"Unable to obtain character data due to server congestion."

[Mhaeric]

Like the title says, starting today I'm sometimes unable to even see some of the characters on the Balmung server, including my main. I'm able to see the other characters and log in with them just fine when this happens. Sometimes all of the characters are available, but not all of the time.

This began sometime between 3:00am PST and 3:00pm PST Thursday, February 2, 2017.

Here is what it looks like when I hover the mouse over my main character when they are unable to be accessed:


Please fix, since it's frustrating not being able to have access to your character even though the game is up!

[Canadane]

Sounds like even if you could see your character, you'd be unable to log in.

[MistakeNot]

Sounds like even if you could see your character, you'd be unable to log in.

Don't be so sure of that. I have had the same thing happen to one of my characters (the last one in the list, which might or might not be relevant) a couple of times - and I was able to log in with that character anyway.

[seekified]

Read the patch notes. This was added in 3.5 to inform players when the server has decided it's so busy it'd be best not to add more stress by loading character models, and everything else should still work fine.

They routinely enable this after maintenance etc since lots of players log on at once and puts a lot of stress on the lobby servers.

[Mhaeric]

Why would I read the patch notes from four patches and 3 weeks ago when the issue only started happening today, the day after the most recent patch?

Anyway, that message makes it sound like the character cannot be played at all, although from what people here are saying it actually is playable. I would suggest a more accurate descriptive phrase instead such as "Unable to display character model due to server congestion." which doesn't imply that the character is wholly unavailable.