23 years after launch, Final Fantasy 11 is suspending character creation on its most popular server as it buckles beneath the weight of player congestion

I played Final Fantasy 11 for the first time in 2024 after an episode of the Abnormal Mapping podcast poisoned me with brainworms hungry for an MMO that, since its launch in 2002, has been left largely untouched by the genre conventions World of Warcraft would formalize in the years that followed. It's like an interactive museum of an alternate MMO history, and there's apparently no shortage of other players drawn in by that siren call.

More than two decades after FF11's launch, Square Enix has halted new character creation on its most popular server because it's attracting more players than it can handle (via Vice). In a news post on the FF11 website, producer and director Yoji Fujito announced "measures that will be implemented to address congestion on the Asura World."

"Thanks in part to players that are new to the game, as well as those that are returning home to Vana'diel after being away for a while, the overall player population has been trending upward recently," Fujito said. Unfortunately, those higher player counts have "led to a series of unexpected issues that have managed to affect the quality" of gameplay on Asura, the FF11 world with the highest player population.

As an example, Fujito said that system messages are "not displaying properly" for players participating in Vana'Bout, a recurring seasonal event where players are assigned randomized objectives that contribute to a shared global completion goal. To address those congestion issues, Square Enix is taking the following measures starting on Tuesday, July 29:

• The ability to use the World Transfer Service to transfer characters to Asura will be suspended.
• The ability to create new characters on Asura will be suspended.
• The Vana'diel Adventurer Recruitment Program will be suspended for Asura.

Fujito said Square Enix is "also considering other potential measures that will help equalize the populations across worlds," as other crowded servers could present similar issues.

On the FF11 forums, some players have said that event design might bear more of the blame for congestion woes than increasing player population—at least as they relate to Vana'Bout.

One thread criticized Square Enix's decision to tie Vana'Bout objectives to Ambuscade battles, which has led to clogged instance queues. "This is absolutely ridiculous," one player wrote. "Wasting an entire hour to queue and do a 60 second battle."

Another player echoed those complaints in a separate thread, saying it's "extremely upsetting" that Square Enix designed Vana'Bout objectives like one requiring the player to take a certain amount of damage in an Ambuscade.

"You know where everyone's head immediately went? Go in on Very Easy SOLO and sit there and tank hits over and over without trusts to make sure you're continually taking damage and healing yourself," the user wrote. "With this said, Vana'bout [has] now become a waiting game sitting in Mhaura waiting extremely long queues... It's not fun, at all."

While FF11 has been comfortably in its own lane for the last 23 years, it could look to its more mainstream cousins for solutions. WoW, for example, has occasionally offered free server transfers for players willing to move characters from overpopulated servers to low-density realms.

Luckily for me, I already made my character on Asura months ago, so I still get to hang out with the popular kids. If only I could only remember how to navigate the early 2000s-era launcher…