SQUARE ENIX has halted the sale and the free trials of Final Fantasy 14 temporarily, citing server issues due to high player count.

If Final Fantasy 14‘s awards in TGA 2021 made you curious about the game, forget it. FF14‘s community loved the game so much that they have invited all of their friends and friends' mother to play the game. Then, we have a lot of new players coming in because of TGA, and a lot of returning players as its latest expansion, Endwalker, has just been released. With so many players logging in at the same time, the game's queue times have gone astronomically long. At the same time, servers are being overloaded, and SQUARE ENIX has already acknowledged that they have a huge player base problem.

Game Producer Naoki Yoshida has apologized profusely for the server problems, but it has come to a point that the server issues have gone from inconvenient to completely unplayable. Hence, the decision has been made to stop new players from joining in – at least until the server issues have been fixed.

Earlier last week, Yoshi-P also announced that they will be giving current subscribers a two-week extension to their subscriptions. This is how they apologize for the crashing servers and long queue times. However, no matter how nice this gesture is, the fact of the matter is that the Final Fantasy 14 player base is now too big for its servers. The bad news is that SQUARE is also struggling to address this issue, as the world shortage of chips still persists.