It seems that the recent influx of new players in Final Fantasy XIV is both a blessing and a curse for Square Enix. In an attempt to stabilize the game’s servers, the company has developed a new system that will kick inactive players from the servers to help solve the congestion problem.
Naoki Yoshida, producer and director for Final Fantasy XIV, wrote on the official website about the company’s plans for the game moving forward.
Login Caps
The game has plenty of servers scattered across Asia, North America, and Europe. Yoshida said that not all of the servers have the same capacity, and that is why there are certain caps in place.
Yoshida explained that this limit is necessary because of the data center’s matching server. The matching server can only handle so much information at a time, so certain limits must be imposed for it to function properly.
With that said, the login caps for North America have been increased slightly due to an upgrade to the matching server. This effectively raises the number of logins for the region to approximately 750 per world server.
In addition, the EU data centers are going to be upgraded soon, though the status is currently pending.
Wait Times and Automatic Logout
As is customary with such games, once a server reaches full capacity, those who want to log into the game will be put in a queue.
Yoshida humbly asks players to log out when they’re not actively playing to make way for those who want to get into the action.
As a temporary measure, a new system will be implemented by Patch 5.58 that will boot out AFK players for an extended period.
The feature was supposed to be used at the Endwalker expansion’s launch but developers had to use it early to alleviate server congestion.
Data Center Upgrades and Hurdles
Yoshida said that the company plans to expand its capacity by adding new data centers and increasing world servers. While that is a good idea, the company is facing some hurdles, which are mostly due to the pandemic.
According to the game director, the insufficient supply of semiconductors plus stricter travel restrictions has prevented them from speeding up their upgrade process.
He added that they’re continually working hard to make sure that everything will fall into place. He asks the players to be patient at this time.
In closing, Yoshida takes full responsibility for the issues that have plagued the FFXIV community right now. He wants to assure them that they’re doing everything they can to lighten up the situation.
So, are you in favor of automatic logouts as a temporary way of reducing server congestion?
