After the earthquake this week that has affected the countries of Turkey and Syria, the Final Fantasy XIV team has announced that they will be temporarily suspending automatic demolition of estates until further notice.
This policy went into effect today at 9:25 a.m. Pacific time and affects all servers located on Chaos/Light Data Centers. Due to the massive damage and emergencies in the region, especially with the possibility that cleanup and assistance could take a long time to resolve, this gesture doesn’t have any approximate end point. If your countdown did begin, you could stop it by entering your estate, but there are many people who clearly have other concerns at this time.
The earthquake in southern Turkey happened on Monday, February 6th, and has killed and displaced thousands. This is not the first time that Square Enix and the FFXIV team have decided to pause the timers on auto demolition and helped in other ways due to emergencies. Normally, when you’re inactive, the auto-demolition timer kicks after 30 days of absence. This decision makes sense, especially in light of previous pauses of the demolition timers.
Housing in Final Fantasy XIV is notoriously difficult to secure, with the previous system of being able to be in the right place at the right time and wait it out, replaced by a lottery system going forward. This change is how things are now, and with the opening of additional data centers and the addition of new housing plots in some recent updates, if you managed to score a coveted property, losing it due to hardship or an emergency would be awful, so this seems like the right call.
Final Fantasy XIV also got some hotfixes, with a number of issues fixed, including Island Sanctuary crashes, quest glitches, and more.
Read the update over at Final Fantasy XIV.
