Good Morning Friends! It has been a wild weekend. Initially I had expected to drop a post on Friday with my early thoughts about the game… and that never really happened. I was too busy playing the game and also by reference too scared to log out because the queues kept getting larger. When I logged into the game around 8 am there was only a queue of 30 people, and as the day wore on that just kept getting bigger. I read some analysis of the Steam data and apparently there is a roughly 400% increase in the peak numbers from this same time during Shadowbringers. Admittedly Steam is the wrong way to play the game and as a result you have a tiny portion of the overall population playing on that platform, but still some extrapolation should be able to be made about the massive increase in players that we are experiencing.
There has been a pretty constant flow of information coming out of Square and more specifically Creative Business Unit III, and the most recent is that they will be giving free play time as partial compensation for how rough the situation is currently. I get that this is probably still a bitter pill to swallow for the folks who have been unable to play at all. For example as bad as the situation is for the North American Data Centers, I hear the European Centers are even worse. I’ve heard discussion of over 10,000 player queues happening over there to try and get in and play. The worst I have personally seen myself was over 7,000 the other night when I logged in just to see how bad the queue was after our podcast.
Worse than the queues however has been our old friend the 2002 error. Now I have been bit by this in the past, and thankfully thusfar because I am logging in extremely early each day… I have yet to encounter it. However most of my friends are struggling constantly with getting punted from the queue and having to rejoin it… in the vague hopes of doing all of that fast enough to get back their position in the line of players waiting to get in. Honestly I think a lot of folks would feel better about waiting if they knew that sitting in line would actually guarantee them eventually getting in. However that login infrastructure is being used by ALL of the players, and it is getting pounded to death. Quite honestly I am not sure what can be done because right now it is extremely hard to get your hands on enterprise grade servers. I know in my own line of work our move to the cloud has been accelerated by the fact that anywhere we tried to acquire them… we were looking at at least a six month wait.
If you CAN play however… the expansion has been great so far. Prior to the release of the expansion Yoshi P said something about a major shock coming around 83, and I can verify this occurrence. I am grossly over leveled due to the side quests… because they are so freaking great this expansion. However were I just focusing on the MSQ I would have hit this spot around level 83… and quite honestly from this point forward I am not sure what is going to happen. All of my predictions for the shape of this expansion and what would happen… are now out the window. This game and this team are one of the few teams that can really throw me for a loop like this. Every single expansion there are several things that just come from out of left field and challenge my notions about the game and this expansion is no different.
There is one thing that I have found really frustrating, and I am going to try and address this in as low spoilery as a possible manner. In video games and MMOs specifically there are two mechanics that I absolutely hate. The first is being asked to play someone other than my character and the second is being forced to do stealth mechanics. I play a tank for a reason and that reason is I never want to have to sneak around in order to accomplish things. So far this expansion has given me two unskippable duties where I had to do both of these things at the same time. Were it not for the fact that the queues were so freaking long… I probably would have rage quit out and played something else for awhile. I don’t invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours in a character… and then not want to play that character and I detest stealth mechanics in games in general. Putting both together and putting them on a timer… another thing I hate… was almost too much for me. I made it through it and I hope that is the last I see of that stupid bullshit for the rest of this expansion.
At this point I am maybe a third of the way through the story… maybe even less. I know there are two areas that are shown in the Aether Current system that I have yet to visit. It seems like there is a mountain worth of content still ahead of me, and last night when I stopped for the evening I had just unlocked the level 85 dungeon. I do not however think I am even vaguely close to the mid point of the game. Some shit is happening and I have to deal with it, but also I have no clue HOW we will deal with it. Right now the game is doing a phenomenal job of keeping me in the dark as the player character and there are a few paths ahead of me… and I am not really certain WHICH of those are going to come to pass. I am not sure yet if this team is going to do what I think they might do, and that is a good thing. I am constantly guessing… which is all the more reason why I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone else.
One of the things that I did years ago, is create a “quiet time” tab in my chat interface. Essentially it acts as a second general tab but with all of the public channels turned off. I felt like this was probably a good idea given that there might be accidental spoilers that happen in zone chat. Essentially turn on only the things that you feel you need the most so for me I have tells, party, free company, and a few specific linkshells turned on. I highly suggest you create your own limited chat because honestly more than anything it cuts through the noise and lets me focus on the game itself. Once I have finished the story I will go back out into the public channels, for the time being however I am just hugging my friends as I pass them but largely ignoring most of the world.
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