If it isn’t already obvious, Final Fantasy XIV has a lot of people trying to play the new Endwalker expansion, which opened up to early access for those who pre-ordered this past Friday. How many people? Drawing data from Steam specifically, the MMORPG has hit a new concurrency high on that platform, cresting over 94,000 players as of yesterday according to both SteamDB and Steam Charts. For context, the last time the game hit a new high-water mark on Steam was in July 2021, with over 64,000 players in the wake of World of Warcraft’s poorly regarded June update. (We do note here that it’s generally accepted wisdom that most of XIV’s players do not play on Steam, but it’s a useful metric nonetheless.)
Naturally, this massive groundswell of people trying to connect all at once has caused no end of problems for those trying to play Endwalker or the MMORPG at all, as login queues over the thousands have been the watchword since early access started. As a result, producer and director Naoki Yoshida announced that all players will be getting seven free days of subscription time as recompense when the expansion officially launches on December 7th. Furthermore, that free subscription time could be extended depending on how long server congestion persists.“Across the FFXIV service as a whole, the number of simultaneous logins has reached the hardware limit, and as a result, logging in has required an extremely long time, especially during ‘peak hours’ when we tend to see increased player activity. For this, I am truly sorry.”
In the meantime, Yoshida’s post offers some explanations on why certain login errors are occurring as well as some timetables of peak hours for each region in order to help players schedule their play time. A separate post from Yoshida also elaborates on other issues that have arisen like miscalculated XP earnings that end up rewarding less XP than announced, Paladin class gear being undyeable when it should be, and NPCs floating in the air or walking on water when they are following player characters; that issue requires a patch that is currently being worked on.
