The arrival of the highly-anticipated new feature, Island Sanctuary, in yesterday's Final Fantasy XIV update, Buried Memory, was met with huge demand. In an unsurprising move, Square Enix had to boost server capacity to its max as some worlds became loaded to capacity with the new instances.
The team initially updated with the confirmation of ongoing congestion in instanced areas which include Island Sanctuary and indoor housing. The maximum number of instances would be increased to see if it could ease the burden on the servers. In an additional follow-up, they make it clear that even after adjusting the server settings and adding extra machines, most of the servers in Europe and North American data centers have reached their instance limits during peak times. More servers are likely to follow, as demand is likely to hold for a while.
The number of logged-in characters in some worlds is also close to the maximum number of logged-in characters in a world, and there is a possibility that all data centers will reach their instance limits during peak login hours.
We will continue to monitor the situation and consider possible countermeasures, however in the meantime, should you receive a message indicating that the server is busy when attempting to move to a different area, we ask that you wait a while before attempting again.
This isn’t new territory for Final Fantasy XIV, but after an increase in players was met with huge demand and congested servers, which eased a bit until Endwalker’s release late last year was met by long queues and hitting capacity so often that the game was temporarily removed from sale and all promotion put on hold.
What distinguishes this time is the fact that the game has gotten new data centers and capacity increases more recently, but the North American data center upgrade, which is set to take place in two parts, recently had its first phase delayed.
For updates on the capacity issues, head over to Final Fantasy XIV.
