Over the past few years and especially in the past few months, Final Fantasy XIV has basically become the MMORPG to play, and the release of the Endwalker expansion has amplified this effect.
Following the early access launch of Endwalker on December 3, players on many servers have faced massive queues on login that could last several hours at peak times, simply because there isn’t enough room on the datacenters for everyone to play.
This was also exacerbated by the ongoing worldwide semiconductor shortage, that prevented Square Enix from securing the hardware required to open additional servers.
The publisher already granted seven free days of playtime for the affected players, but apparently, they decided that it’s not enough.
Today Square Enix announced that it will suspend physical deliveries and digital sales of the Final Fantasy XIV Starter Edition and Complete Edition. Only sales of the expansion packs and Collector’s Edition digital upgrades will continue to be sold to allow existing players to upgrade as needed.
On top of that, paying subscribers will be given priority to log in, so free trial registrations will be suspended as well.
Advertisement campaigns will also be halted, which makes sense, considering that the product they’re supposed to promote isn’t being sold.
A timeframe for the end of these measures has not been provided.
In addition to this all, existing players will be compensated with 14 additional days of playtime, bringing the total to 21.
Speaking of future updates, December 21 will also see the release of update 6.01, which will solve a bug causing error 2002 during login queues.
Patch 6.05 including the Pandæmonium: Asphodelos savage raid will be released as scheduled on January 4, 2022, unless new major issues arise.
Square Enix hopes to release some sort of roadmap for the implementations of new servers by the end of January 2022. The plan is to make large-scale additions especially for North America and Europe.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for PlayStation 4, PS5, and PC. The upgrade to PS5 is offered free of charge to those who own the PS4 version. The Endwalker expansion has just been released a couple of weeks ago.
