On Friday, Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood’s Early Access phase kicked off, with the first players piling in. But as is par for the course with MMO expansion launches, things haven’t been going very smoothly.
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The main issues seem to stem from the sudden increase in player numbers. Specific quests that toss players into instanced dungeons and battles have been hit the hardest, and in some cases quests can’t be completed, locking people out of the rest of the expansion. This is happening a lot with a main quest where players must chat to an NPC before being flung into a new single-player instance.
Kotaku reports that players are even queuing up to speak to this NPC to try to alleviate some of the stress on the servers instead of just charging, forcing the game to create countless single-player instances all at the same time.
This isn’t the only quest that’s suffering because of the stress on the servers. USGamer notes that another quest later on has the same issues, and that it’s even affecting the Duty Finder, which puts players in a new instance.
Producer Naoki Yoshida responded to the problems with a post on Lodestone. “As announced earlier, there are a huge number of players currently playing Stormblood, and as a result, the servers continue to experience a large amount of stress. For this reason, we are currently limiting the number of players that can enter instanced content so that it does not lead to major server crashes.”
He goes on to explain that this limit is causing a great deal of congestion as players attempt to get into the instanced quest.
A second problem has reared its head, too. Players leaving or disconnecting during the Susano Primal fight weren’t able to log back into their characters. This particular issue seems to have been caused by players using an emote before the fight. “Our investigation thus far has revealed that this issue occurs when entering ‘The Pool of Tribute’ while performing an emote action,” a community representative explained. “Due to this, we ask that users please finish their emote actions before entering ‘The Pool of Tribute’.”
Players who have fallen foul of this particular problem will need to be sorted out individually, but it does seem to be working, and those complaining of the issue are now saying that they can log in again.
If you’ve been playing, have you experienced any bugs or problems?