The director of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker announced that all sales of the full versions of the game will be halted. The reason for this is the sudden great popularity of the MMORPG, which is causing extremely long wait times when logging in. Players will also receive a total of 3 weeks of free game time.
The situation in brief:
- Since summer 2021, FFXIV has experienced a significant increase in player numbers. The transfer of major WoW content creators like Asmongold, Preach, and Bellular to FFXIV garnered much media attention, leading to many new players and records on Steam.
- However, it also caused problems since the game’s servers weren’t designed for the number of players. The director of FFXIV, Naoki Yoshida, apologized at the time for the queues and server issues. Measures such as automatic AFK logout were introduced.
- Before the launch of the new addon Endwalker, Yoshida stated again that the situation unfortunately has not improved. Due to the global shortage of semiconductors, it is only difficult for the team to acquire new servers in a short time, Yoshida said. Therefore, he warned players that there would be problems at the launch of Endwalker.
- Since the Early Access of Endwalker on December 3, FFXIV has been overrun daily. Especially in the evening, queues of 3,000 to 7,000 players form, which proceed very slowly. Additionally, players are plagued by Error 2002, which kicks them out and often puts them back at the end of the queue.
The MMORPG is currently simply too popular and has more players accessing it than it can handle. Now the director Yoshida has commented on the situation again.
Delivery and sale of FFXIV will be suspended
This is what Yoshida says: In the new statement, the director of FFXIV presented new measures to combat the server overcrowding. This primarily includes the complete suspension of sales of the full versions of FFXIV.
Due to the high number of players, especially during peak times, there are extremely long wait times that regularly exceed our server capacity. For this reason, we have decided to temporarily suspend the sale and delivery of the FINAL FANTASY XIV Starter Edition as well as the Complete Edition. Even though players with an active subscription can log in preferentially, it is not currently possible for players of the free trial version to play outside of late evening / early morning hours. To enable them to play, the registration for new free trial accounts will also be temporarily suspended.
Yoshida explains that this measure will be implemented gradually, as Square Enix needs to coordinate with its distribution partners.
This situation has occurred multiple times with FFXIV. At the release of the reboot “A Realm Reborn”, sales had to be temporarily suspended because the servers were full. Additionally, the digital version of FFXIV was briefly “sold out” in the Square Enix Store in summer 2021.
3 weeks of game time as compensation
This was also said: The long queues and issues with Error 2002 have persisted for 2 weeks now and are frustrating many players who cannot come to play due to their work in the evenings.
Therefore, all players who have an active subscription in FFXIV on December 21 will receive 14 days of free game time as compensation for the inconveniences. Together with the previous compensation, players will receive a total of 21 days of free game time in the MMORPG.
What’s next?
Here’s the update status: Despite the server problems, the FFXIV team plans to maintain their schedule for releasing new updates.
- On December 21, the normal mode of the new raid Pandaemonium will be released
- On January 4, the epic version of the raid will go live along with new armor, crafting recipes, and the fun dungeon Euphoraton.
Director Yoshida apologizes to the raiding community of FFXIV at this point. Upon the release of each raid tier, there is a race for the first kill of all bosses in FFXIV, as in many other MMORPGs.
This racing will now be negatively affected by the server issues. There is no guarantee that all raiders will have a fair chance in the race because they now depend on the length of the queues and Error 2002.
However, delaying the patch would also affect subsequent patches like 6.1, and therefore, 6.05 is still scheduled for January 4, according to Yoshida.
Here’s the status of the servers: Since July, the FFXIV developers have been working on building a new data center and new worlds. However, even though the team is investing “much more money than usual,” the work is being delayed due to the semiconductor shortage and the physical shortage of server equipment.
With the help of IT suppliers from around the world, we are slowly receiving information about delivery dates and quantities. Given the high specifications required for FFXIV servers and the fact that adding a single logical data center requires hundreds of servers, we definitely need much more time, but we are gradually seeing progress. Accordingly, the server and infrastructure teams are working together to plan new additions, and we hope to provide a sort of roadmap by the end of January 2022.
The plan is to add new servers in every region, especially in Europe and North America. However, it is still unclear whether this will be done gradually or in a large update.
As soon as there are updates on this, there will be another statement from Yoshida.
We also recommend you try the MMORPG in our podcast, although it’s currently not a good time for that:
Play Final Fantasy XIV if you want to do something good for yourself
