Final Fantasy XIV Producer Naoki Yoshida Addresses Login Queues And Server Congestion

Over the past few weeks, Final Fantasy XIV has experienced a sudden surge of players, resulting in long queue times as the servers strain to handle the unexpected load. Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida apologized to the community in a recent blog post and assured the community that they’re doing everything they can to address the ongoing login problems.

“Expectations for [Endwalker] are high and have resulted in an increased interest in FINAL FANTASY XIV—especially in North America and Europe, where we are currently experiencing an extreme influx of new players,” explained Yoshida.

“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,” he said.

Yoshida went on to explain in great detail what they’ve been doing to alleviate the problem, which includes raising the login caps for both the NA and EU servers. As of July 16, NA server caps have been raised by roughly 750 players per server. EU server caps, however, have only been raised by a smaller amount while the team works on upgrading the servers in the EU data center.

Unfortunately, the team has met several roadblocks with the EU server upgrades due to the global shortage of semiconductors and computer supplies and travel restrictions due to COVID-19.

As a temporary fix, the devs have implemented an AFK timer with Patch 5.58 that will automatically log inactive players out of the game after 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy XIV continues to break player concurrency records on Steam.