Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail pre-orders are a huge nightmare for Square Enix

Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail is now available for pre-order, but good luck trying to get this expansion in advance. The game’s popularity is once again at fault here, as there are too many pre-orders and only so many requests these websites can take before crashing.

Starting this mess of pre-orders was the Square Enix store not accepting credit card payments, which was so bad that the company acknowledged it on Twitter. In the post, Square asked the fans to try paying with PayPal instead, though they did tell fans to use guest checkout since there are issues with the site.

One of those issues is that fans caused a ton of traffic to try and pre-order Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail, resulting in error messages. Sometimes, the error messages would even come when attempting to pay for the expansion, which angered a ton of customers.

Anyone trying to get it on the Square Enix store probably wants to get the physical Collector’s Edition, which has plenty of goodies. Naturally, some fans don’t care for this and attempted to pre-order the expansion on Steam instead. Sadly, there are also issues here, as Valve didn’t send registration codes and Square Enix eventually worked it out with them.

Just when it seemed like things were getting better for fans pre-ordering Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail, they got worse. The few fans who were able to successfully pre-order this expansion in the Square Enix store didn’t get their codes right away. Square had to tell fans on social media that their codes might be delayed for a few hours, making things even messier.

We’re sure some MMOs would love to have some of these problems, but this goes to show how you can never prepare for a massive success. It’s obviously good that the company has fans who are dying to play the latest expansion, but trying to prepare for a rabid fanbase must be a nightmare.

Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail will be released on July 2 for all systems.