Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (FFXIV: ARR) is off to a rough start, despite the fact that the game itself is fantastic. Its server issues has been well documented, and Square Enix previously announced that additional servers are on their way. While many people are probably tired of hearing about the issues and rather just want to hear a fix, FFXIV: ARR‘s director and producer, Naoki Yoshida, has turned to the Square Enix forums to post a detailed explanation on what’s going on.
It won’t fix your login issues, but it’s a breath of fresh air to see this sort of transparency from a producer of a major game. Several launches this year that were online only, such as Diablo III and Simcity, didn’t go smoothly at all, and neither Blizzard or EA made this sort of effort to clarify what’s going on. Sometimes gamers just don’t want to be left in the dark, and having some information goes a long way to build loyalty with your customers.
As for what Yoshida had to share, the MMORPG had recorded upwards of 218,000 concurrent connections on the night Square Enix announced its plans to halt digital downloads of the game. Both the company and its producer were surprised by the number of players who were eager to get into the game from day one, and Yoshida himself admitted that he underestimated sales and login estimates.
Each FFXIV: ARR World Server is designed to support a maximum of 5,000 concurrent connections, which is a respectable number in the MMORPG world. Naturally, going over that number means more strain on the server, which means performance issues. As we stated before, Square Enix took the stance of allowing those that can manage to login to experience the game in its entirety, rather than allow more people that constantly ran into issues within the game.
And since the majority of the Internet believes Square Enix can just hit a button and spawn new World Servers, Yoshida goes into detail as to what each server consists of, and the work that’s involved to create a new World Server. As of the time of the post, Yoshida states that the new servers have been acquired and the essential programs have been installed, so internal testing is underway. The team is also working on optimizing the Duty Finder management servers in order to reduce server load and ensure better stability in the future.
The team is also looking into implementing an auto-kick feature for AFK players but feels that priority should be placed into getting more servers up and running.
The only unfortunate part to the detailed post is that Yoshida makes no mention to whether or not players will have free transfers to the new World Servers. For those that haven’t been able to login and play at all, that’s not a huge deal. But for the players that have already sunk time into their characters, hopefully Square Enix allows them to easily transfer to a less populated server.
Source: Square Enix Forums
