Square Enix Provides Update on FFXIV Online Congestion Situation

As the number of simultaneous logins has continued to hit the upper limit in Final Fantasy XIV Online, Square Enix Producer and Director Noaki Yoshida released an update on how the studio is planning address the situation Tuesday.

In the immediate future, FFXIV will be seeing increased login caps for its European Data Center, as well as classifying all of its North American Aether Data Center Worlds as Congested. Down the line, Square Enix hopes to put out larger-scale solutions.

Square Enix Provides Update on FFXIV Online Congestion Situation

On Aug. 24 during the Patch 5.58 Hotfix maintenance, Square Enix will be changing the operating system settings for their European Data Center, enabling the login cap to be increased once they have confirmed stability post-maintenance.

In late September, Square Enix are also planning to replace some of their equipment with high-performance machines to further increase the European login cap.

Yoshida mentioned that the team has observed considerable levels of congestion on the European Data Centers over the past few weeks, especially during weekends.

"Though login queues have been quite long," Yoshida said, "please rest assured that they are working properly. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask that you continue to wait for your turn to log in should you encounter a queue."

As for FFXIV players on the North American Data Center, Yoshida announced that all eight of the Aether Worlds have been classified as Congested, disabling new character creation there until the classification is lifted.

"Despite expanding the maximum capacity as much as possible and closely monitoring the situation," Yoshida said, "the number of logins for each World have constantly remained at full capacity, which led to us taking this course of action.

"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. In the meantime, we kindly request that you consider creating a character on a World within the Primal or Crystal Data Centers, though we’re aware that they are currently quite congested as well."

Lastly, Yoshida said that Square Enix's Infrastructure and Development teams remain working on large-scale solutions to the congestion issue, such as expanding their data centers or adding new Worlds.

However, due to the ongoing global shortage for semiconductors and recent resurgence of COVID-19 cases in Japan, actual implementation for the large-scale solutions remains without a set date.