Ragar fights through dungeons and login errors in this second half of his review

You Can Slay Monsters, But Can You Defeat the Dreaded 1017 Error?

So far I’ve talked at length about all of the things ARR has done right and a few specifics that I’ve found odd, but now we get to what’s been on all of the players’ minds since Early Access: login issues. During the Early Access period, the game itself was perfectly stable but there were issues with Duty Finder and players were unable to queue for any dungeons. This issue was compounded by the fact that the Duty Finder service is apparently tied to their quest instancing system; so many players found themselves stuck on certain class/story steps because they were unable to load into the required quest instances. After multiple maintenance periods that weekend, the Duty Finder error was repaired and players were delighted. That is until they tried to log in and discovered a new problem: Errors 1017, 90000, and others.

If you haven’t been following the launch issues, the basic idea is that more players were trying to log onto the game than Square Enix was allowing. Most of us expect this with new MMOs; we’ve all seen queues pop up in games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, WoW, and others. The reason this was an issue for ARR players was that there really wasn’t a queue system here. Once the number of players trying to queue up for a server passed a threshold number, players would be given the 1017 error, “This world is currently full. Please wait until an opening is available and try again.” Hitting OK on this message would take you back to the start screen and you’d have to make your way back to Character Select and try again. This meant that rather than logging in and finding a queue that tells you how long you have to make lunch/take a nap/run errands/etc. before logging in, players were stuck repeating this login process for however long it took to get in. Even worse, after all of that effort to get on the server, no one wanted to give up their spot so they would just stay perpetually logged in as the game launched with no AFK auto-logout timer. Anyone hoping to play the game the next day was basically encouraged to leave their computers on overnight or to log in prior to going to work in the morning.

Square Enix has already said they’re working on adding new worlds and upgrading their data centers to rectify these issues so, hopefully, these issues will be gone within the next week or two. The strange thing is that, considering how much they got right with this remake, these errors stand out all the more. They fixed all of these inherently broken mechanics from v1.0, but then turned around and missed something the bulk of us would consider a no-brainer in MMO design like AFK auto-logout, proper queuing and not having all NA and EU traffic going through the same data center. Luckily these are all easily fixed problems compared to something within the game itself and it does speak to the quality of the game that the players are essentially DDoSing themselves from playing, but regardless of how many things a game may get right, a player can’t stay hooked on your game if they can’t actually log into your game.