In the latest development of server and login problems surrounding Final Fantasy XIV and the launch of Endwalker, director and producer Naoki Yoshida explained a few measure being taken to help alleviate the issues. In a new blog post of the game’s official site, he detailed how the team is implementing patchwork solutions to mitigate disconnections during the login process and what the plans are moving forward.
Lobby server maintenance took place shortly after the blog post was published, which is said to make some improvements to the login and queue process. As previously outlined, queue lobbies held a maximum of 17,000 players — if the queue exceeded that cap, players trying to login would be met with Error 2002 and fail to get in queue. Yoshida-san said that backup development servers have been repurposed to increase the size of queue lobbies to 21,000 players. This won’t necessarily improve queue times, but it’ll let more players get in line.
[UPDATE: FFXIV servers will be going down for maintenance starting on December 7 at 10 PM PT and will last until December 8 at 2 AM PT. This is the maintenance period mentioned in Yoshida-san’s blog post. The original story has been updated to reflect this and specific details on the fixes implemented by this maintenance can be found below.)
However, another round of maintenance is scheduled starting at December 7, 10 PM PT and should finish by December 8, 2 AM PT (sorry for the US West Coast bias, be sure to check your time zone) — this requires all servers to go offline for four hours. This will be to address the Error 4004 and Error 3001, which are the more frustrating issues.
Yoshida-san explained that when there’s a queue, the server waits until 100 players can be let in, lets them in once there’s space, then constantly repeats the process. When several certain conditions occur on heavily overloaded servers during this process, some players waiting in queue will be disconnected with the Error 4004. The team has a fix that should solve the issue, but they will continue to monitor the situation.
The other problem, Error 3001, can happen when overloaded servers errantly let more players login than what’s supposed to be allowed, thus exceeding the server’s limits. Players will then be disconnected from the login queue. A fix is said to be part of the December 8 maintenance, and the solution’s details will be explained in a future blog post.
While these fixes can help with the more frustrating parts of getting into the game, these are only temporary patchwork solutions. Yoshida-san reiterated that the global semiconductor shortage due to labor shortages caused by COVID-19 has limited their ability to implement long-term solutions. He stated, “We have put in considerable investment—even more so than usual—to secure the needed hardware, but even so, the current fact of the matter is that a long lead time is needed to prepare the server hardware.”
Because of this, he said it’s probably going to take several months (or longer) to add new Worlds for players to log into, but aren’t able to give an estimated date on when this can happen. The fixes outlined above are optimizations to source code and tweaks to how servers handle player counts, but we’ll have to wait for large-scale solutions.
In the meantime, active subscribers who own FFXIV will be given seven days of free subscription time, and more could be added in the near future. If you’re trying to login to play FFXIV, you can also anticipate when it’ll be easier by checking the peak hours of activity for your region.
