Square Enix keeps a list of the nights Final Fantasy XIV might go down, and it keeps changing it. Read again on 25 September, the notice carries nine possible windows and nothing confirmed. Six new nights run to 8 October, and the next one is the night of 28 September.

Yes, the list lives on a wedding page. The Ceremony of Eternal Bonding is the game's in-game wedding, booked in advance, and Square Enix says maintenance may cause a reserved one to be cancelled. That is why this notice exists at all.

Every night we have seen the notice list, and what it said each time

We have now read this page four times. The columns are those four readings. Every window marked possible runs from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. the next morning, Pacific time, which the notice writes as PDT.

Square Enix marks the possible ones as subject to change, and says emergency maintenance can still happen outside them. The confirmed list currently reads "None".

The three nights from 21 September are still on the list, though all three have passed. So by our count six of the nine possible nights are still ahead, and the next one is the night of 28 September. The notice lists nothing for the three nights before it.

Our take: the list is a live document, and that is the story

Credit where it is due, because this is a publisher telling players something ahead of time rather than after the fact.

The useful thing here is not the wedding advice. It is what four readings of the same page show. On 2 September the notice listed nine nights and confirmed none of them. When we read it again on 7 September, three had dropped off, one had hardened into a confirmed four-hour window, and the rest were untouched. By 10 September that confirmed entry had been cleared away, and three new nights had appeared at the end. By 25 September four more nights had gone, and six new ones had appeared, reaching into October.

So this is not a schedule published once and left. It is a page Square Enix edits. Our reading is that it is worth checking again rather than trusting a copy of it, including a copy of it on a site like ours, which is why this table has four columns instead of one.

The uncomfortable half of that is what it means for anyone planning around it. A list that gained three nights at one reading and six at the next is a list you cannot plan a month against. Our view is that publishing it anyway still beats the alternative, which is a player finding out the servers are down by trying to log in.

The one rule worth carrying away sits at the bottom of the notice and dates to 2018. A ceremony booked to start after maintenance or an outage ends stays valid and needs no rescheduling. Square Enix says to reschedule a reservation that overlaps confirmed maintenance, and confirmed is a stricter word than possible. Read that as a floor rather than a ceiling: the same page says maintenance may cancel a reservation, and that emergency maintenance can happen outside every window the notice lists.

The two scheduled windows we have seen

When we read the page on 7 September it had something concrete on it. The confirmed section named 11:00 p.m. on 7 September to 3:00 a.m. on 8 September, Pacific time, and an all-Worlds maintenance notice gave the same hours. All Worlds means every server, rather than a few. By 10 September the confirmed section was back to "None".

The night of 16 September was one of the possible nights, and it did get a maintenance notice. An all-Worlds emergency maintenance notice scheduled the game offline from 11:00 p.m. on 16 September to 3:00 a.m. on 17 September, Pacific time, to add hotfixes for Patch 7.56, and said the finish time could change. A hotfix is a small repair shipped between the game's numbered updates. We did not read the wedding notice that week, so we cannot say whether it ever showed that night as confirmed.

Note that the edges did not match, either time. Both windows were scheduled for 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., narrower than the 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. bracket the possible nights use. Neither notice we hold says when the work actually finished. Two nights is not a rule. Our reading is that it is still worth remembering if a future night hardens the same way.

What's next

As of 25 September, by our count six possible nights remain, the last of them ending at 4:00 a.m. on 8 October, and none is confirmed. We will read the page again rather than assume this table still holds. Every date we track for this game sits on the calendar with the day we last checked it against the Lodestone, which is the game's own news site.