The MMO faces an enormous surge in players following popular streamers.
Final Fantasy XIV Online sees “user numbers recorded in all regions” after some popular streamers play the MMO. A major expansion is expected in November, and players may return or pick up the game before the arrival of Endwalker.
However, the servers of the game are struggling to handle players’ influx. Naoki Yoshida, producer and director, said many North American and European players recently had problems logging into or creating characters due to the “server congestion.”
Some North American servers were up to 7 hours at certain points last weekend and the average queue times were approximately 10-20 minutes. Players had to wait up to 40 minutes on European servers.
Square Enix has revealed some measures to tackle the server problems of Final Fantasy XIV Online. It has accelerated plans to boot players who are too long idle. This feature is usually enabled when new expansions come to help the systems cope with an increase in player numbers, as Polygon notes, but Square Enix returns them early. Yoshida also asked players whether they were inactive to log out and free spots.
The publisher says the North American data centers of the game have been updated recently. From this week onwards, the game supports up to 18,000 simultaneous logins — up to 750 players per world server. The European data centers will soon be upgraded similarly.
In the meantime, Yoshida has noted that the global semi-conductive lack has slowed server delivery to certain data centres. Visiting COVID-19 restrictions also prevented server infrastructure teams from visiting data centers.
It’s fascinating to see a game that has been around for eight years, four months after the next development, have been so massive, sudden increase in popularity. However, it highlights once again the impact streamers have on gaming culture.
Latest: November 2024
