Final Fantasy 14‘s upcoming Stormblood expansion officially arrives tomorrow on Tuesday, June 20, and with it comes the long-awaited Red Mage and Samurai jobs, along with a slew of new content for subscribers of Square Enix’s hugely successful MMORPG. Those that pre-ordered were given an early glimpse at the new content in the expansion with the Stormblood Early Access period, which runs from June 16-20. Unfortunately, it appears that Square Enix somehow did not anticipate the huge number of players accessing the new content, and this has led to widespread server instability, crashes, and lengthy login queues across all data servers.

To be fair, login queues can typically be expected when an MMORPG releases a new expansion. FF14‘s first expansion – Heavensward – saw similar queue times, which cleared up after a few weeks. The server instability, however, is something entirely different. In some cases, players are waiting for 15-20 minutes only to be notified that the connection to the server was lost, kicking them back to the beginning of the queue.

On the flip-side of this, players that have actually made it into the game aren’t necessarily in the clear. Those that try to join an instance – say, a solo PvE fight for one of the new class quests – are getting similar ‘connection lost’ messages and getting kicked out of the game, only to be forced to wait another 10-15 minutes for the login queue to clear up. Similar server issues are also preventing players from accessing the majority of the main storyline, which in turn is preventing players from accessing most of the new zones. FF14 director Naoki Yoshida had this to say about the server issues that have been occurring within the Stormblood Early Access period:

As announced earlier, there are a huge number of players currently playing Stormblood, and as a result, the servers continue to experience a large amount of stress. For this reason, we are currently limiting the number of players that can enter instanced content so that it does not lead to major server crashes.  However, this has caused massive congestion to enter instanced content and I would like to sincerely apologize for this.  If you are unable to enter instanced battle content, we ask you to please wait and try again at a later time. We understand that this unfairly places the burden on our players, but we require more time until the issue can be resolved. We continue to work on measures to address this issue and will follow up once we have an update.  Again, we sincerely apologize for this level of congestion occurring during early access when many of our players are the most excited to play. Everyone on the team will continue to put in our full effort to ensure an enjoyable gaming experience, and I would like to thank you for your continued support.”

It is concerning to see this many issues within the Stormblood Early Access window, especially given that only part of the player base has had access to the new content in the four days before the expansion’s official launch date. Hopefully Yoshida and the rest of the FF14 team can iron out the server wrinkles before the hard release of Stormblood tomorrow.

So, thoughts on the server issues players have been experiencing thus far with Stormblood? Have you played any of the new content yet within the expansion? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to DFTG for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!