Pools Closed (Asura Is Full!)

We need you to clear the cellar of Diabolos!

(no wait that was a Lamp that Cid randomly had in his office)

They’ll lock it down. Fujito said as much during the Q&A when asked about future locking servers, as well as having no plans/“unable” to make anything cross-server to address consequences of locking servers. Also he said they’re not looking to create incentives for people to leave larger servers. So it’ll just be a game of lock-lock-lock.

SE is completely dropping the ball and not taking advantage of the growing popularity of XI.

SE is working with what they have and on track to create ~6 mid-population servers. The locks are necessary to prevent players self-building another super server.

The what now? The only way we can gauge this is with the estimates from this site's Database. According to it, we currently have 83,000~ active characters, compare that to a year ago when this post was made. We are down ~30,000 active characters from one year ago, roughly 25%. SE absolutely has dropped the ball, and almost never capitalizes on population spikes, but right now is not one of those times.

May is always a good month for them, especially if they hand out freebies like those bonanza kupons. I wonder if that guy still tracks the server pops regularly, 85k seems high but that's not based on any facts just a hunch.

It's not based on a hunch, it's based on this site's data.

83,817 active characters, according to ffxiah.

yeah I meant my opinion was a hunch. active characters just means an AH transaction within 30 days, right?

Its still an estimate because it doesnt access unique POLIDS, so AH mules will be counted.

But its still by far the best estimate available to the public.

I will say that the recent XIV patch with the final XI alliance raid seems to be getting even more people to check out XI, at least on Phoenix. Assist Channel here has been a lot more abuzz since last Tuesday and I've been seeing more legitimate new adventurers running around. Whether they will stick around past free trial / initial month is another story, but it is neat to see.

I get that, but it's the heavy-handedness of which they're locking servers which approach a even close to 1600-1800. The solution can't be just locking a server that has grown to that size immediately endlessly. And super servers aside, people just inherently like playing on larger servers and will gravitate to them especially newer or returning players.



Where's the misunderstanding? There's no doubt XI has seen an increase in players coming into the game over the last near 2 years coinciding with XIV:DT.

Regardless of the past responses, the point is SE not even meeting the moment during a pretty substantial period of resurgence into XI.

XI population is relatively stagnant, at best it's seen 5% growth in the last 2 years.

most of the increased population on asura/bahamut is not new players, if you think otherwise you are a complete fool.

don't get me wrong though, it's an absolutely insane feat for a 20+ year old MMO to even be stagnant let alone grow 5%.

you saying they are dropping the ball and not taking advantage of something though is pretty far from the facts

Is this based on anything tangible or just vibes? We can use wayback machine to see the history of the database page at dates they randomly polled.

This is what I am trying to help clear up with the data that we have.

The numbers do not support this:

There were 105k active players in 2016.
104k in 2020.
104k in 2023.
110k in 2025.
83k in 2026.

Overall active population is down from last year. It's the exact same as it was this time two years ago. Of those who come over from that game, few, if any, appear to be actually staying.

When you record numbers matters. In 15 days the population will appear to be 110k.

Compare same day year over year

88,480 May 4th 2021
89,380 May 4th 2022
76,489 May 4th 2023
64,710 May 4th 2024
Around 60k~70k 2025 (I stopped recording it daily in 2024 winter)
83,817 Today

The problem with Square Enix is they are utterly fixated with constant growth, and if they can't get it they will keep cutting the budget till they kill the game (cause they keep removing people to save money and boost profits).

They are doing the same with ff14 (adding more and more platforms while not expanding the dev team is insanely stupid behavior, it's going to keep extending the duration between patches due to the work load). I think the reason they did the crossover thing was to try make ff11 grow, but they are not making the game better for these new players so why would they stick around?

The company is beyond stupid, XI having a very high profit margin (it's like 80-90% profits) is simply not enough for them.

The problem is they are not doing anything to make it grow or make players want to keep paying either.

I thought the same when they announced the Odin lock, but after experiencing Odin for a bit it's pretty clear it's not about the typical population but the peaks. Even post-lock, I've observed hour-long ambuscade queues, 40 minute omen queues, and 20-30 min odyssey queues during JP prime. No, not every time, but enough that it impacts gameplay.

Throw in the issues with single-threaded performance that cannot be fixed by throwing money at it and the fact they threw Limbus into single non-instanced zones, and there are some real problems at those population levels besides how many people you perceive to be too many.

But, even if they could stretch it further, it makes more sense to have a handful of servers that aren't right up near the limits of what they consider acceptable. Pushing all the way to the limit before locking causes problems if people start to reactivate or pile in on the lock announcement (which they will).

Have you read like...any patch notes? Clearly you're not keeping up with the game at all if you think "they're not making the game better for these new players."

They've made DOZENS of updates to the game in the last year or two that were centered around improving the new player experience.

If you think that's not enough or would have preferred different updates that's fine. I don't think that's true though; I think you're just a bitter jaded douche who will never be happy no matter what they do.

You're so upset about SE, their games, and their management of FFXI (and probably FFXIV)...just leave it alone. If you don't like the way FFXI is, go play Madden or something. Why are you tormenting yourself spending all day thinking about and bitching about FFXI? Go play *whatever games* by *whatever company* is doing things the way you like. It clearly makes you angry that SE has billions of dollars and isn't spending it on FFXI.


I wonder where you're getting this idea, because I would see CONSTANT posts on reddit, every single day (and still do) of people who are new players and returning players, asking which server they should join. Basically everyone would tell them Bahamut or Asura, then they'd say "I'm on Asura, can I get a linkpearl?" So...in my anecdotal experience, nearly all new players are being funneled to the populated servers.

I'm sure there's a handful of active players who transfer to high-pop servers, but there's definitely a shitload of new players coming to the game and they're largely going to *whatever the current highest population place is*. Hell, even on my backwater I'm constantly handing out linkpearls to new players, or people returning from 5-10+ year long breaks.

Why would they have set such limitations upon themselves when they upgraded servers? Just preserving data instead of increasing performance?

Dogshit content (limbus), locked servers... Time to unsub (they said)

Isnt Asura locked down? How are new players getting on Asura?

I switched tenses too often in there so it's a bit confusing but...

I would (past) see lots of posts on reddit every day
I still do (today) see these posts
They ask (today & in the past) which server to join
Everyone would (past) say they should join Bahamut/Asura.
They would (past) say "I'm on Asura, can I get a linkpearl?"
Players are (today & in the past) being funneled to the populated servers.

In the past, it was Asura. Then Bahamut, Odin, and now Shiva/Fenrir. It's always been the case that these players have existed, have asked for server recommendations, been suggested to go to populated places, and then made a character on those servers. The name of the server is the only thing that changed.

The changes they are making are surface level, they are not only not making the game better for new / casual players in any meaningful way and also older players are losing the will to play too due to ***content additions like limbus (which isnt' designed to be rewarding or fun but just keep people busy as long as possible for as cheap as possible) and no updates to older good stuff.

If everyone that isn't happy goes off to play other games and says nothing, things are going to keep getting worse. Even if complaining has a tiny chance to be heard, it's good to do it (and yes the community team does read places like this and passes stuff back to them).

It would be one thing if this was something like Guild Wars 1, where they keep it going with a skeleton crew and it's free. This is a premium priced game we are paying to play (many of us are paying far more money to play this, than we would if we played wow or ff14), and they are treating it like Guild Wars 1.

The trust update is a good example, trusts are not actually much better than they were before. All this update actually ended up being, is something to keep you busy and paying the sub.

The point was the money, not making trusts better for casual players or even giving people something to do. Even if the trust update sucked, if at least it was "something to do" I would have been happy. It's not even that, I log in after a patch and activate the 4 monthly and within an hour I'm done.

you're saying something different than what i said and using a lot of words to spew it.

i bolded it for you to try again.

if you need me to word it another way.. asura/bahamuts increased player population was NOT a problem caused by new players. it was existing players transferring to those servers. or do you really think bahamut gained 5000-6000 new players in the course of 2 weeks causing SE to shut it down? this was almost entirely transfers.

were there some new players? YES. FFXI has fantastic retention for existing players, it does not have any sort of outreach or marketing to new players. most new players quit.

did most new players start on asura? yes.. but that was not what i said. they are the minority of the surge.

matched your wordcount in something that could have easily been inferred in the first sentence you replied to

Their code is older and designed in a way that each zone (or possibly even each zone cluster) runs on one thread (think of a thread as a worker). Rewriting it to allow multiple threads to work on the same zone or cluster at the same time means handling cases where they want to edit the same data at the same time and has the potential to introduce an immense amount of bugs. It's not a realistic option.

They didn't set the limits when upgrading, physics did. Signals already travel over half the speed of light within a chip and reducing the distance they have to travel requires incredibly precise manufacturing processes that only a couple companies in the world can make any improvement on. New tech improves processing primarily by using multiple threads and better instruction sets, rather than improving single thread performance.

TLDR; They cannot buy a 'better server' that will increase their limits because it doesn't exist. A reasonable gaming PC could run one of their threads better than any server rated hardware in existance (with lower long-term stability). The only way to increase capacity is to do an incredibly costly and risky set of changes to their code.

Thank you, that is unfortunate but makes sense.

Is there an official link showing server open / closed status?

I don't think so. Asura, Bahamut, and Odin have closed. None of them are likely to reopen.

Bahamut is about to drop below phoenix. Can't leave bahamut closed when it only has 6k and dropping. Can't open it either cause it will jump right back to 10k.

What will they do!?!1?/11!?

They're gonna do what they do best.