Yes, I am officially necroing the blog because of all the Endwalker whining... GET OVER IT!

(Posted on my sports-conspiracy blog, but I thought it might be good to put it here too!)

I could probably go into any number of sports-related rants regarding the entitlement of fans and the like -- up to and including my increasing anger at the idiots who do not understand a sports fan has no right to a legal, lawful, nor fair contest.

Really, they don't.  Mayer!

But what I have seen the last almost-five days now in video-gaming has to take the cake.

I know I probably said here (and I know I said elsewhere) I was never going to play Final Fantasy XIV again.

The coronavirus and the need to kill copious amounts of time while staying the fuck at home (thank you, Samuel L. Jackson!!!!) changed all that.

Today is the official release date of the final expansion of the first story arc, Endwalker.

I do not know when I will complete it, or whether I will be able to.  More on that in a second.

I have been considering doing another video-game post on the death of Activision-Blizzard, and the DESERVED death of the company, as a going concern.

I may, well, soon.

But this is one factor in what is going on here.  Because a lot of people, disgusted with the sexual-harassment/assault culture at Blizzard (as well as increasing microtransactions, including pay-for-gold (which the company which owns the game DOES have the right to do -- unlike Real Money Trading outfits!)) have left World of Warcraft in monstrous numbers, leaving WoW with a player-base, by some estimates, of less than 2 million subscribed accounts.

By comparison, Square-Enix and FFXIV, this weekend for the "Early Access" of Endwalker, have reported, and by quite a distance (some metrics say the record could be by a multiplicative factor of at least two, if not more!!), the highest server load in the history of the game.

Which has created massive problems.

One of which, which will probably take a back seat, is a very real issue with certain processors (like mine, AMD models appear to be reported as having problems) with the game, at best, dropping or stuttering sound.  At worst, like mine, the computer will randomly freeze and force a complete reset of the system!

But that's nothing compared to their more glaring problem:  Full worlds and massive server queues.

And everyone says "This is normal for a launch!!", etc.  And they are right -- TO AN EXTENT...

The problem is, the mass exodus out of Blizzard and into Square-Enix was never foreseen.

The second problem is that the development team knew they couldn't do anything about it.

Some blame COVID, I blame Bitcoin.  There's also a definite scalper motif into this, which has bled into the high-end gaming consoles as well.  It's one of the reasons I may have to quit for a while:  Upgrading systems has become impossible because of the semiconductor shortage which has gone on the better part of 12-18 months now.

I have friends of mine who would like to update their video cards.  Here's your problem, as evidenced last June at a store in Dallas.  I want you to take special note of a gentleman in the mob just in front of the cammer before it attempts to stampede the store, upon notification that, between all the Bitcoiners and scalpers, there's no prayer there's enough video cards to get everybody one:

(Look at about 1-2 seconds into the video.  Look closely at his hand, you won't see it for long...)

There's at least one person in the damn line who has BRASS KNUCKLES!!!

That's how bad that is.

But the reason I made this post is another kind of entitled jackass...

"I WANNA PLAY WIGHT NOWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!  WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"

Just a short list of what has been going on on the Official Forums of the game (and thank God I'm banned from those several times and characters over, because somebody would get threatened with a punch to the mouth):

• "I want to thank you for making bethesda and fallout 76 look good. I was going to type a lot more, but why bother. you and the company decided that you would loose more money from player leaving then from getting more servers."
  
• Another thread:  "I don't accept your apology"
• Calls for lawsuits...
• "Shame on you Square"
• I know there was at least one all-caps profane rant on the question -- which was probably allowed to remain far longer than it should've...
• "Get over it?  No, I don't think I will."
• And on
• AND ON
• AND FUCKING ON!!!!!

The only way Square-Enix was going to get this right was not to release Endwalker for AT LEAST ANOTHER YEAR.

That's how bad the gaming console/semiconductor/video card/chip market has been FUCKED, between the scalpers and the Bitcoin geeks, with a small nod to COVID, in the last two years.

If you don't think they would've done something if they could've, you're even more arrogant than I thought.

FUCK OFF.