Final Fantasy 14 has been experiencing a massive surge in players this summer, and now one of its North American data centers is closed to new character creation until further notice, Square Enix announced Tuesday.
In a notice put out by Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida, he said that all the worlds on the Aether data center will be labeled as “congested” until further notice. This means that no new characters can be created on this data center. Notably, Aether is the data center that a bulk of streamers, like Asmongold, have been playing on, though streamers are not the sole reason for the congestion.
“Were the number of characters to increase any further, it could result in login queues taking up to several hours, which is why we needed to take this approach,” Yoshida explained. “In the meantime, we kindly request that you consider creating a character on a World within the Primal or Crystal Data Centers, though we’re aware that they are currently quite congested as well.”
As of writing this, most of the worlds on the Primal and Crystal data centers are open for character creation, and all of the worlds in Crystal actually have a “preferred” status. This means that characters made in these worlds will have a special EXP buff up to level 70. Transferring your character from a congested world to a preferred world is also free.
The Final Fantasy 14 team has been looking into solutions for the bustling popularity of the game, and while it’s planning large-scale solutions, the global shortage of semiconductors has gotten in the way of creating more worlds and upgrading servers. There’s currently an automatic AFK timer that will kick players off if they’ve been away for more than 30 minutes, but more solutions are coming.
Source: Polygon
