Final Fantasy 14 players have been waiting for this day for a very long time. It's the pre-launch date for the new Final Fantasy 14 expansion, Endwalker. Endwalker is the culmination of a ten-year story within the fantasy MMO, but is also simply a massive content update for Final Fantasy 14 faithful to dive into. Unfortunately, however, many Final Fantasy 14 players are encountering an issue preventing them from playing the game. A "2022" error is all Final Fantasy 14 players see before they're kicked out of queues.
As players already know, Final Fantasy 14 employs a unique type of server queue system. Queues are used not just to help during times where many people are logging in at once, but also in other ways. For example, they're used to prioritize those who own the full version of Final Fantasy 14 over free trial players. What this means is that almost all players experience at least a brief queue, though queues are understandably being exacerbated due to Endwalker's launch.
Here's where things are going wrong. Players are entering queues hoping to get into the game as soon as possible, only to receive a 2002 error before their queue ends. This error requires Final Fantasy 14 players re-join the queue to get into the game. Since all players enter a queue to get into Final Fantasy 14, even if it's brief, that means many Final Fantasy 14 players are getting hit by the 2002.
As for what the 2002 error is exactly, there's no obvious answer at the moment. The error message's description reads "The lobby server connection has encountered an error," with Final Fantasy 14's official Twitter attributing the problem to congested servers. In other words, login servers handling queues across multiple servers are overwhelmed. As such, they're unable to properly log players in, regardless of whether the specific server in question is overwhelmed or not.
To its credit, Square Enix warned Final Fantasy 14 players that there were likely to be issues at launch. A message shared in September confirmed that the Final Fantasy 14 team tried to secure new server infrastructure to add more worlds to the MMO, but couldn't in time due to pandemic restrictions.
These types of issues aren't uncommon for MMO and expansion launches, though Final Fantasy 14's recent surge of success is definitely contributing to the problem. Luckily, there's a simple solution to this, much like other MMO launch problems. Players will just have to be patient and wait. Once the launch surge fades out some, servers will be less congested. That's not an easy solution to deal with in the rush to play through Endwalker, though.
Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker is available in early access now on PC, PS4, and PS5.