Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn’s solid performance in the Japanese sales charts provided a misleading picture, it would seem, now that the game continues to suffer connection problems. Developer Naoki Yoshida has come onto the forums to explain their failure to fix the game again, while Sony is now offering refunds for the game.
Naoki Yoshida’s apology may be unprecedented for a Japanese developer to an international audience, especially when you put its scope into account. He takes responsibility for his mistake in underestimating consumer demand, and thereby not preparing enough servers at the onset.
Regarding login restrictions, Square Enix only prepared to have 5,000 concurrent, or simultaneous, connections. Logins above that number caused server crashes and problems with login. To compound the problem further, as Square Enix struggled to restore servers, the demand from players trying to log back in kept straining the servers, ultimately affecting all of the game.
Yoshida also addressed issues with character creation. The servers can actually handle characters being created several times that amount, but they had problems with the characters being concentrated in the city areas, leading to more server issues and crashes.
Yoshida ends explaining that the additional servers and Duty Finder are still in testing phase, but will be added in as soon as they are assured it will handle all issues. Square Enix has also implemented a new feature logging out characters AFK for too long after an extended period of time.
If you bought Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn on PSN between August 27 to 28, you will be provided a full refund as soon as it gets processed. Extra Standard Edition and Collector’s Edition entitlements have been resent and the game will reappear in the download list in the near future.
If you had not yet bought or signed up for the game, you should monitor the news for when the server issues have been resolved. Hopefully, this turns out to be a good game after all, after all the server issues have been cleared up.
