Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood has been launched fully on June 20, but even before then the Early Access period was hit by connection issues. The popularity of the new expansion saw a massive uptick in active players and new accounts. This increase in traffic combined with a series of new bugs to create a perfect storm of connection issues and server crashes.
If you want to get into Stormblood, be sure to check the patchnotes first.
Since the first few days of the pre-launch period, players experienced a variety of issues. The game’s director and producer Naoki Yoshida issued an apology to all those who were looking forward to a problem-free early access period. He cites two main issues, congestion and server crashes.
Regarding the first issue, from around 8:00 a.m. (Pacific Time), we have strengthened the instanced worlds and diverted stress loads, enabling 20,000 players to enter instanced content each hour. As a result, the playable slots for instanced content have been increased significantly. We would like to offer our sincerest apologies that an extended amount of time was required to address these issues, as we strived to avoid large-scale server crashes within the data centers during our procedures. We will continue to monitor this situation 24 hours a day.
Regarding the second issue, we are experiencing continuous crashes within the Duty servers due to the consistently high stress loads caused by frequent matching requests from Worlds within the data centers. As we have confirmed that these crashes are causing some players to be unable to log in due to error 90006/90002, we continue to seek resolutions that address the root cause of these issues. As a temporary measure, we have implemented a work flow to restore the Worlds in 15 to 30 minute increments if the Duty server has crashed. We apologize for the inconvenience, but if you are experiencing the above error, we ask that you please try logging back in after 15 to 30 minutes.
We sincerely apologize for the large amount of time lost from your important early access time during the weekend. We will continue to monitor the high stress loads that the NA data centers are experiencing, and will continue to do our best so that players can play on all Worlds with stability. Once again, we apologize for the issues occurring for an extended amount of time.
But this wasn’t the end of the problems for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood. Unknown hackers began targeting game servers late on June 20 with a massive DDOS attack that crippled the ability for players to enjoy the game.
A statement from Square reads as follows:
This is a report regarding the network technical difficulties that occurred on Jun. 16, 2017, Jun. 18, 2017, and are still occurring on Jun. 20, 2017.
We have confirmed that since Jun. 16th, we have been experiencing DDoS attacks* from an anonymous third-party targeting the FINAL FANTASY XIV game servers on the NA data center.
Our technical staff is taking every possible measure to address this issue but the attack is still continuing to take place by changing their methods at every moment. We will continue to monitor and work on recovery from every possible angle.
* What is a DDoS Attack?
An attack attempting to increase the server load to an extensive level by flooding the network of the targeted servers using a massive number of computers.Due to this attack, our game servers, network equipment and network connection are being hit with heavy load at an extensive level, which is causing a disconnection from the game and login difficulties.
Our technical staff is continuing to work on countermeasures for this issue.
However, with the attack we are currently experiencing, only a massive number of access attempts are being made, so character data and personal information registered to our customers’ accounts are not in danger of being exposed.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing.
