Final Fantasy XIV has been surging in popularity in recent months, and the developers are seeking to address how to handle the increased number of simultaneous logins to its servers.
The new Patch 5.58 Hotfix now classifies all worlds from the Aether data centre – one of three North American servers – as “congested”, meaning that players will be unable to create new characters on any world in this data centre until this classification is lifted.
In an update from the game’s official website posted yesterday (August 24), producer and director Naoki Yoshida explained, “Despite expanding the maximum capacity as much as possible and closely monitoring the situation, the number of logins for each World have constantly remained at full capacity, which led to us taking this course of action.”
We would like to share a message from #FFXIV Producer & Director Naoki Yoshida that provides an update regarding the congestion on North American and European data centers and our plans moving forward. https://t.co/LsrnAwOhIZ pic.twitter.com/35AJKZBI30
— FINAL FANTASY XIV (@FF_XIV_EN) August 24, 2021
“Were the number of characters to increase any further, it could result in login queues taking up to several hours, which is why we needed to take this approach,” he continued.
“In the meantime, we kindly request that you consider creating a character on a World within the Primal or Crystal Data Centres, though we’re aware that they are currently quite congested as well.”
The Hotfix has however brought some improvements for European players, which will be getting a login cap increase once the team has “confirmed stability post-maintenance”. New high-performance machines being introduced in late September will further increase the cap.
“We’ve observed considerable levels of congestion on the European Data Centres over the past few weeks, especially during weekends. Though login queues have been quite long, please rest assured that they are working properly,” Yoshida added.
“We apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask that you continue to wait for your turn to log in should you encounter a queue.”
Final Fantasy XIV‘s popularity is only likely to continue surging as ahead of the release of the Endwalker expansion in November.
Elsewhere, Sea Of Thieves has started a new time-limited crossover event with Borderlands.
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