If you’ve been following the MMO sphere for the last month, you’ll know that a lot of players are not happy with the current state of World of Warcraft, to the point where many are moving over to other games such as Final Fantasy XIV, be it exclusively or just dipping their toes in. Even colossal names such as Asmongold, Rich W Campbell, moistcr1tikal and summit1g (just to name a few) are some of the bigger names that started streaming the game recently to tens of thousands of views, something FFXIV’s Twitch directory has never really seen.
With them came their audience and a huge rush of players over the last month, taxing the servers and causing congestion to the point of queue times we hadn’t seen since the launch of an expansion. Obviously, they’re not solely responsible for the increase in sprouts as the hype for Endwalker has been increasing over the last few months, but they certainly contributed to it massively.
Because of these concerns, Naoki Yoshi haswritten a letter to the fansdetailing some of the changes and challenges ahead of this influx of players.
On the front end, Square Enix has made all worlds “Standard”, removing any of the “Preferred Worlds” in the process, which normally would give newer players up to a certain level dramatically more experience. They explain that, instead of creating “Congested Worlds” like they have in the past, it would prevent players from truly creating characters on specific servers, ultimately funneling them into others.
In addition, to combat the congestion, Square Enix has put into place a 30-minute timer that will logout AFK players. They have done this before during the launch of expansions and other events, but there are ways to get around this if you’re someone who likes to dance in Limsa for 24/7. They have raised the cap of how many players are able to play at any given time, increasing the maximum count by 750 per server in North America, with plans in the future to expand this for the European servers.
They’re looking to reevaluate how they will be implementing new data centers (notably Oceanic which was announced not too long ago) after 6.0 and going into 7.0, although Yoshida-san has state that the insufficient semiconductor storage provided by COVID-19 has already prolonged some of their plans and travel restrictions have obviously prevented them from physically visiting these data center locations for management.
