Squeezing into Eorzea should be more manageable now, especially if you’re playing on one of Final Fantasy XIV‘s EU or NA servers. Square Enix has introduced a new logout timer to hoof idle players out after a certain amount of time and has made some changes to ease the creation of new characters.
Final Fantasy XIV got its 5.58 patch this morning, so now you’ll find that players who are inactive for more than 30 minutes are logged out “in an effort to ease server congestion” – Limsa Lominsa is about to feel a lot more barren. Square Enix is also swapping the status of some worlds to “Standard”, which should ease the character creation process for you sprouts out there.
“The worlds on the North American/European data centres are currently extremely congested during peak hours,” Square Enix says. “However, if we change the status to Congested World, it will be impossible to create new characters on most of the Worlds on these data centres. As a result, a large numbers of characters would be concentrating in fewer worlds. Therefore, all worlds under the North America/Europe data centres have been changed to Standard World.”
Final Fantasy XIV’s recent surge in popularity was initially felt in the US, with space on servers becoming scarce as the game broke its concurrent player record on Steam. At one point, you couldn’t even purchase the game digitally on Square Enix’s US store.
The congestion soon spread to the EU servers, with players taking to Reddit to share they were also having issues getting in. To the surprise of no one, this coincided with the popular PC game breaking its concurrent player record on Steam once more.
Elsewhere in FFXIV’s 5.58 patch, you’ve got bug fixes and PvP meta tweaks. Season 20 of The Feast is also kicking off, which is a PvP mode that tasks you with stealing your foe’s medals. The FFXIV Endwalker release date is set for November, though we’ve rounded up all the details in one handy place for you – because we’re nice like that.