Players had to queue up virtually in lines of over a thousand strong to access the new Endwalker expansion for Final Fantasy XIV ( FFXIV ), which launched over this weekend.

MMO queues aren’t unheard of- they’ve long been the genre’s solution to solving overcrowding. Considering FFXIV ‘s upwards boom in popularity over the year, it was basically understood that the idea you’d get to play the game this weekend without waiting a long time in queue was a pipe dream at best.

Streamer Patrick Boivin documented his own attempts to access the game, with screenshots showing over 3600 players in queue just to access Final Fantasy XIV  on the server he was playing on.

Some players on the reddit even reported the number going as high as 9000, with frequent “2002 errors” disconnecting them and forcing them to rejoin the queue.

“I’ve been trying to get in for the last 6 hours lol, always crash in 2002 at some point. I gave up now when I re-entered the queue at place 10.6k-something.”, one redditor writes.

Naturally, the internet did what the internet does best and coped through humor, with many Twitter netizens posting memes about themselves being stuck in queue.

The Rocketing Popularity

Despite having been around for many years now, Final Fantasy XIV has had a great upwards momentum in the past year. There’s several reasons to suggest why- first off, more people got into video games in general since the pandemic started. The second is the so-called “WoW Exodus”, which saw many World of Warcraft content creators try out the MMO after being frustrated by their usual MMO.

As of now, the trailer for Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker sits at 3.8 million views on YouTube.

Final Fantasy XIV

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix

Release Date: 2013-08-27

mac os, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam

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