, among other things. I completely understand the predicament they're in. I've been trying to update my video card for almost 2 years now, but a card that should be $300 is selling for $1600, sometimes as high as $2800, because of the shortage. I can't begin to imagine the hellscape that is trying to buy game servers in this environment.
Suing for a queue time? Seriously? People in WoW threads have threatened suing Blizzard since… well, forever, for queue times, servers being down, maintenance times, whatever takes them away from playing. TOS basically covers this stuff. I always laugh when I see someone post "I'm going to sue for this downtime!" "I paid for this game, I should be able to play whenever I want!" "It's (insert current year) why can't they instantly fix all these issues?"
People can still log in , it's just congested. I been playing every day since launch I just been babysitting the queue with remote play. First time I have to say remote play has been a Godsend.
A game doing TOO well… what a time to be alive.
L&R
3 hours? Amateur.
Spent about this much last Saturday, got disconnected in less than half an hour after login in, then another several more hours waiting on queue. XD
If only AGS and Activision Blizzard could share some of the AMPLE server space from their dead/dying MMOs with FFXIV.
(Enjoyed it for a time, but I've given up on New World with all the bugs and lack of players on many servers. There's 91 players right now on my New World Server.)
Please stop praying for my MMO, it's become too powerful.
legal ? ya leave my boi Yoshi P. alone guys 😂
TLDR: The real problem hear is that they offering something people love (crack) for just pennies. The amount of anger that people feel for not being able to access the thing they love (crack) makes them want retribution in greater measure than what is reasonable (pennies). Some folks might disagree with me but I would refer to such parties here after as idiots. The affected parties (idiots) have bought their game (crack) which provides whether they like it or not, thousands of hours of content for just $40 (pennies). No one in the legal system cares about gamers because they are in large part not high earners (crackheads, idiots). And what they're banging their fists about is the cost of two cheap meals in 2021. Any reasonable adult would say, so you can't play your game move on and make wiser investments. The amount of rage is due to the nature of the product and not the offense. Take my cookie and i'm mad. Take my crack?
Queues suck. Nobody likes them. But I do not see any malice from Square in the handling of the issues. I think they are doing all they can, so a lawsuit sounds a bit too much in this case. It's only been 2 weeks since the expansion launched, this will get better with time. People just need to have a little patience.
Never heard of any one trying to sue wow for long que time
Yea ff14 has one of the best online communities. I know nearly every time I login I don't have waits more than normal. Nothing more than a few minutes. Typically que lists of less than a hundred. It really appears the only time it's bad is during peak times, which should be expected.
This reply from them is fucking awesome and such replies would be nice if they were more common when shit hits the fan.
I was kinda miffed that I couldn’t buy the starter edition to well….get started on my ps5.
But now that I’m reading all the stuff going on. It’s quite understandable.
We legitimately have one person in our fc who’s suggesting that the players have grounds to sue. Honestly they have been known to be a complainer but man the amount of anger and walks of text from this guy is crazy. It’s gotten to the point where some members talked to them about chilling out, and maybe stepping aside for these, now 21 free day period, and play other games.
I think we can all agree that errors and long queue time suck, but we also know they’re addressing and taking steps in fixing it, even stopping new account from being made. But man this guy just believes “they’re not going to do any of that, SE is a soulless company that just wants to steal our money.” I understand frustration, but explosive complaints and 24/7 shit talking on a game you’re still playing is mind boggling to me!
I just can not get in to ff14 knowing lost ark is right around the corner
Square-Enix CAN be sued, but I HARDLY think anything would happen since they're making a good faith attempt by not only giving playtime, but also communicating with the fanbase that "WE. ARE. TRYING. EVERYTHING!"
I fought with some of my FC members and quit the FC because they wanted to find any possible AFK hack to stay online while not playing. And I thought this was completely wrong and selfish. Other players like myself don’t see a need to stay online to AFK and come back 2-3 hours later. There are selfish players that want to stay online to not deal with the queue time ergo why we have long queues.
It's actually more than just their own history that makes them act like this I think. Why has there been such a massive influx of new players? One of the main reasons are the issues at ABK and because WoW is struggling, in part because of unpopular game design choices, but to a large part because people are pissed of all the BS Activison is doing.
We all know that this has led to such a huge influx of new players into FFXIV that they already struggled in regards of server capacity even before the new expansion went live.
They have a real life example to look at what can happen when companies cause a shitstorm like ABK did and I'm pretty sure that Square Enix does not want that to happen to them because of bad behaviour regarding the wait times.
PS: Several hours in the queue where also happening at WoW in the past – back in the days of Vanilla there where server queues of up to 6 hours.
Yoshi-P knows how to manage their relationship with their customers. When things are bad, you never go more than a week without some sort of messaging and it always gives way more information than the business actually needs to by any standard. (sometimes, some would argue, too much information)
As a result, the majority – although certainly not all – of their playerbase tend to be understanding when things go wrong.
Just play on JP servers no q’s here xDdddd
Absolutely hilarious that they'd actually list "act of God" (capital G) as a cause for why the service might be interrupted. Like… really? Hahahaha. Is that standard?
The ghost of 1.0
"You will be visited by 3 spirits"
1. The Ghost of long queues
2. The Ghost of Raubahn Savage
3. The Ghost of error 2002
They are actively compensating game time for this issue, that itself is really huge because of the potential cost being sacrificed here. I think everyone can continue to wait or chill for a moment to let them work through the congestion issue.
Especially when they can't get new servers due to part shortages thanks to the pandemic.
It’s 21 days free not 14
Player first, clear communication, generous compensation. What is there not to like about this company. It is not the problem itself that drives away customers, it is how a company handle the problem.
People regularly line up for hours for restaurants, concerts and popular clubs. Just saying.
If mmo players could sue the company then WoWs player base would be millionaires from all the shit Blizzard makes them eat.
Y'know. this is actually pretty tame wait times considering just how bad Stormblood wait times got. And that was with constant disconnects.
There's so much misinformation being tossed around, presumably for the sake of inciting something, so let me provide the cliffnotes of what's actually going on.
Regarding what is actually happening with the game's sales and distribution:
The devs are suspending sales of Final Fantasy XIV, meaning any version that is purchased and playable (This includes ARR, Heavensward, etc). This does NOT mean that you cannot play the game – it means you cannot buy it. People who already have their license paid for will still be able to play, as well as receive three weeks of free gameplay time. For those of you interested, that is around a $10 million loss for Square Enix in terms of subscription revenue.
Free trial is basically impossible right now, and so they are preventing any more people from signing up for the free trial. If you are a free trial player already, you will still have your free trial (just good luck getting to play the game with these queues).
Advertising when possible has been pulled to prevent people from being denied access to a service they were advertised to. Not all advertising can be pulled, however.
*Regarding what is actually happening with the servers*:
There have been two critical issues plaguing the login servers since Endwalker launch: extremely long queue times due to limited server capacity; and 2002 errors that would cause the login server to terminate the client and boot the player from the game. Extremely long queue times are a given, but the 2002 error has been the most frustrating part of the login crisis. Players essentially could not leave their computer to do other things while waiting in queue, as the queue was unstable and could crash as often as every five minutes.
The initial response from Square was to give players one week of free gameplay time. Developers also said they would investigate, but believed the 2002 error was a clientside internet connectivity issue. It has now been discovered that the 2002 error is being caused by a bug connected to the 1.0 login server system. For those of you who don't know, FFXIV 2.0 "borrowed" chunks of 1.0's code to cut down on production time. At the time, this was to ensure the game would be remade in a timely manner. This practice has haunted FFXIV in many ways (with many limitations of in-game features due to "1.0 jank"), but this is probably the most disastrous of them all. The bug has been found, analyzed, and is predicted to be resolved by the 6.01 patch, which will release December 21. This will not fix the huge login queues, but will hopefully make them more stable so that players may be untethered from their computers as they wait. Square Enix is also providing two more weeks of free gameplay time as compensation for the queue troubles.
The only way to resolve the long login queue issue is to obtain more server hardware, which is currently impossible. No amount of money can buy a product that does not exist, and chip shortages are estimated to continue as long as until 2024. Square has offered to buy hardware for double market value, but there is just not enough supply. Square has also investigated cloud server technology, but found the results to be untenable due to latency issues. So for now, we're stuck with the long queues.
Bro, no.
Just no.
ah, the shameless plug 😀
That self awareness alone is worth sharing 😛
As to damages, now that is an interesting thing in mmorpgs.
The experience of the first days of launch are very unique, everyone is on equal footing, the world is brand new with no spoilers, that is not an experience that can ever be replicated, the launch of a new xpac or mmorpg always feels like a special event.
Plus it helps not being behind in gear since you can argue content requires gear and ingame communities are known to demand best gear available after the first few weeks making your overall experience worse though then you get to the even more complicated subject of how much game design influences community behavior etc.
Wonder if anyone would argue about it and how would you even calculate damages
SE is also riding the anti-WoW wave, even an average gift of goodwill from them like 21 free days time looks like a ridiculous huge generous action which makes them look incredibly good, compared to many people who were used to Actiblizz's treatment who cant even imagine giving free game time, they are definitely scoring a lot of points by being the opposite of actiblizz
Oh hi there 🙂
The WoW crowd coming in hot to those FFXIV servers 🙂 Thanks for all you do, Hoeg!
To clarify regarding the free playtime: It's not 7 days and then 7 more for 14 total, it's 7 days from the Early Access issues and then 14 more on TOP of that for 21 total. The reason they're doing 14 more days is, I imagine, because once the date of the 21st rolls around, the expansion will have officially launched 14 days ago, which means paying subscribers will not have actually "payed" anything for their subscriptions during those two weeks of tumultuous queues and login errors.
Ginger Prime is great!
And yes, I'm watching this while sitting in the queue.
Yes. I am waiting to get in… Not Endwalker. Just to get in FF14.
Just for knowledge – on early release day, the day after the 24 hr maintenance – I had a SMALL queue of about 20 people, during prime time USA time. So, the wait time now, to me, isn't required. It's like they're throttling to throttle.
I appreciate SE's transparency. I appreciate the 21 free days.
I'd give up those 21 free days for more bandwidth and servers in their data centers.
I wouldn't chock this up to Square Enix being awesome. The company is known to have pulled some nasty crap. The subsidiary development team Creative Business Unit III under Naoki Yoshida however is godlike with customer service. They are the ones FFXIV players have an almost religious devotion too, because they have worked insanely hard to earn that goodwill back. It also seems they never intend to lose that ever again.
The "force majeure" here would be semiconductor shortage.
That was the right thing to do but it's unfortunate for Square-Enix that their game can't fully capitalize on its success and popularity because of the circumstances. It must hurt extra hard to do this a week before Christmas (and a Christmas where many areas in the world might receive new stay-at-home orders at that, no-thanks for Omicron.)
A comment for the algorithm
I don't have words to describe how great it feels to hear news on the level of "Ya our game is so desired that we physically can not handle the number of users and have to stop selling it." They're giving up potentially 10s of millions in revenue to ensure current player experience is the best it can be.
Square-Enix suspending service and sales for Final Fantasy XIV? 😐🤔
That's fine, it's ok, no big deal. 😌
(Of course I don't mind. I don't have the proper system to use the product, I haven't purchased the product, much less played the product. 🤣)
Anybody else replaying FFX during queues?
I played 1am in the morning everyday. No problem logging
Yes, suing them will definitely create the server hardware they are unable to buy due to scarcity.