Final Fantasy XIV details plan to handle the surge of new players

Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida posted an online letter today detailing the MMO’s plans to address the recent influx of new players.

The game’s population has seen massive growth in recent weeks. This is in part due to dissatisfaction with World of Warcraft, and it’s also because of Twitch viewers following their favorite streamers. Popular WoW player Asmongold started adventuring in FFXIV earlier this month.

All of these new players have resulted in longer queue times and, sometimes, the inability to make new characters on some servers. To combat this, Square Enix has increased the maximum number of logins allowed on each server. It has also implemented an automatic lockout feature, originally planned to rollout for the launch of the Endwalker expansion on November 19. This will log out players who have been inactive for an extended period of time.

The team is also moving faster to add new servers, which it notes will be challenging due to the semiconductor shortage. Final Fantasy XIV already announced that new servers based in an Oceania data center are on their way, which will benefit players based in Australia and surrounding countries.

The post concludes with a message from Yoshida.

“As producer, the responsibility for being unable to predict the current influx of new players falls to me,” he writes. “The days before an expansion’s launch are supposed to be ones of excitement, but instead they’ve brought many players grief, and for that I, personally, am extremely sorry.”

Of course, no one could have seen this surge coming. Final Fantasy XIV is actually at the end of an expansion cycle. It should be a slow period for the game. But interest has spiked because of the shortcomings of WoW, the evangelizing of fans, and through streams such as Asmongold’s.

Still, this kind of direct and humble communication is part of the reason why FFXIV players love and respect the game’s director.