Square Enix Closes The Aether Data Center To New Character Creation

Final Fantasy XIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida penned another update regarding server capacity issues released during the just completed patch 5.58 hotfix maintenance. The expansion of the server capacity for North American data center servers failed to alleviate the problem for the Aether data center.

As of the Patch 5.58 Hotfix maintenance, all Worlds on the Aether Data Center have been classified as Congested. Despite expanding the maximum capacity as much as possible and closely monitoring the situation, the number of logins for each World have constantly remained at full capacity, which led to us taking this course of action.

This means players will be unable to create new characters on any World on the Aether Data Center until this classification is lifted. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this will cause for those of you who were looking forward to embarking on adventures with friends.

Were the number of characters to increase any further, it could result in login queues taking up to several hours, which is why we needed to take this approach. In the meantime, we kindly request that you consider creating a character on a World within the Primal or Crystal Data Centers, though we’re aware that they are currently quite congested as well.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this will cause for our players on the North American Data Centers.

The eight worlds affected are:

• Adamantoise
• Cactuar
• Faerie
• Gilgamesh
• Jenova
• Midgardsormr
• Sargatanas
• Siren

The Aether Data Center is where most of the influx of WoW streamers who recently started playing FFXIV such as Asmongold, Rich Campbell, and the Limit raid team.

Work also continues to fix login issues on the European data centers.

During the Patch 5.58 Hotfix maintenance scheduled for August 24, we will be changing the operating system settings for the server configuration of the European Data Centers, and the login cap will be increased once we have confirmed stability post-maintenance. Furthermore, in late September, we are also planning to replace some of our equipment with high-performance machines to further increase the cap.

We’ve observed considerable levels of congestion on the European Data Centers over the past few weeks, especially during weekends. Though login queues have been quite long, please rest assured that they are working properly. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we ask that you continue to wait for your turn to log in should you encounter a queue.

The world-wide semiconductor shortage continues to play havoc with Square Enix' efforts to build up server capacity. With Endwalker's release now less than three months away, I'm starting to grow a little concerned about whether the servers will hold up to the demand.