Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida apologies for the long queue times.

Final Fantasy 14 just launched its newest expansion, Endwalker, to early access. With a new expansion comes the usual woes for the massively popular MMO. Indeed, this means that there are very long server queues and general login problems around the world.

Producer and director Naoki Yoshida has issued a public apology to eager players regarding these issues. In addition, Yoshida has offered a bit of compensation to those with active subscriptions: 7 days of free, extra play time.

Yoshida issued the apology and compensation remarks in a new post to the Final Fantasy 14 website over the weekend. He provided some context as to just why the servers are being as hit as hard as they are.

Yoshida also talks about the reasons and potential workarounds for error codes that have also become more frequent during Endwalker's release. These include errors 2002, 4004, 5003, and 5006. The last three are tied to connection timeouts after waiting in the queue for long periods of time. Error 2002 can occur if the login queue reaches the max of 17,000 players or if the user's connection experiences instability.

Back in July, Square Enix was forced to implement a new idle kick system into Final Fantasy 14 in order to alleviate server congestion. At the time, the company says that they planned on expanding server capacity but due to the global chip shortage, the rollout of additional servers has been slow. That shortage issue has obviously not gotten any better here in December 2021.

Yoshida notes that they will grant 7 extra days of play time for those that own Endwalker and have an active subscription. He goes on to say that they may give additional free time "depending on further developments on the congestion situation." When this free time extension will be granted will be announced at a later time. However, Yoshida notes that even those on the 30-day free trial will receive the bonus time.