Square Enix Restricts Final Fantasy XIV "Open" Beta

[Logan Westbrook]

Square Enix Restricts Final Fantasy XIV "Open" Beta

The bugs that delayed the original launch of the Final Fantasy XIV beta have been straightened out, but now it faces a whole new problem.

Being too popular might not seem like that bad a problem to have, but that's the challenge that's facing Square-Enix and its open beta for Final Fantasy XIV. The company got the beta up and running yesterday, after "critical bugs" caused last minute delays [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103157-Final-Fantasy-XIV-Open-Beta-Delayed], only to find that its servers couldn't handle the volume of users.

As a temporary solution, Square-Enix is limiting the number of beta registration codes it hands out. On the FFXIV account page it says that the system was experiencing congestion, and that technical staff were monitoring the situation and trying hard to resolve it. Registration is currently completly suspended, with the site suggesting that players should wait until registration re-opens and try their luck again.

It seems there are still a few kinks to straighten out before the game goes live later this month, but testing servers to see how they hold up to stress is one of the things that open betas are for. Better that this gets discovered now, rather than later when it's much harder to do anything about it. Final Fantasy XIV [http://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-XIV-Collectors-Pc/dp/B003O6EFKI/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1283527472&sr=1-1] is released for PC on September 30th, and on PS3 in March 2011.

Soource: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-02-square-enix-limiting-ffxiv-beta-codes]





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[Drop_D-Bombshell]

March? Damn, it'S one of those things i've been waiting for and sod's law makes the wait now even longer!

I just hope the wait's worth it...

 

[NickCaligo42]

EDIT: Yeah, okay. Load-testing the servers, I can see that. My apologies for pulling the hate trigger a bit prematurely. I guess I felt a bit misdirected by the article, whose title seemed to suggest that this was an awfully silly turn and that they should be beyond that point by now. Original comment below.

Pffft. More proof that Square has absolutely no concept of how to deal with online infrastructure. Nice work guys. Real cracker-jack job. You'd think they'd at least have pulled this off after FF11.

 

[Fensfield]

To electronic wolf.. we've known the memory issues they were having with the PS3 had delayed FFXIV's PS3 release until March for a while o.o

And Nick.. well, it's nice to see the morons don't know the meaning of 'testing' are still around. As the article says, thank goodness these didn't hit once it went live, but rather while they were loadtesting the servers. .. Idiot.

How's the saying go? Haters gonna hate?

Late Edit: Yeah, sorry, that was a bit more jerky than necessary.

 

[dghjdgdjf]

"Open" indeed.

 

[Delusibeta]

To electronic wolf.. we've known the memory issues they were having with the PS3 had delayed FFXIV's PS3 release until March for a while o.o

And Nick.. well, it's nice to see the morons don't know the meaning of 'testing' are still around. As the article says, thank goodness these didn't hit once it went live, but rather while they were loadtesting the servers. .. Idiot.

How's the saying go?

Ahem, fix'd.
I remember when Quake Live suffered this exact problem when they entered open beta. Their solution? A queue. I was stuck, waiting for a number to count down, before I could play. It took hours. And then, when I got in, I found out that PunkBuster hated my PC. Oh, joy...

 

[Tahmoh]

Cassita you really need to do your research coz your info is based on really faulty information that has been disproved by about 20 different sites and the SE deves themselves as a complete misstranslation that some crappy site cooked up.

As for this limited access thing im not that bothered as i'd decided to leave it a week to let the congestion die down after i noticed the bitching on a couple of site when it got delayed a day.

 

[NickCaligo42]

To electronic wolf.. we've known the memory issues they were having with the PS3 had delayed FFXIV's PS3 release until March for a while o.o

And Nick.. well, it's nice to see the morons don't know the meaning of 'testing' are still around. As the article says, thank goodness these didn't hit once it went live, but rather while they were loadtesting the servers. .. Idiot.

How's the saying go? Haters gonna hate?

Pfft. Fair enough, I'll freely admit I jumped to pull the hate trigger, and for that you have my apologies, but you could certainly afford to be less of a jerk about it yourself. Frankly the article feels a bit misleading if this is for the purpose of load-testing. The title in particular suggests that this is an awfully silly turn and the article itself seems to suggest that they're backpedaling rather clumsily, as if they were supposed to be beyond this point by now.

 

[Virgil]

As a temporary solution, Square Enix is limiting the number of beta registration codes it hands out. On the FFXIV account page it says that the system was experiencing congestion, and that technical staff were monitoring the situation and trying hard to resolve it. Registration is currently completly suspended, with the site suggesting that players should wait until registration re-opens and try their luck again.

FYI, everything appears to be working now, or at least enough to get a beta account created and to start downloading the client. It was probably web server congestion that was causing the problems - I doubt their new site has ever had to handle that amount of traffic.

That said, this registration process is incredibly clumsy and "Engrishy" for a game that is supposed to be launching in a month. I'd bet that over half their potential audience won't manage to get the game client downloaded, let alone get into the game.

Of course, terrible interfaces are par for the course for their online offerings, so this isn't that surprising. Hopefully the in-game interface isn't as awful as FFXI.

 

[Darchrow]

People care about this game?

You know the game will only allow you to play it for 8 hours a week. After which point you receive no XP from anything.

Yeah, good luck with that community service, Square. I'll be over there > playing games that don't punish me for liking them.

I know a lot of people pissed off about the fatigue system but don't really understand it, people say 8 hours but in essence they limit the amount of SP you can obtain until you hit diminishing returns (it is speculated to stack up to 0%).

In other words the time it takes to get diminishing returns for SP depends on how fast you obtain it so it could be 6hours could be 24 if you're a slow leveler it really is a different kind of method to halt progression. I mean even leveling itself is a method of stopping people from getting to high levels really fast, this just ensures progression is control very carefully and could imply a lot of things about FF14. (Maybe they don't have any end-game content to appeal to people to level too quickly?)

Now it means for one to be hardcore you don't necessarily have a high level class but multiple high level classes whilst I could understand why so many people are butt hurt about being FORCE to play different classes I for one was originally intending to get my Lancer to have a multitude of spells from various class to my liking.

 

[Danzaivar]

Now it means for one to be hardcore you don't necessarily have a high level class but multiple high level classes whilst I could understand why so many people are butt hurt about being FORCE to play different classes I for one was originally intending to get my Lancer to have a multitude of spells from various class to my liking.

So your argument is "it's fine, because it doesn't affect how I was planning to play through it"?

 

[Eri]

As of this posts time stamp, beta keys are available. I just got mine.

 

[Shnoogle]

I was one of the poor souls that ran the beta key lottery. From the amount of people complaining on various sites (FFXIVCore had 64 pages of comments - some moaning, some offering tips on alternative SE links for getting a beta key) I was seriously worried that SE had dropped a major clanger.

Since I have gotten on the Beta, the game is very reminiscent of the type of gaming experience I got from FFXI, but with an important caviet or two, it's much a much more polished product then FFXI was at launch & the beta has an (un)healthy population of WoW fanboys with the typical purile character names, all complaining that it isn't like WoW.Whilst I loved WoW (and I've played it from beta until the present day), I didn't like the idiot portion of the WoW population. After about 2 months of it's release, the idiot quotent left the rest of FFXI's population to get on with it. Heaven!

After a good 7 hours exploring etc, I really enjoyed the gameplay. Some things need addressing, like the archaic menu system, but overall it's a great experience. A different experience from WoW and all the other popular MMOs, but a worthy one at that, so far.

 

[Irridium]

As a temporary solution, Square Enix is limiting the number of beta registration codes it hands out. On the FFXIV account page it says that the system was experiencing congestion, and that technical staff were monitoring the situation and trying hard to resolve it. Registration is currently completly suspended, with the site suggesting that players should wait until registration re-opens and try their luck again.

FYI, everything appears to be working now, or at least enough to get a beta account created and to start downloading the client. It was probably web server congestion that was causing the problems - I doubt their new site has ever had to handle that amount of traffic.

That said, this registration process is incredibly clumsy and "Engrishy" for a game that is supposed to be launching in a month. I'd bet that over half their potential audience won't manage to get the game client downloaded, let alone get into the game.

Of course, terrible interfaces are par for the course for their online offerings, so this isn't that surprising. Hopefully the in-game interface isn't as awful as FFXI.

Yeah, it was a pain in the ass for me to get it set up. Can't help but feel like this was a bit rushed.

 

[Mr. Grey]

As of this posts time stamp, beta keys are available. I just got mine.

And at the time of this posting it has been suspended.

At least for me. Give it a try, maybe it just hates me.

Or it remembers me... why would it do that though?

It's back up! Go, go, GO!

 

[8bitmaster]

I thought your experience would halt for strict only level grinding and you would still gain exp from quests and group dungeons and stuff like that.

 

[boholikeu]

Because I want a game punishing me for playing it?

Technically it's not really punishing you. It's just no longer rewarding you.

Which brings us to the next question: do you really like the game because of its mechanics, or because of the mini-jolt of endorphins you receive when you level up?