'Players don't need to worry about that': Final Fantasy 14 director says the team is well-armed for Dawntrail's launch rush, no repeat of the Endwalker queue fiasco or day-long DDoS attacks

pcgamer.com:

Naoki Yoshida seems determined not to have a repeat of Endwalker's launch woes. Its release in 2021 was a real lightning-in-a-bottle moment: The pandemic was still causing full-blown lockdowns, World of Warcraft players were heading to Eorzea in droves, and the expansion was wrapping up a decade-long story. It was a game suffering from success, causing servers to buckle and the game to be pulled from sale for six weeks as things stabilised.

Admittedly, that can cause a little bit of concern when we're right on the cusp of another expansion launch. But after sitting down and talking with Yoshida, he's confident that things won't be the same this time. «Previously, the situation was that just physically we didn't have the servers. But now we've acquired a sufficient amount of servers from around the world, so players don't need to worry about that.»

For those unfamiliar, Endwalker's main troubles came from not only a lack of servers, but the fact that ones available simply weren't capable of handling so many players. As Yoshida tells me, each server had a capacity of approximately 1,500 people. During Endwalker's peak, the team was seeing upwards of 5,000 people trying to access a server. Now I'm not very good at maths, but that's over three times the amount of people the server could reasonably handle, which is a helluva lot. 

Compounded with the fact that there was a huge semiconductor shortage during the pandemic (and during Endwalker's peak), it meant that Yoshida and the team weren't able to snag some emergency servers as things continued to buckle under the weight of a gargantuan number of players. 

Now general world things and Final Fantasy things have stabilised somewhat, it's given Yoshida the power to go into Dawntrail better armed. «I consulted with the president of Square Enix and I asked him if we could buy servers,» Yoshida told me. «And these past few years we have acquired a large number of servers for that purpose: In Europe, we have four servers. In