It’s been a month since Endwalker launched, and Final Fantasy XIV players are still crowding into 6.0’s final zone to try and slay Chi — a FATE boss rewarding a new Stormblood-era mount, Level Checker. The wait for Chi’s FATE can take hours (or days), and the afternoon queue still lingers at thousands long. So there are hundreds of players, quite literally, waiting in line to log in and wait again.
Also, hello, it’s me; I’m “players waiting in line to wait in another line.” Right now, zmy strategy is gathering a ton of materials at night when I’m not working. Then, during the day, I park my little Miqo’te where Chi’s FATE spawns and craft for hours while I work so I can periodically look over and see if the boss has shown up yet. I’ve seen Chi pop twice and still haven’t gotten my mount. I can offer no reasons for why I do this, but perhaps at this point it’s just sunk cost fallacy.
If you’re out of the loop and okay with a few spoiler-ish details, Chi is the final boss of a three FATE chain. It can spawn once every 48 hours, and the community tracks its spawn through tools like Faloop! and Discord alerts. When the potential spawn window for Chi’s FATE opens, players pour into the instance to wait on the boss platform. You could be there for 30 minutes or 30 hours, and all of this gets way more complicated when you factor in things like FFXIV’s AFK timer. If you earn maximum participation rewards for the FATE, you get six Chi Bolts. And 12 of those bolts get you the thing everyone is after, a Level Checker mount. So, yes, you do have to kill Chi twice.
The Level Checker mount you’re rewarded with is probably one of my favorites; I get why we’re all out here. It’s a replica of the Level Checkers you first encounter in Stormblood‘s Omega Raids and based on an enemy from Final Fantasy V. Mounting up on one makes your character adorable, small, and trapped inside of a screen. I love it, and apparently, everyone else does too. A typical FATE has a handful of people show it, Chi’s FATE can have hundreds.
Anyway, I went through this process yesterday on my server, and y’all are still out there in huge crowds waiting on Chi for days. That’s in addition to the wait times you’re experiencing just to get in from the server congestion. I figured that things would calm down a month out even though my server queue times are still long, but everyone crowds around like Endwalker launched yesterday. I remember Ixion crashing instances constantly from the traffic in Stormblood, but I don’t remember the camping out part lasting quite the way our community love for Chi has.
Chi’s FATE baits you into thinking it’s going to spawn, too. Before it can pop, you’ll see two other FATEs with “Omicron Recall” in their names, and they can spawn a ton before Chi ever shows up—they both just have to die at least once before the thing will come out. Being the intelligent person I am, I decided to fly around and farm other FATEs while I waited the first time. Chi spawned and died in less than a minute to the mob of hundreds of hunky bunny boys and cute cat girls waiting for it. I arrived just in time to bitterly look at its corpse.
My crushing disappointment aside, the whole process is just one of those weird things I love about the game’s MMO bits. There’s a ton of in-game jokes the FFXIV community has over our collective time spent just sitting, with my favorite being the way we all summon the same mount and how everyone sarcastically responds “just 30 more minutes” to folks asking when Chi will spawn.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get Level Checker for myself, but good luck to you folks still out there with me sitting on a big empty boss platform for hours.
