Endwalker Congestion and World Status in Early Access

Hello, this is FINAL FANTASY XIV Producer & Director, Naoki Yoshida.

The Early Access for Endwalker, which started on December 3 at 1:00 a.m. (PST), has been accessed by an extremely large number of players, making it the largest number of simultaneous connections we’ve ever encountered in the history of FFXIV.

We apologize to the thousands of people who are waiting to log into the game for the inconvenience caused, as the maximum number of logins has been reached for each World.

While hours have passed since the commencement of early access, and although the login servers have avoided going down completely, the load on each World has become very high, and some Worlds are going down due to extremely high load conditions. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

We would like to share an update on the situation and our response.

■ Why Worlds are going down

We have been hitting login caps across each World, and the frequency of characters simultaneously moving between zones (entering duties, moving to another area, etc.) has been very high. This resulted in an immense amount of network load which caused Worlds to go down. We apologize for the inconvenience.

■ Preventative measures

To prevent Worlds from going down, we have adjusted the number of characters that are permitted to simultaneously move between areas, limited the amount of instantaneous network load, and made other adjustments to this end. This may increase the frequency of instances where you are unable to move due to congestion and will need to reattempt. As these measures will be in place to prevent Worlds from going down and allow for stable gameplay, we apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation.

Furthermore, determining the network load for simultaneous area movement is extremely difficult, and we may further limit the number of characters should the Worlds go down again.

■ World recovery

In the event that a World goes down, the following steps are performed to reboot the World.

1. Detect the trigger which led to the World going down and identify the cause
2. Implement countermeasures to reduce the load which caused the World to go down
3. Reboot the World and have GM teams perform login verifications
4. Recommence logins for the World

The above is an outline of how Worlds are rebooted and requires from around 30 minutes to an hour to complete. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we are addressing the congestion for early access and official service on a 24-hour basis, so we ask for your patience as we reboot the Worlds.

We’ll continue to provide the best support possible in order to prevent Worlds going down on a large-scale, and we appreciate your understanding and your cooperation!