MMOs are very big games, so there’s a lot more to go wrong. It seems that Final Fantasy XIV is no exception.

Friday was the launch day for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood’s Early Access, and players piled in but unfortunately it wasn’t without its problems. The main issues stemmed from the increase of player numbers, as you might expect. Quests that throw people into instanced dungeons and battles have been the most affected, and have meant some people have been unable to complete quests and stranded them at a point where they cannot access the further quests down the line that Stormblood offers. One of the big offenders is a quest in the main line which flings players into their own single-player instance, and it seems players are catching onto this so they’re queuing to speak to him so as not to force the servers to generate too many new instances at one time.

Producer Naoki Yoshida responded to the problems with a post; “As announced earlier, there are a huge number of players currently playing Stormblood, and as a result, the servers continue to experience a large amount of stress. For this reason, we are currently limiting the number of players that can enter instanced content so that it does not lead to major server crashes.”

A second even stranger issue has occurred when players who leave or disconnect during the Susano Primal fight have found themselves unable to log back into their characters. The cause has been nailed down to, oddly, players emoting as they enter ‘The Pool of Tribute’. A community representative asked that “users please finish their emote actions before entering ‘The Pool of Tribute”. Fortunately it does seem that while each case of this bug must be sorted out individually, it is possible for it to be fixed as some affected players are now able to log back in again.

Never thought I’d hear of the day when in-game emoting caused you to be locked out of your game account…