Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker launches in a week, and given all the server congestion and trouble that Square Enix has seen for FFXIV this year, they have some warnings for players and some steps that they have already taken in order to ease the launch and beyond.
With such a huge expansion planned, and the influx of players over the summer to FFXIV that caused max capacity worlds, some world completely off limits to new characters, and more ongoing issues, something had to be done to prepare. While the team has been working on expanding login capacity and has even made more worlds accessible over time, the preparation needed for Endwalker’s release had to be carefully planned. Still, global supply chain issues have also had an effect.
They are expecting the potential “number of logins that is yet to be seen since the launch of Final Fantasy XIV”. They predict the demand will be high regardless, so they optimized their servers in order to increase the login caps, but because of ongoing global supply chain shortages, they weren’t able to get new semiconductors to add some additional servers before release. This means that they will continue to monitor supply chain availability and consider adding new worlds if demand remains high. For now, though, players will have to balance their excitement with a little bit of patience.
The announcement is both a courtesy warning and hopefully a way to temper expectations for next week's big launch. Expect server queues when the expansion launches, but know that they have optimized their existing servers, even going so far as to replace the existing server machines with higher performance hardware, raised the number of simultaneous logins, and did other things that they could to make things smoother for the expected crush of players.
For the full pre-launch notes on expected server congestion and what they plan to do about it, see this Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker update.
