During the Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail media tour, Naoki Yoshida assured me, and no doubt countless other journalists and content creators, that the servers were jacked and ready to handle the hordes of players coming at launch Despite all this, I was still apprehensive. [I had asked my roommate to move the mouse while I went shopping so that my character wouldn't lose out to the 30-minute AFK timer and end up waiting four hours in a row. I was almost ready to play, but error 90002 showed up and I realized that the universe did not want me to attack the dungeon tonight. Those of you who have experienced the lesser but equally painful problems of Stormblood's Lauban (Savage) will remember how much of a pain it was.

So, forgive me for being a bit cynical, but I'm glad I was proven wrong when I jumped in the moment Dawntrail was released. I held my breath to see how many players were in front of me, but my heart sank a little when I saw the number: 1,059, which was not a huge number, but if the servers were on fire, it would still take a hot minute while I patiently waited my turn to sail to Tural The numbers were.

But 10 minutes later, no fuss, I was standing outside my house ready for adventure. Only ten minutes! A year and a half ago, this would have been an outlandish dream. This time around, the process was much smoother, and it seems I'm not alone: fellow PC Gamer writer and Final Fantasy 14 enthusiast Harvey Randall said it took him about five minutes in a line of about 700 people to log in on the NA servers.

Even if there are still some hiccups, it is definitely a pleasant change from the torture people endured during Endwalker. A peek at Dawntrail's mega-thread on the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit confirms that most of the queue-related comments seem to confirm that it is a smooth process overall.

I've seen several people claim, jokingly or seriously, that it's because people aren't clamoring about the expansion. It is worth recalling what Yoshida said about the launch queue during the media tour. The smoothness of the queue is not an indictment of the game's popularity, but rather a good sign that the team did their job correctly." It's not that crowded, which means people have left Final Fantasy 14, right? I would really appreciate it if you could tell those people that this is the result of a lot of effort and preparation we put into helping our players."