Final Fantasy XIV giving players a free week in apology for queues
Oh, the perils of popularity!
Even before the official launch of Final Fantasy XIV's Endwalker expansion on Tuesday, the MMORPG's servers have been overloaded during its early access period for pre-orderers, leaving players in long queues to join. Oh, the perils of popularity! Sharing a status update over the weekend, game director Naoki Yoshida apologised again for the problems, and said they plan to give all active subscribers seven days of free game time.
"Considering that we are asking players to wait in queues for extremely long periods of time and the ongoing situation making it difficult to play normally, we have decided that during the official release of Endwalker on December 7, we will be granting 7 days of free game time to all players who own the full version of the game and have an active subscription," Yoshida said in Sunday's post.
He noted that they "may give additional free game time depending on further developments on the congestion situation" too.
Yoshida also explained several issues they've identified which make the problem even worse by kicking players out the queue or not letting them queue at all.
Error numbers 4004, 5003, and 5006 happen when players have spent so long in a queue that their connection to the login server times out. He said they were "currently working" to extend this session time. As for Error 2002, he explained that crops up when a data center already has more than 17,000 players in the login queue, not letting more people join the queue. He also noted that players can lose their spot if their internet connection suffers packet loss or instability, and "because the waiting times in login queues are long, we believe this increases the chances of encountering internet issues or momentary disconnections".
Knowing what causes problems isn't much comfort if you're still suffering them, mind. The game has been struggling with capacity problems for months, having grown mighty popular during a global tech shortage which Squeenix say stops them from expanding servers as much as they want.
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker officially launches on Tuesday the 7th of December. Anyway, here's Sia???
