Final Fantasy XIV unveils new plans to reduce server congestion for the biggest servers

After a lengthy maintenance to facilitate the North American data center relocation, Final Fantasy XIV is back online and ready to play once more. Unfortunately, if you were planning to make your first post-maintenance activity a quick server transfer to Gilgamesh, you’re out of luck. The development team is making changes to facilitate the fact that certain servers (Gilgamesh, Balmung, Bahamut, Chocobo, Shinryu, and Mandragora) are heavily congested now in the hopes that those servers may be slightly less crowded for Stormblood’s release.

Character creation on the listed servers is disabled for the time being, as are server transfers to the affected servers. In addition, the total amount of gil which can be brought across servers has been upped significantly to 10 million gil on a character and up to 5 million gil per retainer. The EU data center will also be adding additional servers after the expansion launch, with special incentives to encourage transfer and leveling on the new servers. Plans are in motion to also facilitate transfers with plots of land so that moving servers need not mean relinquishing your house.

At a glance, this seems like a major change, but in practical terms it’s a fairly minor one simply because players have had to live without creating characters on several of these servers for quite some time now. Character creation on Balmung, for example, has been entirely impossible since the launch of Heavensward; formally announcing that it’s not being reopened just removes the urge to occasionally check if people might have stepped away for a while. The server is beyond full.

Server transfers to Balmung have long been the workaround for players who want to get onto the unofficial roleplaying server, and the more cynical members of the playerbase have speculated that the state of affairs was tacitly encouraged by Square-Enix to improve revenue. Obviously, that’s not the case.

In other words, today you cannot make a character on Balmung. A week ago, you could not make a character on Balmung. All that’s really changed is that the loopholes have been closed.

The problem here is that the company has a dearth of options short of forcibly moving people. EU players need some incentive for the new servers because those will be getting added with the expansion, but on the NA servers, the hope is simply that not having a huge queue and no available housing plots will be enough incentive. Right now, there’s an overwhelming majority of players on two servers, and while it speaks to how popular the game’s roleplaying community is that it has one of those servers, there’s no need for more servers, just a need for people to move around a bit.

It’s not a perfect solution, of course, but it’s the first step toward a larger solution.