As those who have been reading my post in the recent weeks will know; Final Fantasy XIV has released it's newest expansion titled Endwalker. According to the team themselves this were to be their biggest and most expansive expansions yet. And it was. It totally was. It was so well received and so popular that Square Enix has now stopped selling the game to new players because the servers can't hold up.


<center>![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/pusen/23tkk3WK9EiFCyUFp8Qwo9gZT2yBgWg2oUydsBcfZbvhpexjwgAkutFedeygXFbomQtZt.png)
<sup>Screenshot by me</sup></center>

# Response to Congestion

This was revealed in todays [Response to Congestion](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/e7388986bc24d5a1337e0beed057f7b5b78b9bb3) posted by Naoki Yoshida, the producer and director of FFXIV, himself. Since the servers have been suffering pretty hard since the release of the expansion these letters from Yoshi-P about server congestion has become quite regular.

There's four quite important points from this letter:

#### Additional game time compensation!

They're giving all active subscribers 14 days of free game time! This is on top of the 7 days they already gave us a week ago! They're doing this as compensation to all the people who haven't been able to play much because of the massive queues. People are queuing up for several hours before being able to play and those who have been hit the hardest haven't even been able to play yet. 

I've been a victim to queues as well but I've managed to work my way around it. I installed Google Remote Desktop on my PC so that I can log in and queue up while still at work. This way I'll be working my way through the queue and be ready to play once I get home. The alternative would be to log on once I get home and have to wait 2-5 hours to be able to play. 

It also helps that I've been ill for the last week which means I've been able to log in in the early morning hours before the queue picks up and stay logged in for the rest of the day. This compensation has also spawned some great memes in the community, like this one made by redditor [u/786453123768](https://www.reddit.com/user/786453123768/) for instance.

![](https://i.redd.it/5y8fricyew581.jpg)

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#### Temporary suspension of digital version sales

This is the big one. They're literally stopping the sale of the game to new players to avoid the queues getting even bigger. At the same time they're stopping the free trial which has been one of their biggest selling points over the last few years. What this means is that until the queues calm down or they get bigger servers new players won't be able to start playing FFXIV, unless they can find a physical copy.

You might be thinking "well why don't they just get bigger servers...". They have. They've been trying for months, ever since the game exploded in popularity during the summer. The global ship shortage isn't helping and they haven't found a supplier that can deliver what they need to upgrade data centers and world servers. They even offered to pay double and still nothing.

They will also be stopping all new advertisements that was planned for the game. None of this really matters to me but it sucks for those who want to get into the game. This has also spawned some great memes from the community, like the ones below.

<center>![](https://preview.redd.it/uujcjze99u581.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6811d4938c2c859044da91f3aa9f37c72dbc4347)
<sup>[u/RileyTaugor](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rhjbjq/when_you_have_so_many_people_playing_your_game/)</sup></center>

<center>![](https://preview.redd.it/x8l4xodppw581.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=cf9bc34a739026f34b8fe82e09183168a146f39b)
<sup>[u/emmafrostie](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rhqrm4/critically_acclaimed/)</sup></center>

<center>![](https://i.redd.it/v0m6l7c7vv581.png)
<sup>[u/Xaneth_/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rho5hk/will_this_suffering_from_success_ever_end/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)</sup></center>

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# Fixing error 2002

This is another big one. Ever since the queues started people have been getting errors while queues which sees them going to the back of the queue when logging back in unless they're quick to get back in line. I was victim to this on the second day of the expansions when I was number 3000 in queue, got down to 500 only to get this error. When I logged back in I was number 4000...

This means people will have to babysit their queues unless they want to risk this to happen. That sucks big time. Since you're gonna be queued for several hours you often want to spend that time doing something else instead of staring at your screen. 

Luckily they'll be patching this on the 21st of December so that should make things a lot easier for a lot of people. People are gonna get so much work done now that they don't have to babysit those queues. 

And again, memes...

<center>![](https://preview.redd.it/goor1dld2w581.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=047e8375a80dcc0019ff06693fa0a3c2153dec0f)
<sup>[u/rhoq0f](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rhoq0f/surprise_it_was_me_10/)</sup></center>

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This is quite the different kind of success story. These guys really deserve their success though. Yoshi-P has to be one of the coolest and most down to earth people alive and he's made one hell of a game. He's also done so with a lot of respect to the consumers which we can clearly see examples of in this post. This is a man that's willing to sacrifice new costumers to keep existing costumers happy. In this day and age I don't think there's a lot of video game developers of companies that would do that.

A certain other company behind a certain other big MMO would probably find a way to milk their customers instead...

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