The release of the Endwalker expansion from Final Fantasy XIV caused severe congestion on Square Enix’s game servers. Following this event, Naoki Yoshida, the producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV spoke about expansion and optimization of game servers.
Yoshida first announces the early opening ofa new data center in the Pacific, two weeks ahead of schedule. Square Enix only wanted to open three Worlds for Oceania when the expansion was released, these will eventually be 5 worlds that will be possible for more fluidity for players in the region. The transfer will be initially free and will allow players to migrate from European, American and even Japanese servers.
Migrations from January 26
Given the server issues following the release of Endwalker, the Home World change service had been temporarily closed. This January 26, it should reopen and allow players to migrate to another world, as for Oceanian players, except for worlds considered overcrowded.
After the 6.1 update, the game will also receive a travel system between data centers. For example, it will be possible to migrate between two datacenters of the same server. The migration between Japanese, American and European servers will be impossible. In the future, migration between servers still under study will also be possible. It is important to note that you can only perform this migration only on the character selection screen.
There are currently 3 data centers for the game in Japan, for a total of 32 Worlds. Square-Enix intends to increase the number of datacenters to 4 to ensure more stable access to servers and more possible connections for players. The number of Worlds will however be maintained at 32. As for the number of connections, it will be extended by more than 50,000 places. US servers will see the same improvement, going from 3 to 4 datacenters, managing 8 worlds each, for a total of 32 worlds. However, this will be done in 2 steps, the first one in August 2022, then the second in spring/summer 2023. Ditto for the European servers, which will evolve in two stages, the first adding 2 Worlds to each of the 2 datacenters, for a total of 8 worlds per datacenter then in a second step, the addition of a third datacenter also comprising 8 different worlds.
Resumption of the sale of the game
The resumption of the sale of the downloadable versions of the game will take place this January 25 at 9 a.m. (Paris time). However, Yoshida points out that if the servers become congested again, the sale will be suspended again. He concludes in apologizing once again for the inconvenience caused and confides that everything will be done in the future to avoid this kind of problem and guarantee players the best possible playing conditions.