Final Fantasy 14's producer Naoki Yoshida took to the FFXIV website last night to address the ongoing concerns of the influx of players to the MMO, specifically just how the servers are holding up among the rush to Eorzea. The post details login caps for European data centers, as well as what the team at Square Enix are doing to alleviate congestion.
In the post, FFXIV's Yoshi-P touched on login caps for European data centers, stating that the login cap has been increased with today's Patch 5.58 Hotfix maintenance. Additionally, this September, Square Enix is hoping to replace the actual hardware with "high-performance machines" to be able to increase the cap even more.
Aether data center worlds, though, aren't quite in the same shape. Yoshida states that the team has classified Aether data center worlds as "congested." As such, in order to avoid login queues that would take "hours," the congestion desgination means that new players will be unable to make new toons on the Aether data center worlds, at least until the congested classification is lifted.
"Were the number of characters to increase any further, it could result in login queues taking up to several hours, which is why we needed to take this approach. In the meantime, we kindly request that you consider creating a character on a World within the Primal or Crystal Data Centers, though we’re aware that they are currently quite congested as well."
Finally, Yoshida does address what the team is doing to alleviate the congestion issue for the time being, though the current silicon shortage and Covid-19 restrictions in place make this slow going. However, Square Enix is still determined to start expanding and upgrading their data centers to combat this issue as quickly as possible, though Yoshi-P mentioned that they will likely need more time to implement this.
You can read the whole blog post here, and in case you're wondering exactly why Final Fantasy 14 has suddenly become so popular, Victoria has you covered.