Popular MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV launched its latest expansion on Friday. Since then, folks have struggled to play due to a huge influx of players, frequent disconnects, and long server queues. To compensate players for all this, Square Enix and FFXIV’s devs have announced a plan to give all players seven free days of game time.
Endwalker is the next big expansion for FFXIV. And while it doesn’t officially come out until December 7, Square Enix began letting players who pre-ordered the expansion play early on December 4. Quickly after the early access launch of Endwalker, the MMO’s servers began to struggle to keep up with the demand and new and old players hopped online all at once. This led to long server queues and a lot of frustration.
In response to this, FFXIV’s producer and director, Naoki Yoshida, published a blog earlier today apologizing for the “congestion” players encountered over the weekend while explaining Square Enix’s plans moving forward.
“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,” explained Yoshida in the blog post, “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 also confirmed that this compensation gift will be given to anyone currently playing the MMORPG via a free trial that comes with registering the full version of the game and those with multiple accounts. Yoshida also explained that in the future Square Enix might provide more free game time “depending on further developments on the congestion situation.”
The entire blog post isn’t just an apology and a promise of free game time. Yoshida also goes into great detail about why the servers are struggling to keep up with player demand, why some error codes are happening, peak hours of congestion, and announced a fix for players being auto-logged out for inactivity during the end credits of the various expansions.
Final Fantasy XIV’s new expansion has led to an explosion of new players and returning players. Even on Steam, which isn’t the game’s main or only platform, the MMO is setting player records, hitting over 91k active players over the weekend. How many of those 91k players were actually able to get into the game successfully is another story.
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