Perhaps, this is a good problem to have in the eyes of a corporation but a not-so-good problem for the players affected; however, it appears that Final Fantasy XIV and its newest expansion, Endwalker, are suffering from a bit of success.
For those unaware, the influx of players from World of Warcraft along with other players from other games who are wanting to check it out has joined the flood of returning players who had been waiting two years for the Endwalker expansion which would see the conclusion of a 10-year story. This caused Square Enix to announce that their MMORPG had reached 25 million accounts… quite possibly one of the most impressive feats in MMORPG history.
However, that acclaim came at a cost… a login process that is seeing players wait over an hour or longer in queues stacked anywhere between 1500 players on smaller realms up to as much as 20,000 players. The game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, had apologized profusely for this over and over again; however, there is very little that Square Enix can do about the situation.
The solution to the problem is extremely simple: Add more servers around the world; however, the solution which should be a cakewalk pre-2019 is faced with the onslaught of a global pandemic, a supply chain breakdown, and the slowing down and (in some cases) halting of semiconductor production… a key component to any electronic device… which includes servers to which each data center would need hundreds of, according to Yoshida.
While he has assured us that there has been some movement, details on what that movement is won’t be revealed until late January 2022. Until then, Square Enix had to take some proactive countermeasures to make do with what they had… which meant fixing a login server bug that had existed since version 1.0 of the game, increasing max capacity on realms and login servers, and offering free game time totaling 21 days (7 for the initial week and an additional 14 for the ongoing issues).
However, it’s merely a band-aid to a leg that is still broken. This has prompted Square Enix to take a more drastic measure. Today, they announced that they have suspended shipments, halted digital sales of the game, and canceled the option to take part in a free trial. In addition, all realms have blocked the ability to create new characters. In other words, Final Fantasy XIV just went into quarantine to protect its servers from incurring any further increased load times.
All of this is temporary… or so we thought. The idea was that players would enjoy the main story quest and then stop logging in until the content updates, thus giving smaller wait times so more people could play the game but despite all of the challenges, Yoshida stated that their patch release schedule will go on as planned which means more and more people will want to log in to play the new raids and feature that are coming in 6.01, 6.05, and beyond.
Yoshida thanked the players for their patience and, again, apologized for the inconvenience.
Source: Producer’s Newsletter, Square Enix
