[UPDATE: FFXIV maintenance has finished and the game is back online. This story has been updated to reflect this. You can check out our Patch 6.08 breakdown for more detailed information on the update.]
Another scheduled maintenance period for Final Fantasy XIV has passed. This time, it was for the implementation of Patch 6.08 and to take the Oceania Data Center online. FFXIV was offline starting January 24 at 8:00 p.m. PT and came back online on January 25 at 2:00 a.m. PT. Congrats, you can made it through six hours without FFXIV.
We now have the definitive patch notes, and the general ideas director and producer Naoki Yoshida mentioned in a recent interview on Radio Mog Station came to fruition. According to the FFXIV Reddit translators, the development team was looking at increasing DPS output for Samurai, Black Mage, and possibly Monk and/or Dancer. The idea was to make damage output reflect the complexity required to optimally play certain DPS Jobs. When looking at the details in the Patch 6.08 notes, you can see that potency increases extended to Paladin, Summoner, Dragoon, Ninja, and Machinist, as well as the aforementioned Jobs. Yoshida-san also mentioned that the new Reaper set the bar quite high for DPS Jobs, but it won’t be getting nerfed — instead, other Jobs were buffed.
In a move to better serve players in the Oceania region and hopefully mitigate some of the recent server congestion, the long-awaited Oceania Data Center is now live with maintenance finished. It includes five Worlds, and transferring characters to any of those Worlds will be free. This was originally planned for the launch of Endwalker and Patch 6.0, but various circumstances around the global pandemic caused some delays.
Furthermore, the game itself is now available for purchase again. Square Enix decided to halt sales of FFXIV after extremely high server congestion resulting from the Endwalker launch caused frequent disconnections and unprecedented login queue times. Now that traffic has calmed down a bit and a new Data Center has been added, players should be running into fewer problems around the login process. (If you’re confused about how to get the game thanks to the convoluted Square Enix account system, check out our guide on buying FFXIV.) Keep in mind that the free trial is still unavailable for the time being. Yoshida-san mentioned the team will monitor and base near-future decisions on traffic trends.
Catch up on all things FFXIV with our breakdown on the server expansion roadmap and our summary of Patch 6.08. [This story has been updated to reflect that Patch 6.08 is now live, and you can get all the details in the official patch notes on The Lodestone].
