Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is having server queue issues months before it's even out, as Square Enix's online store crashes under the weight of pre-orders

 Final Fantasy 14's expansions, uh, tend to break a little when they first launch. It's not an ideal situation, but it's fairly par for the course when it comes to launches of this scale: The solution is almost never 'just buy more servers', rather, it's often a cat's cradle nightmare of tangled systems. 

Game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) says his team has braced for impact at a recent PAX talk, but that's an impact in late June/early July. Turns out, Dawntrail's having server issues right now. Its online store is, well, a little on fire. Failed card payments, broken buttons, 404 codes, the works. 

Even the Steam version of the game was having trouble. One particularly worrisome consequence is that pre-order bonus codes—which you can use to get a fancy EXP-boosting earring and a minion—have been taking a while to pop up in people's inboxes: "Rest assured, codes are being delivered sequentially, but the email may take up to several hours to arrive due to the high volume of orders."

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