Linkshell Community Site Maintenance

[Gippo]

Apologies if this has been posted somewhere, but I have searched and not found anything.

Can we get an update please as to the current condition of the playonline community site? It has been under maintenance for literally months.

Will the site issues be rectified any time soon?

Thanks for any response.

[Gippo]

Bump for justice

[Anjou]

Bumping because it needs to be looked at...

[Freebytes]

Maintenance normally means it is down for a few minutes. Maybe a few hours. Even, in the worst case scenario, a few days. However, it has been down for a few months. Are they updating it or is it broken?

[Lumps]

Nothing has been said about this for far too long. It should have been back up by now but they won't even tell us what's going on.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

The XIV Lodestone just entered its 2.0 beta.

The XI Linkshell Community has never been out of beta.

[Dragomair]

I wouldn't know where to find the link, but I remember seeing that an update to the server 'broke' the linkshell community and they are trying to fix it before putting it back online.

[Muhfuggah]

Something in the likes of "Unfortunately we will not be bringing the Linkshell community back due to lack of resources" would be cool.

Then people would stop asking about it.

[Quixote]

I don't think it will be coming back and please forgive me if I am being too negative but Linkshell community has been beta forever. I think it is good to assume that they are waiting for us to fade away into FFXIV and get hooked on it.
And it is working I myself will be getting the game and I am sure most of us will do the same.

[Demon6324236]

I don't know that they are just abandoning it, but I think they are more focused on FFXIV for sure, we seem to share a lot of things for sites and even reps, so its not to far out of the question we might have the same people working on sites related to the games, and SE just thinks its not worth the effort. Besides that, if FFXI dies shortly after the FFXIV release, why waste the time and effort? Might just be waiting to see how it plays out.

[Camate]

Greetings everyone,

To start off, I'd like to apologize about the long wait for a response on the status of the LS Community site. Both Associate Director Yoji Fujito and Producer Akihiko Matsui have made comments on this topic, so please take a moment to read them below.



Sorry to keep you waiting on this for so long. After gathering the information and understanding the situation, I'd like to start off with a comment on this.

The LS Community is something that is spread across various departments here and a lot of different people are involved. Getting information from just one representative from each of these departments resulted in quite differing information, and all of this information was then shared with Producer Matsui, who has been going around to find out more.

I'd like to explain exactly what is going on right now and then have Producer Matsui follow-up with some of the more detailed parts.

I've written the below extremely objectively, so while it might come off as not taking responsibility for the problem, I would just like to report on the current situation and I appreciate your understanding on this.

Currently there is someone who is trying their best to resolve the technical issues and is performing the recovery work. However, despite knowing the cause of these issues, the scale is much larger than we had thought and the work in order to properly resolve this has grown extremely big. Also, the area where this is being addressed is not the department specifically for the LS Community, which has resulted in the task schedule not progressing very well.

To put it in simpler terms, due to the fact that there are no engineers specific to the LS Community, it's not possible to focus solely on the recovery work.

With that said, there is a discussion taking place in regards to what will happen to the LS Community, which has been in beta (it's been beta for quite a few years now…).

As of right now this is the current status. Producer Matsui will be making a follow-up after this in a bit, and will inform you about the future of LS Community.





Hello, Matsui here.

I'd like to explain about the current situation regarding the issues with the LS Community. Fujito has already made a post about this, but I feel it's necessary for me to explain about this as well, so I apologize if I repeat parts that were already said.

Since the end of March, due to a bug caused by the addition of the new jobs, it has not been possible to connect to the LS Community.

As there is currently no staff on hand who can handle the system implementation of the core portions of this, we requested the web department to investigate whether it's possible to address certain aspects.

As a result, they determined that it was possible to fix the displayed portions with the new jobs, and when we requested this work to be done separate issues and bugs arose. We then realized the fixes would take much more time than was anticipated at first.

However, just the other day we managed to resolve the database issue and it is now possible to select the new jobs for your forum profile. We've received a report that using these methods they were able to start fixing the bugs that are currently affecting the LS Community.

Though it will require a bit more time, we are currently working on getting the LS Community features back to the way they were before these issues.

Originally I had planned to make an announcement once the fixes were completed and I apologize for making you wait so long without any information, but due to the fact that this is an issue that was spread across multiple departments it took a bit of time to get a consensus from everyone involved to make an official announcement.

Thank you very much for your continued support of FFXI and the LS Community.

[Muhfuggah]

Greetings everyone,

To start off, I'd like to apologize about the long wait for a response on the status of the LS Community site. Both Associate Director Yoji Fujito and Producer Akihiko Matsui have made comments on this topic, so please take a moment to read them below.

TY for taking the time to let us know what's going on /

[Antanias]

Why not just give up on the ls community site and make it more like the Lodestone over on ff14? Both the old and new versions are way more intuitive than the LS Community site has ever been.

[OmnysValefor]

So vague and obscure about even this.

[Nervosa]

Just burn it down, its been in beta for years now with no progress being made.
No one uses it aside from gathering character data for FFXIAH.

[Olor]

I also love that these forums are still in beta. Crikes. Is there anyone even still on the XI team? Or is 95% of my subscription fee going to pay for XIV?

[Zumi]

There is my FF14 beta character
http://na.beta.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/349437/

Needless to say their new 14 site kicks the old FFXIs site ass. It seems like nobody is even working on 11 anymore. When 14 comes out I may just permanently switch to that because 11 hasn't been getting much stuff recently.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

gathering character data for FFXIAH.

A third-party resource that shouldn't need to exist, but we won't go there...

[Glamdring]

as long as we are on the subject, it's been 6+ years since it was rolled out. Any chance you'll EVER get it out of Beta?

[Edyth]

Dear Yoji Fujito and Akihiko Matsui,

Relax. You can terminate the LS Community site. It's not worth the time, manpower, or money. Please redirect your staff and our subscription fees to improving game content.

Sincerely,
Edyth
And all the people who like this post

[Demon6324236]

The only reason people care is for AH.com, a community site, this is as close to support as any community site has ever gotten from SE so far as I know, so by all means, I think its a good idea to fix it, or even improve it for people to make use of.

[Alhanelem]

Dear Yoji Fujito and Akihiko Matsui,

Relax. You can terminate the LS Community site. It's not worth the time, manpower, or money. Please redirect your staff and our subscription fees to improving game content.

Sincerely,
Edyth
And all the people who like this post
Actually, the site is a very valuable feature... just not for the reasons for which it was originally created. :p

That being said, the producer posts make me think of just how much organizational issues could be impeding the game's development...

[Thala]

Just to reinforce the sentiment, I imagine an extreme minority of players actually care about the Linkshell Community. For most of us, all we want is an effectively public means of sharing our character data without having to do so manually.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Just to reinforce the sentiment, I imagine an extreme minority of players actually care about the Linkshell Community.

The same could be said about R/M/E 99 holders.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

XIV was written from the ground up to have the Lodestone site and other such external web integration. XI was not written with a Linkshell Community in mind.

[Alhanelem]

Which is why it was basically a huge hack job and why there isn't any one person at SE who knows entirely how it works (lol)

[OmnysValefor]

Just to reinforce the sentiment, I imagine an extreme minority of players actually care about the Linkshell Community. For most of us, all we want is an effectively public means of sharing our character data without having to do so manually.

Noone would care if it weren't for FFXIAH. Because of FFXIAH, a large portion of the community cares.

[Awateru]

Couldn't they just have some way to get an XML or JSONP feed of your character data? Have some option in the account management or forum settings where you can enable / disable / customize it, and have it at a generic URL like:
forum.square-enix.com/characters/servername/charactername/

[Darwena]

I want LSC back!!!

[bungiefanNA]

Guildwork and FFXIAH can't update your mission progress without the LS Community. I'm amazed it has been down for so long. It's making it hard to find people to do certain missions with.

[SilentSteel]

It's actually up again, just came back last week.