Final Fantasy XIV addresses overpopulation due to influx of exposure from Asmongold

Square Enix is boasting record numbers for its MMO RPG Final Fantasy XIV. But the surge of new players has caused issues with congestion on servers that are reaching max player capacity.

Twitch’s top MMO content creator Asmongold streamed FFXIV for the first time at the beginning of July, peaking at more than 200,000 viewers in his first stream. Since then, he’s played 55 hours on stream with 5.6 million hours watched, according to Twitch audience tracker Sullygnome.com.

Shortly after Asmon’s first FFXIV stream, the game hit a Steam record for concurrent players. And a week later, the Square Enix store had a “waiting list” for players looking to buy the digital product.

Now, the game’s producer and director Naoki Yoshida has come out to address various issues due to the overpopulation in the game caused by Asmongold and other streamers who have started playing the game.

Over the past couple of weeks, NA and EU servers of FFXIV have become so overpopulated that players are having a tough time getting into the game due in part to the maximum number of players that the servers can handle. To combat that, Yoshida said his team has “recently upgraded” data centers in North America. As of Friday, July 16, the devs were able to increase the simultaneous login cap by 18,000 players.

For European servers, upgrades are still pending. But Square Enix has a couple of other fixes that it’s implementing to smooth things out at least a little bit.

While Yoshida pleaded to players in his post that they should log out of the game if they’re not actively playing, he added that the developers plan on putting in a new auto-logout feature to prevent idle players from keeping others out of the game. This was an update that was planned for a later patch, but instead, Yoshida said it will come with the release of Patch 5.58.

In the past month, Asmongold hasn’t been the only person to show interest in FFXIV on Twitch. His friend and fellow-streamer Rich Campbell has racked up 1.7 million hours watched playing the game for 156 hours. 

Meanwhile, other notable content creators, like variety streamer CohhCarnage and MMO content creator Annie Fuchsia, have accrued 1.1 million and 880 hours watched respectively playing the game.