Final Fantasy XIV – 3102 Error and What Really Happened

As most Final Fantasy XIV players know This weekend’s Open Beta had some issues. The most prevalent issue was Error Code 3102, “Your character is already logged in please try again in a few minutes.” Usually it just means you disconnected and you tried to log in again too fast. This time, however, that was not the case. Well over ten thousand players suffered from this error, some of which had it for over 24 hours. I for one had this error come up on my main account around noon on Sunday.

The Facts on 3102

So the common issue that arose this weekend was people disconnected while loading into a new zone. While normally this isn’t an issue, for some reason several thousand people throughout all the North American and European servers were having the problem. Now, because they were zoning when they disconnected they were trapped in coding limbo, meaning the game still recognized the character as in game in between loading zones.

This coding glitch made it unable to load into the game on any North American or European server due to the game thinking they were already loaded in somewhere on the data center. Since this glitch was affecting players on the North American and European data center and not the Japanese data center, meaning they could create a character and log into a Japanese server, the glitch could be isolated to the data center itself.

So a bit past midnight this morning Square Enix started dumping the effected data center to start emergency maintenance. From what we could tell, it appears they went systematically and manually removed people from the game instead of just shutting off the servers. I figure this was to prevent more people from being affected, however that is just speculation on my part. After all that servers finally fully went down somewhere around 2am eastern time this morning. After finally going fully offline, the game stayed offline until about 4am eastern. When the servers came back online players afflicted by the 3102 error could finally log back in to the game.

Where we stand

At this point after a weekend of frustrating errors everyone suffering from the 3102 error should be able to log back in. On top of that the North American an European servers have had their allowable play time extended to approximately 11am eastern today. It’s not a huge bonus but it’s something, considering the game enters Early Access this weekend. For more information you can go to the A Realm Reborn Reddit or the Beta Testers Forums