Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
It didn't feel like the servers were struggling. Was the hardware really struggling to cope with it...?
Yes. That is the entire reason that Dynamis and Meteor got created as well as some additional worlds. Back during lockdowns with Endwalker, they had so many people that tried logging in that it crashed the login queue and people couldn't sign in at all. And they had to give out free membership time. That incident was due to the WoW migration. They invested in hardware/chips for making additional data centers to help with the issue. They also invested in testing cloud data centers not too long ago. With Dawntrail, they stated they had a higher concurrent playerbase than in the history of the game since ARR, which means Dawntrail congestion was even worse than Endwalker. If people didn't go to Dynamis, it would've been worse which is why the Twitter account was spamming every single day asking people to go to Dynamis and they got rewarded for it. Even now, the zones are still instanced instead of being alone breaking up the server stress. The server stress isn't just in login, it's also people just existing in the open world as well.