Server hardware has been an ongoing thing for Final Fantasy XIV, so it’s probably not a huge shock that the developers are seeing how well cloud servers will work for game servers. The team has already tested the servers out behind the scenes, but starting on November 20th test servers will go live so that players can stress the heck out of the servers by playing normally. And you’ll be able to jump right in, as the stress test will award everyone 50 million gil, a level skip to 80 for every job, a main story skip to bring you to the start of Endwalker, and a number of fireworks.
You’ll need those fireworks. To celebrate things, obviously.
The stress test will last for a week, and the announcement itself stresses that after the test characters will be deleted and you can’t take it with you. (Have players made jokes about roleplaying Ancients facing the Final Days? Of course they have.) If you want to put strain on the server and see how resilient the cloud servers will be in the face of players, go ahead and log in before November 27th. There’s no word on any incentives for testing, but at least it will be frictionless to try.[AL:XIV]