I think it is safe to say that the biggest mistake Square Enix made was combing North America and Europe into one group of servers. Square Enix has a total of twenty-five servers per region. So at the moment with only the Japanese and North American/European categories, we have a total of fifty servers for players to be able to access. If North America and Europe were separated, we might have seen less traffic since the player would have been a bit more dispersed on an additional twenty-five servers hypothetically. Instead, we have to now wait for Square to now give us those additional servers and hope this solves the problem. I personally remain a bit skeptically only because so many people already have characters on existing servers but I guess we shall find out what happens after the new changes are implemented.
So what should we expect from all of this? It is hard to say since Square Enix is keeping their bad news very short. Nothing currently points to any additional benefits or "we're sorry" gifts for those who have experienced inconvenience when attempting to play. World Transfers will be an optional service available at some point. According to
A Realm Reborn's
web site, this server should go live sometime near the middle part of September but restrictions may still apply. A price point has not yet been placed on this service though if you ask me the first transfer should be free in order to let people move their whole Free Company to a less populated server once all the log in issues are resolved.
Needless to say, the current status is not a good way to start off a re-release of a game that already has put a bad taste in some people's mouths. A fee of $14.99 is quite a lot to spend on a log in gamble. It is understandable that Square Enix might have underestimated the amount of active players, but at this point, it seems almost like an excuse for not being properly prepared. After all, this is the second time some subscribers played this game.
Update: The links to some of the images are coming up as a "404 Not Found" file. All the images are located in the blog's gallery in case you have trouble viewing them.
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