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Final Fantasy 14's brand new Endwalker expansion has launched today for those who have early access, while everyone else will have to wait for its proper release next week. It's a given that the launch of any popular MMO title is going to be a little bumpy, as the servers get congested with everyone trying to log on and access the content at the same time.
Long-time players of Final Fantasy 14 will likely be familiar with this situation from past expansion launches, but new players might be surprised to find the hefty queue times that will await them when they try to log on for the foreseeable future. Additionally, many players can't even begin to queue as they are plagued with Error 2002.
Updated December 5, 2021: Square Enix has released further information in regards to Error 2002, explaining two primary causes and possible solutions, as well as additional information on other errors.
How Do You Fix Lobby Server Error 2002?
When trying to log onto Final Fantasy 14, you might find yourself presented with the following error message: "The lobby server connection has encountered an error." This pesky little problem is Error 2002 and it can pop up and thwart your attempts to access the game after you have already been queuing for a while, or before you even make it to the character selection screen.
Square Enix has released a statement on the issue asking for players to try again after a short wait.
Square Enix has detailed in a new post that Error 2002 has two primary causes: when there are more than 17,000 players in a login queue, or when "your internet connection experiences packet loss or a period of network instability, causing the server connection to be momentarily disconnected".
While the first cause can only be resolved by the congestion problems easing in general, to avoid receiving a 2002 error for the second, it is recommended that you switch to a hard-wired connection instead of Wi-Fi to improve connection stability.
However, players have reported that there is a workaround for this error. Should you receive Error 2002, before heading to the character selection screen, go into the Data Center menu from the title screen and reconfirm your data center, then you should be able to access the character selection screen and begin queuing once more.
While it could be pure coincidence, when we encountered Error 2002 and tried this — it worked! Now it's time to visit the moon!
Unable to Obtain Character Data Error
There's an additional error plaguing players for the launch of Endwalker, but this one is nowhere near as irritating as Error 2002.
You might find yourself presented with the "Unable to Obtain Character Data" message when accessing the character selection screen — so your actual character and their details won't be visible. However, you can still choose to log in with them, so you can ignore this error really. It's simply a symptom of the game under strain from many players attempting to log in at the same time.
Error 4004, 5003, and 5006
Square Enix has explained that these errors occur due to your connection to the login management server timing out as a result of waiting in a login queue for a long time. There is nothing you can do as a player to resolve this, but the team is currently working on extending the session time. In the meantime, we'll all just have to keep trying to log back in and hope for the best.