FF14 Suspends Inactivity Penalty After Hurricane Helene

Due to the destruction and power outages caused by Hurricane Helene hitting the United States, Square Enix has temporarily paused a feature in its popular MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 that demolished player homes if they didn’t log in frequently enough.

Last week, category 4 Hurricane Helene hit the southern United States hard, leading to flooding, billions of dollars in damage, and over 160 confirmed deaths. The storm is the second deadliest hurricane in the last 50 years and reportedly over a million people still don’t have power in states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. And while an online video game is far from the most important thing during disasters like this, Square Enix is making sure players affected by the storm don’t return to FF14 to find their digital house demolished.

On October 2, Square Enix posted a notice on the official Final Fantasy 14 website announcing that it was temporarily pausing the demolition of inactive player homes in North America while people are still recovering from Helene. Normally, after 45 days of inactivity, a player’s in-game house would be demolished so that cyber plot of land could be grabbed by someone else on the server.

“From all of us on the FFXIV development and management team, our hearts go out to those who were affected late last month by Hurricane Helene in North America,” posted Square Enix. “Due to the damages and other factors, we have decided to temporarily suspend the automatic demolition of estates.”

According to the post, the data centers affected by this are Aether, Crystal, Dynamis, and Primal, which are all the North American servers. Square Enix didn’t say when home demolishing will return for these servers.

“It is our sincere hope that recovery is swift, and those of you who were affected will be able to rejoin us in FFXIV soon,” said Square Enix.

As pointed out by PC Gamer, this isn’t the first time real-world disasters have led to Square Enix temporarily pausing home demolition in FF14. In January, the demolition of homes in servers in Japan was paused after the massive Noto earthquake. In 2023, following a destructive earthquake in Türkiye-Syria, Square Enix also paused home destruction.

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