Final Fantasy 14 is probably at the peak of its popularity right now. Square Enix had to disable new game sales of Final Fantasy 14, which have now been resumed, to combat the severe congestion issues that arose around the launch of the Endwalker expansion. As most players have finished Endwalker, they are probably waiting for the next bit of story content said to come in Patch 6.1.
Patch 6.05 for Final Fantasy 14 was released earlier this month and added savage raids along with a new Treasure Dungeon. It also included the new tomestones of astronomy, which can be exchanged for gear having an ilvl of 590. Allagan tomestones of astronomy have a weekly cap of 450, so it will be a few months before players gain access to the full set. Square Enix has now released the patch notes for 6.08, which comes with some much-needed balance changes.
According to the notes for Patch 6.08 in Final Fantasy 14, the damage of various actions for most jobs will be increased. Director Naoki Yoshida had commented on how well the new Reaper job turned out and had expressed the development team’s interest in buffing all other jobs instead of nerfing any dominant class. It looks like the changes made in Patch 6.08 are focused on improving all DPS jobs.
Patch 6.08 also adds the highly requested Oceania data center. Final Fantasy 14 players in the Oceania region had been playing on faraway servers and had to compensate for the latency issues they faced during gameplay. Square Enix had planned on releasing the new data center with the launch of Endwalker, but could not get the hardware ready in time.
While the Final Fantasy 14 servers are not as congested as they were in December, this should ultimately help in reducing the load on the servers. Players can also take advantage of various bonuses, including double XP until level 80, should they choose to transfer to any of the new worlds. This transfer service is free of cost.
Square Enix had earlier detailed a roadmap of server expansion for Final Fantasy 14. The number of worlds in each region will be rebalanced, with new ones also being added to the NA and EU data centers. This move will help in increasing the maximum number of simultaneous online users, and hopefully players won't have to face the ridiculous queue times ever again. However, some of these changes will not come to fruition until next year.
Final Fantasy 14 is now available on PC, PS4, and PS5.
