Something strange is going on with Final Fantasy 14. Most big MMORPGs go through a pretty typical arc in terms of player count: they spike soon after release, stabilize, and then slowly taper off over time. However, Final Fantasy 14 is enjoying a rare and sudden population spike thanks to WoW players jumping ship.
"Enjoying" might be the wrong word, though. Final Fantasy 14 basically doubled its concurrent player record on Steam earlier this month, which is way more players than Square Enix could handle on short notice. This has led to long login queues, trouble creating new characters, and slow performance in-game.
The obvious answer here is for Square Enix to simply buy new servers to handle the additional load, but as explained in an extensive blog post from Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida, it's not quite that simple.
"Recently, we have experienced record user numbers in all regions, with a vast amount of new players beginning their adventures," wrote Yoshida. "In particular, the increase in NA- and EU-region players over the past two weeks has been both so staggering and unexpected that many players are now having difficulty logging in or creating new characters due to server congestion, and for this we deeply apologize."
Yoshida goes on to explain that Square Enix has done what it can to raise server login caps at North American data centers by 18,000 as of July 16, but the Japanese publisher hasn't been able to secure additional EU servers yet thanks to the ongoing semiconductor shortage. And even with 18,000 extra slots, the North American servers still "experienced periods of six to seven hours at maximum login capacity" last weekend. This led Square to suspend new character creation and login waits as long as 40 minutes.
There are a few things players can do to help, however. Yoshida asked players to log out rather than remain idle when they're done playing and to not try to create new characters during peak player times. Square has also instituted a new idle timer to automatically log out players if they haven't done anything after 30 minutes.
Yoshida wasn’t able to say when things will get back to normal but did say that Square Enix is "aware of the burden we have placed on our player base, and are working diligently to lighten it in the coming weeks and months."
Square Enix had better act fast. Pre-orders for Endwalker, FF14’s November expansion, are up 160% compared to Shadowbringers, which likely means an even bigger population spike is a few short months away.