The launch of Final Fantasy XIV’s Data Center Travel system hasn’t been entirely smooth. The service, which allows players to visit servers on other data centers, launched with Patch 6.18 temporarily. Unfortunately, the first 24 hours of the service led to server instability, forcing the FFXIV team to suspend the service.
Following some hotfixes and an additional post-patch maintenance period, the service returned to life. Players could visit other data centers, though the team did warn that server stress means that crossing data centers could be a lengthy process. In our testing, we found that jumping to and from data centers would take around 30 minutes during peak hours.
One feature that had to be temporarily shelved was the Home World Transfer Service, which was suspended on June 27, prior to the launch of Patch 6.18. While Data Center Travel is temporary, Home World Transfer lets players move their characters to a different home server on a permanent basis. It costs $18 per transfer unless you’re traveling from a Congested Server to a Preferred one. The service is somewhat tied to Data Center Travel since it does impact server populations, so the team wanted to wait until the newer service was stable. It wasn’t stable initially, so the return of Home World Transfer was delayed.
Now, the FFXIV team has explained that it’s feeling good about Data Center Travel, meaning Home World Transfer might be returning soon.
“Since the Home World Transfer Service uses the same structure as Data Center Travel, we will wait until the end of the week to confirm that there are no issues and resume the service sometime next week. We will announce the opening date as soon as it is determined,” said the team in a post on The Lodestone. “We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the long wait, and kindly ask customers for their patience.”
It’s all just a part of FFXIV’s expanding server infrastructure. The Oceania data center was launched earlier in the year. Japan already received the brand-new Meteor data center, while Europe got four new worlds. North America will be getting four new Worlds sometime in August, while another four will come in the first half of 2023.
