Amidst ongoing congestion issues facing the early access for Square Enix’s award winning MMO that includes a free trial of the base game A Realm Reborn AND the Heavensward expansion up to level 60 in its entirety with no restriction on playtime, players are taking to social media to vent their frustrations over the highly anticipated Endwalker expansion and the extreme waiting times just to log into the servers. Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida has issued a statement “Across the FFXIV service as a whole, the number of simultaneous logins has reached the hardware limit, and as a result, logging in has required an extremely long time, especially during “peak hours” when we tend to see increased player activity. For this, I am truly sorry.”
Due to this congestion, players are now being compensated an extended 7 days onto their subscription as an apology and gesture of goodwill starting tomorrow (7th December) for any owners of the full game with an active subscription, including free-trial players who register their full-version copy. It’s also possible that more time will be added to your subscription based on future developments (or lack thereof) of the issues faced.
Some players have also reported others trying to find workarounds in the system to circumvent the 30min inactivity forced log out timer by using dance emotes or starting combat with striking dummies however, Mr. Yoshida has debunked these theories “These methods cannot bypass the automatic logout. When player characters are left inactive in these states, their status is automatically changed to “Away from Keyboard” before they are eventually automatically logged out for 30 minutes of inactivity. To some, this may appear as though they were successful in avoiding automatic logout, which we believe to be the basis of these rumors”. Unfortunately rumours like these are the by-product of log in frustration and the intense scepticism around perceived “idle” actions.
Until the situation becomes more manageable, players are asked to try and log in outside of peak hours but for many this will prove difficult due to other commitments and especially so considering the European Data Centres 12-hour peak.
Peak Times for each data centre
North American Data Centre: 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. (PST) / 20:00 to 6:00 (GMT) European Data Centre: 3:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. (PST) / 11:00 to 23:00 (GMT) Japan Data Centre: 1:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. (PST) / 9:00 to 15:00 (GMT)
However, with players already reporting their completion of the expansion, I can only assume that this congestion will be a short-lived concern and should fix itself as more players come to the end of their journey to the moon. See you in Endwalker… maybe. I’ve still got to finish Shadowbringers!