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Final Fantasy XIV giving players a free week in apology for queuesOh, the perils of popularity!

Oh, the perils of popularity!

A rabbit person in a Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker screenshot.

Even before the official launch ofFinal Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion on Tuesday, the MMORPG’s servers have been overloaded during its early access period for pre-orderers,leaving players in long queuesto join. Oh, the perils of popularity! Sharing a status update over the weekend, game director Naoki Yoshida apologised again for the problems, and said they plan to give all active subscribers seven days of free game time.

“Considering that we are asking players to wait in queues for extremely long periods of time and the ongoing situation making it difficult to play normally, we have decided that during the official release of Endwalker on December 7, we will be granting 7 days of free game time to all players who own the full version of the game and have an active subscription,” Yoshida said inSunday’s post.

He noted that they “may give additional free game time depending on further developments on the congestion situation” too.

Error numbers 4004, 5003, and 5006 happen when players have spent so long in a queue that their connection to the login server times out. He said they were “currently working” to extend this session time. As for Error 2002, he explained that crops up when a data center already has more than 17,000 players in the login queue, not letting more people join the queue. He also noted that players can lose their spot if their internet connection suffers packet loss or instability, and “because the waiting times in login queues are long, we believe this increases the chances of encountering internet issues or momentary disconnections”.

Knowing what causes problems isn’t much comfort if you’re still suffering them, mind. The game has been struggling with capacity problems for months, having grown mighty popular during a global tech shortage which Squeenix say stops them from expanding servers as much as they want.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalkerofficially launches on Tuesday the 7th of December. Anyway, here’s Sia???

Cover image for YouTube video