Final Fantasy XIV raid groups worry about Dawntrail congestion mitigation

With the imminent arrival of Final Fantasy XIV‘s next expansion, Dawntrail, fans are eager to jump into the new content and explore every detail of it. Raiding groups look forward to their next challenges, but the developers’ current congestion mitigation plan could cause issues.

In the lead-up to Dawntrail‘s early access launch on June 28, the Final Fantasy XIV team shared its plan to assist with keeping the login queues to a minimum. There will be a restriction on Data Center Travel until Patch 7.01, or 7.05 at the latest, depending on how the overall queues and servers struggle with players attempting to play the game. For those who regularly travel Data Centers to play with friends, it could prevent many from enjoying the next expansion together, and raiders believe this could cause issues when they attempt the new Savage encounters.

The news about these changes came from an official news drop by the Final Fantasy XIV developers, and upon thoroughly going through it, there are several red flags. The developers encourage players to try migrating to other, smaller Data Centers outside of their Home Data Center to play the main content. While it might be a lesser experience and could have connection problems, it’s a viable solution to work through the main content.

For those who want to sync up with friends to play the Dawntrail content, however, these limitations make it difficult for everyone to party up. Some raiding groups might make it to one of the recommended Data Centers, like Dynamis. Still, the larger Data Centers, namely, Aether, Primal, Crystal, Chaos, and Light, won’t be available for travel.

If a player can get into the larger Data Centers to play and enjoy the content, they might be one of the few in their group who can do this, and they may have to wait until everyone else gets a chance.

Although the Savage raid for Dawntrail, The Arcadion, won’t unlock until July 30, Final Fantasy XIV fans are still hesitant that things will work out in their favor. Many players are worried about their raid groups after the game’s massive issues during the Endwalker December 2021, which went on for months. Hopefully for players, the developer can reopen the Data Centers to travel between them, but we don’t have a guarantee.

We’ll get more news after Dawntrail launches to early access on June 28 and then officially releases on July 2. Expect the first few weeks of Final Fantasy XIV to be full of login queues and issues. Contact your friend groups to plan the launch accordingly and prepare for these issues.