Despite being more than a decade old, Final Fantasy XIV is only continuing to grow in popularity. Square Enix recently announced that the character capacity on the game's EU servers will be raised to increase the amount of players that can be logged into the game at once.
The increased server cap was announced on the game's official blog by series producer Naoki Yoshida. According to Yoshida, by optimizing the machines used in the game's European data centers, Square will be able to accommodate about 500 more simultaneous logins per World, making for a net increase of 6000 players across all the European servers. This increase will require emergency maintenance on the game's servers, however, so the EU data centers will be down for about four hours on July 22. Yoshida says they will monitor the server situation carefully, and depending on how this update goes, they may be able to raise the player cap even further.
This server update is just one of the steps the Final Fantasy XIV team is doing to deal with the sudden influx of new players to the ten year old game. Spurred on by players seeking a quarantine pastime, the announcement of a new expansion entitled Endwalker, and an exodus of players from various other MMO's, FFXIV's servers have swelled to capacity, forcing players to sit in long login queues before being able to play the game. In addition to the new server updates, Square Enix has begun automatically logging out players who are idle for too long, and the company also briefly stopped selling new copies of the game in order to ease the strain on the game's data centers. In an earlier blog, Yoshida explained that the server situation has also been made worse by the global semiconductor shortage that is affecting the entire tech industry, which has made securing additional servers difficult. Yoshida also says the global travel restrictions due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic have also made it more difficult for team members to travel around to the game's international data centers and assess possible problems and upgrades.
Final Fantasy XIV has come a long way from its original debut in 2010, when the game was widely criticized for launching with obtuse gameplay systems, a dearth of interesting content, and a world that largely consisted of the same assets copied-and-pasted repeatedly. Square Enix relaunched and basically remade the entire game almost from scratch in 2013 with the A Realm Reborn update, which drastically overhauled every aspect of the game. Since A Realm Reborn, the game's reception has been overwhelmingly positive, and the game's player base has steadily grown with each new expansion. The game's fourth and latest major expansion, Endwalker, is scheduled to be released on Nov. 23 and will feature the climax of the story arc that began with the original release. Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for Windows PCs, Mac OS, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.
Source: Final Fantasy XIV Official Blog