Preferred Worlds

Wanted to create a character yesterday on Famfrit to get the road to 70 buff and couldn't because it was full. When i was creating the character earlier today I have noticed there is no preferred world in the NA Datacenter. Is it a bug or am I just a few hours too late?

Thanks in advance!

There just aren't any Preferred worlds right now. Preferred status is granted to worlds that have low active populations, but between people wanting to catch up in time for Endwalker launch and people switching over from other games due to XIV getting more exposure, all the worlds seem to have drawn more new and returning players.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

There just aren't any Preferred worlds right now. Preferred status is granted to worlds that have low active populations, but between people wanting to catch up in time for Endwalker launch and people switching over from other games due to XIV getting more exposure, all the worlds seem to have drawn more new and returning players.

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And the possibility that there will be preferred worlds again may change every patch? Or does it change automatically without the patch? Thanks for answering! :)

Preferred world buffs are a way of motivating people to go onto a server with lower concurrent activity than another.

The game is getting congested of late even though it's a patch lull which is normally quiet, with an estimated 250,000 more subscriptions and countless free trials specifically in the NA and EU regions. Servers have been crashing so now it's necessary to not direct people to one server over another, to prevent imbalances. Preferred worlds were made Standard worlds in the patch earlier.

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Originally Posted by Spinetti

And the possibility that there will be preferred worlds again may change every patch? Or does it change automatically without the patch? Thanks for answering! :)

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Preferred/Congested/Standard worlds only change in conjunction with maintenance - which usually implies a patch as well.
When this status of worlds change there will alway be a notice posted on The Lodestone, and this is also shown in the launcher.
The notice for the latest one is https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...edc87b0f349e88

Note: Even non-congested worlds can be locked for character creation. This can change from minute to minute though, unlike the Congested/Preferred/Standard world status.