Final Fantasy XIV's NA Data Center To Be Relocated, Cross-World Party Matching Incoming

The release of Stormblood is going to change a lot for Final Fantasy XIV players. In order to prepare for the upcoming launch, Final Fantasy XIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida has announced that Square Enix will soon be relocating the North American data center.

Yoshida states in the announcement that "the Final Fantasy XIV NA data center was Square Enix’s first attempt at establishing game servers outside of Japan" and, because of that fact, there have been various challenges involved, including "voltage overload and a lack of physical space for additional servers." With the data center's relocation, Square Enix hopes to remedy these issues and "[increase] server efficiency."

The relocation will also make the following features possible.

• Increased inventory capacity
• Worldless (cross-world) party matching and friend management
• Additional content & increased field size for new areas

You may remember that it was previously announced that Stormblood would introduce an increase in maximum inventory size and that its new city of Kugane would simultaneously be the size of Ishgard and seamless, so those two updates aren't particularly surprising. Cross-world parties were introduced back in December and it seems that the data center relocation will help Square Enix support the feature with additional features such as "party matching and friend management."

Yoshida does note that, due to the relocation, some players may experience an increase in ping. However, should their pin remain below 200 ms, there should be nothing to worry about. According to Yoshida, the players that will be hit the hardest are European players that are "playing on an NA data center World."

You can read the full announcement here.