Early Access and Launch week survival guide: What to expect and prepare for
Just a little list of what players can and should expect and prepare for when Shadowbringers goes into early access next week, followed by official launch shortly after, from someone who has survived many, many launch days for expansion packs.
In no particular order, here is a bundle of some helpful tips and reminders:
-Clean your inventory and retainers out: Do this and do this soon. New quests means new rewards and randomly obtained items dropped from monsters. If you do not have the bagspace now, you will definitely not have the bagspace when ShB drops! Don’t be caught with full bags!
-Turn off shout, yell and titles: Sometimes people want to avoid all things spoiler related, no matter how mild or vague the spoiler might be. So just to be safe, make sure you turn off Shout and Yell, and turn off Titles! Last time a spoiler title got through for the MSQ, it’s been changed since then, but just in case! This is a reminder to do that before servers go down for maintenance!
-Blacklist ShB stuff on social media: People are gonna wanna scream about spoilers on their social media, and it’s their right to do so! It’s their little corner of the internet! But to protect yourself, be sure to blacklist appropriately and, if you have to, temporarily avoid those who do not tag! You can always refollow after you’ve caught up! :D
-Get some IRL stuff done before launch: During the day servers are down for maintenance, get your house chores done! Do your laundry, clean those dishes, take all the trash out, buy some good quick snacks and tidy up your space. Make sure everything is clean, ready and set for extended periods of gameplay so you can play mostly uninterrupted. Bonus points if you prep throughout the week leading up!
-Take plenty of AFK breaks: Ensure to drink plenty of water, get plenty of sleep, shower and just take time away from the computer to walk (Please take care of family and pets too!). Don’t play the game without breaks. I know those queue times are gonna be rough, but playing without pause is really bad for your health, trust me. Look up Final Fantasy XI “Pandemonium Warden” and read about that 18 hour boss without breaks. Nasty stuff.
-Expect big queues upon logging in, especially during zero hour: No matter the data center you play on, expansion packs will bring a lot of new players and returning players. And people will likely server jump to avoid queues and fill up servers that are currently empty. Just have patience, make sure you have something to do while waiting(download a phone game or work on some art, ect), the queues will pass and things will settle. They always do. :]
-If we have the AFK campers like Stormblood: Calmly bring the issue up to the dev team on the forum so they can engage the daily server reset again. Though I’m sure they’ll be expecting it again, but just incase, don’t panic! We’ve survived this before. :D
-Expect the inevitable DDOS: Someone out there is going to see the FFXIV community excited for a good time and will want to ruin it, I’ve seen it happen with MMOs and any new online games (Even Overwatch got hit on launch day). If the servers start crashing a lot out of no where, assume it’s the DDOSers at their nonsense again and be patient, the dev team will be working around the clock to get servers up and stablized.
-Have a lil bit of patience and make alternate plans for in-game: Early Access and Launch week for any game is rough, so try to be patient. Queues will be long, servers will be shaky, DDOSing will be happening, loads of players will be fighting the same quest mobs, worlds will be clogged. Just be as patient as you can, things will smooth out gradually and all will be well. If you plan to do MSQ and its a chaos zone, make sure you have a fallback plan to do something else in-game while you wait for things to calm down!
-There will be bugs: Unfortunately that’s just how these things are. You’re probably going to hit a quest or a dungeon that will be bugged to heckity that the dev-team didn’t find in their testing, or it didn’t happen until the servers went live. Bugs are sneaky lil shits that will show up in the least expected of places, so be sure to report them and know that the dev team will be on it as fast as they can.
Most importantly, be kind: The rush to end-game always gets pretty intense, especially with all the multitude of problems that come when the game launches. So be sure to be kind to one another, especially to our new players, who will be very confused and fumbling around trying to make sense of our crazy, content-packed game. ;w;
If anyone else can think of anything more to add, please do!
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