The head of Final Fantasy XIV, Naoki Yoshida, addresses the players in a message. He informs that part of the MMORPG’s servers are severely overloaded and the developers are working on solutions to the problem. Meanwhile, players joke that the launch of the new expansion Endwalker will be fun.
The situation in short:
- Since July, FFXIV has seen a significant increase in player numbers. On Steam, the number of active players skyrocketed and reached a new record. It even briefly overtook Destiny 2.
- Several major streamers like Asmongold, RichWCampbell, and Summit1g started playing FFXIV in the past month, bringing their communities into the game. They provided the MMORPG with a lot of fresh media attention.
- The sudden influx of new players caused server issues, leading to login queues of over 1,500 players and loading problems on the lobby servers.
- Director Yoshida already apologized for the inconveniences and assured that the team is working to procure new servers to handle the influx.
Now, Yoshida speaks again in a blog post (via Lodestone) with news about the current situation regarding player numbers and the servers.
An entire data center is overloaded
What the head says: In the new blog post, Director Yoshida addresses the players and explains that the FFXIV team continues to fight against server overcrowding. With the current maintenance, the number of maximum simultaneous logins on the European servers will be increased. This is to counteract the long queues that occur mainly in the evenings and on weekends.
Yoshida also reported that the 8 servers of the Aether data center in Final Fantasy XIV are completely overloaded:
All worlds within the North American Aether data center will be classified as full after the maintenance for Patch 5.58. Despite our efforts to raise the limit of simultaneous logins as much as possible, the number of logged-in players continuously reaches the upper limit on all worlds. For this reason, we have decided to take the following measures at this time.
Until the worlds are no longer categorized as full, it will not be possible for players to create new characters on the worlds of the Aether data center. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience to those of you who wish to embark on new adventures with your friends.
If we were to allow another increase in player characters, it could extend the login wait times to several hours. That is why we have decided on this measure. We cannot deny that there is also an enormous player presence on the Primal and Crystal data centers, but we would truly appreciate it if you could consider creating a new character on those worlds.
Naoki Yoshida in the blog post
The 8 servers of Aether are completely closed to new players. There, neither new characters can be created, nor can one transfer to these servers through the paid world transfer function. To counter this, other NA servers have also been set to “preferred” to make a switch from Aether more attractive. New players receive significant EXP bonuses and other benefits on preferred worlds.
In the past, it has often happened that individual servers of FFXIV were marked as overloaded and closed. Especially the popular role-playing server Balmung frequently fell into this category. However, it has never happened before that an entire data center had to be closed due to being overwhelmed by new players.
This is what the developers will do: In the blog post, Yoshida further explains that the developer and infrastructure teams continue to work on a solution to the problem. New additional servers are to help alleviate the load. However, procurement is proving to be problematic in the current situation.
On one hand, there continues to be a global shortage of semiconductors needed for the servers. On the other hand, there has been a significant increase in COVID-19 infections in Japan, which restricts the international travel capabilities of the infrastructure team. Yoshida expresses concerns about whether the team can work on new data centers on-site.
Players expect burning servers at the release of Endwalker
This is what is being discussed: In the reddit thread regarding the blog post and on social media, FFXIV players are discussing the current situation around server overcrowding. Their reactions are a mix of amazement and some gallows humor about the new expansion Endwalker, which will be released on November 23.
Actually, FFXIV should currently be in a “quiet phase.” The time between the last patch of the current expansion and the first patch of the next expansion is usually a period when some players temporarily put their subscriptions on hold because they know that no major new content will be released.
Accordingly, many now expect a further significant increase in active player numbers when inactive players reactivate their subscriptions and return to FFXIV at the release of Endwalker.
The Endwalker expansion will be hot. Literally. The servers will be burning.
reddit user Fuzia
[…] And it’s supposed to be the inactive time right now. We will be stuck in queues during Endwalker until December.
reddit user Stepwolve
The launch of the last expansion, Shadowbringers, went remarkably smoothly and without issues, which earned the developers much praise from the community for their work. Many players feared that a situation would arise again like during the launch of Stormblood. Back then, countless players got stuck in a particular quest known as “Raubahn EX”.
Even though the developer team led by Yoshida is making efforts to counter the server overload, there are doubts that they will manage to resolve the issues by the launch of Endwalker. The current situation regarding COVID and the semiconductor shortage for the servers complicates their work.
What do you think? Do you expect a difficult start for Endwalker or do you believe that Yoshida and his team will get the issues under control by the end of November? Discuss with us in the comments.
