Square Enix addresses Final Fantasy 14 server issues

After recently selling out of digital copies, Final Fantasy 14 producer & director Naoki Yoshida has addressed the issues players have been facing after “an extreme influx of new players.” 

In a news post on Final Fantasy 14’s website, Yoshida called the sudden growth of the game “staggering and unexpected,” as the growth has been so huge that players have been left unable to log in or create new characters once lucky enough to get inside. 

As you might expect, the server issues Final Fantasy 14 has been experiencing are primarily caused by the simultaneous login population cap being reached, as each data center can only handle so much, Yoshida explained throughout the post. 

Thankfully, Square Enix will be raising the simultaneous login server caps where possible, with North American servers recently having received an extra 18,000 slots on July 16th. Similar improvements are planned for European servers, however, these upgrades are still pending, so players will have to wait a little while longer. 

In the meantime, players have been asked to be a little more aware of the servers struggles, with Yoshida asking players to “log out of their characters rather than remaining logged in while idle,” as well as to “avoid creating new characters during peak congestion times.”

As “an emergency measure to combat congestion,” the Final Fantasy 14 team are also planning to implement an auto-logout feature in Patch 5.58, pushing it up from its originally planned release at the launch of the Endwalker expansion. “We understand that this feature will not be the most popular with our players,” Yoshida acknowledged, assuring players that it’s an “effective means to temporarily combat congestion.” 

In closing, Yoshida apologized to players again, as he had done throughout the news post, saying that “the days before an expansion’s launch are supposed to be ones of excitement, but instead they’ve brought many players grief, and for that I, personally, am extremely sorry.”

With Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker set to launch on November 23rd, hopefully, the issues the game has been experiencing will have been able to be rectified by then, as with a record number of preorders, there’s sure to be plenty of demand on the servers.