'Final Fantasy 14' Producer Addresses Server Congestion, Population Problems

“Final Fantasy 14” players will have to wait a while for a concrete solution to the game’s server congestion problems.

In a blog post, Naoki Yoshida, “Final Fantasy 14’s” producer and director, addressed the community’s growing concern about the game’s heavily-congested servers and other problems related to the overpopulation caused by the sudden rise of the game’s popularity, saying that players can expect band-aid solutions in the meantime while they work on upgrading their infrastructure.

Yoshida noted the dramatic increase of “Final Fantasy 14’s” playerbase across all of the regions, attributing the popularity spurt to the coming “Endwalker” expansion.

He said that since the player numbers spiked, all “Final Fantasy 14” servers have been under higher stress, especially the North America and Europe servers, which have been buckling under the pressure.

Players have recently been having trouble joining servers and creating new characters. To reduce lengthy queue times, Yoshida said that they were going to increase the maximum number of simultaneous log-ins in the North America and Europe data centers by a total of 18,000 or 750 per world server.

However, he noted that only the North American servers will experience this change for now as upgrades for Europe-based data centers are still pending.

As for character creation troubles, Yoshida humbly asked the playerbase to avoid creating new characters during peak hours of the game.

The automatic logout feature that Square Enix originally planned to ship together with “Endwalker” will be implemented into the game earlier due to the current crisis. Players who are in the game but are inactive for extended periods of time will automatically be logged out to make room for players who are waiting in the queue.

More world servers and data centers are on their way, but Yoshida said that it might take some time before they arrive. He said that they were planning to upgrade their server infrastructure once patch 6.0 was released, but they were forced to re-evaluate their plans based on the current situation.

According to Yoshida, they are in the final phases of the implementation of the new Oceania servers, and they plan to increase global server counts as soon as possible. However, complications with COVID-19-related travel restrictions and the global semiconductor shortage have drastically hindered the speed of their progress.