With massive swathes of players expected to make the journey to Tural, Final Fantasy 14 has announced its server travel and changing restrictions for the Dawntrail launch, including server and data center lockdowns.
A new Lodestone post shares the tight server-hopping restrictions that will be in place in order to ensure players can access the game as smoothly as possible. The developers at Creative Business Unit 3 mentioned multiple times, including in this post, that while they have fixed many of the server systems, FFXIV is still more popular than ever. Therefore, server congestion is essentially expected.
Data Center Travel will be unavailable among and between the most popular servers. For NA, that’s Aether, Primal and Crystal; for Europe, that’s Chaos and Light. In addition, these Data Centers will NOT allow World Travel—that is, hopping between servers within the same Data Center. However, players CAN return to their own Home World (the one their character was created on) via the home screen’s Character Select.
Japanese Worlds and Data Centers have different restrictions, as they’ll simply have a lower cap on players that can access non-home servers.
Players of all servers will be able to go into the Oceania Data Center, as this has a lower population. Meanwhile, North Americans will be able to visit their region’s Dynamis Data Center, and Europeans will be able to utilize the “probationary” Shadow Data Center, as outlined in a recent blog post.
If you plan on creating a new character for Dawntrail, do it ahead of time (and perhaps use the free Fantasia via a quest they're offering). Character Creation won't be possible on "congested" servers, which for now are smaller in number, and will probably expand when 4,000 people are trying to get in to each slightly-popular server.
The post also explains the login queue system, common types of errors, and usual “peak congestion times,” though with Early Access taking place during a weekend, the post notes congestion may flux. The 30-minute AFK timer has returned, too.
The ideas are at least understandable; I can personally attest that World Travel was impossible during the Endwalker launch. At least, it was a hassle to a busier world—I spent eleven hours sitting and waiting to transfer from Diabolos to Balmung, where all my friends were already hanging out. It’s even documented deep in my Screenshots folder:
(Look, I’m part of the problem!)
What do you think—do you think it’s too restrictive? Where will you be playing?
