SE you have a Worldwide Franchise, and your support is a let down.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Auriga

Very true though: http://www.ffxiah.com/player/Quetzalcoatl/Vedabe

---

Sure enough that´s the last time i have sell something, but that does not mean that´s the last time i´ve played the game, you could always ask my mates on the linkshell, even though i don´t need to prove myself over my identity.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vedabe

Sure enough that´s the last time i have sell something, but that does not mean that´s the last time i´ve played the game, you could always ask my mates on the linkshell, even though i don´t need to prove myself over my identity.

---

http://www.chatzy.com/144542738582 <-- hop on others are here

tho how do u survive w/o gil??

Sorry if I offended you Auriga, I truly didn't mean it that way. You have to admit that it was fantastic irony. :)

In case anyone isn't following it too closely, they made a lot of progress to day:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...f-the-reactors

Raist

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Glitch

Sorry if I offended you Auriga, I truly didn't mean it that way. You have to admit that it was fantastic irony. :)

---

Indeed.. epic fail for me i suppose..

Guys, this is getting way to agressive, calm down, remember they are just opinions to discuss, i didn´t mean to offend anyone :)

only thing i have to say about this thread is .... I want a BIG mac now ; ; ... buy me 1 im all outta gil >.<

I just purchased Rift as I know the servers are not going to be back up anytime soon. I am bored out of my mind so I had to do something.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by svengalis

I just purchased Rift as I know the servers are not going to be back up anytime soon. I am bored out of my mind so I had to do something.

---

Played the beta, have fun on your WoW clone. ^^

I still don't get how even after showing a few good reasons why SE never made a full set of backup servers, people still complain.

Making a complete copy of the servers is expensive
moving the data electronically or even physically is expensive and dangerous to the data.
no other MMORPG has a complete physical backup of their servers. (again would be to expensive)

and trying to do any of this now would take way to long.

Still so many serious fools.. FOOLS I SAY! THE WHOLE LOT OF YOU WHO DARE TO FIGHT ELECTRONICALLY!

/fiddles with a rubix cube

I can wait for FF11 to come back, so can you!

OK crazy lady I am starting to have second thoughts about.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Anon

It's not useless to post bro! Some of us from another forum rather enjoy the pearls that fly though here. But you knew you were going to get wrecked for posting. Like I knew. Yet you posted anyway. If the Raist and others would shut up and not post in these threads... well it would be a bit more constructive. At least after reading through their rhetoric I think what they are trying to say is be calm... wait it out... it will be ok. How about all you hippies go hug a tree somewhere together and let those of us that are mad... be mad?

---

yes go cut a tree or whatever and be as mad as you like, telling raist should shut up , he is the only one who brought up constructive posts at all
breau, alexander/bastok

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zarchery

Why would Square Enix need backup servers? It took a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, which was among the top 5 largest earthquakes in history, AND near meltdowns at several nuclear power plants, to trigger their FIRST INTERRUPTION IN NINE YEARS.

You can plan for contingency, but not every contingency.

---

Yes, you are correct. You don't have to plan for a Hat Trick of Suck, you plan for server interruption. This could be from many different sources:

Your backbone could go down.
You could have a fire start in the server room.
Your power line could be cut.
Problems with local bandwidth provider (if you're not directly linked to the backbone).

There's other problems that can get you to the same outcome. Granted, most of these problems would only cause a few hours to a few days of downtime, but the point is still the same. You don't plan for a large earthquake, Tsunami, and Chernobyl pt2. You plan for extended downtime.

There's been plenty of interuptions, just not major ones.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jeffanddane

OK crazy lady I am starting to have second thoughts about.

---

/hurls a rabit cat at you an makes insane jibberish words - in hopes of ending this crazy thread.

ITT: Saying "I'm not selfish" before making a selfish post makes the post not selfish

im pretty sure they had rolling blackouts after the Kobe Quake. point im trying to make is its a good investment to protect an industry

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Basher

im pretty sure they had rolling blackouts after the Kobe Quake. point im trying to make is its a good investment to protect an industry

---

They had many things planned for times like this, the problem is things got way worse then they expected. People expect this complicated answer, but to be honest, it is as simple as what I just said.

Their emergency plans where set at an 8/10 and they got a 9, not that hard to understand.

You missed my point Kailea. If they had rolling blackouts at Kobe then they should be prepared for rolling blackouts now. Surely you would at least base any emergency plans on previous experience?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nu-Hir

Yes, you are correct. You don't have to plan for a Hat Trick of Suck, you plan for server interruption. This could be from many different sources:

Your backbone could go down.
You could have a fire start in the server room.
Your power line could be cut.
Problems with local bandwidth provider (if you're not directly linked to the backbone).

There's other problems that can get you to the same outcome. Granted, most of these problems would only cause a few hours to a few days of downtime, but the point is still the same. You don't plan for a large earthquake, Tsunami, and Chernobyl pt2. You plan for extended downtime.

---

You don't know that they didn't plan for such things. The problem is electricity is an issue for the entire country for over a week. That's not something you plan for.

Planning around this involves setting up a backup in another country. That's pretty extreme.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Basher

You missed my point Kailea. If they had rolling blackouts at Kobe then they should be prepared for rolling blackouts now. Surely you would at least base any emergency plans on previous experience?

---

They probably do, but this was more then rolling black outs. It was government imposed conservation.

Yes Tsu understood. But from the economics of it, which is what i thought this thread was about is, is that although there maybe immediate costs, and we all vary in opinion on what those costs would be, the cost to their gaming industry would be massive. The longer they go without being able to charge people, the more gamers they lose, the more the tsunami costs them.

Raist you there? They charge you guys in the US how for your broadband? By the line usage or by the volume usage

You are absolutely correct. Most if not all buisness have what is called a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan). This plan especially is important with an buisness that has a large network and infrastructure. The DRP can only plan for what they are known to have happen in the country. In order to have what they would call a cloned network to support a nation wide user base they would have to have it set up in another country. The point is they did not need a cloned network as SE's network never went down it did not fail so there was no reason to have one. They as most have said already were just complying with the need to conserve energy for the people as a nation. That is the most important thing.

To the originator of this thread I understand what you are saying from a buisness aspect yes a DRP is extremely important for a nationwide network service, however if your service never fails which in this case it still has not there is no need to spend more than needed. SE choose their DRP based on what they felt was needed. Their services still have not failed so from a buisness point the chose best for the company in terms of preperation and money. They are supporting their nation and giving back to their customers. Does not matter what buisness you are you can plan all you want but in the end you can not keep everyone happy even in a time like this.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Basher

Raist you there? They charge you guys in the US how for your broadband? By the line usage or by the volume usage

---

We have flat rates, and only certain providers have data caps.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JMMC1978

You are absolutely correct. Most if not all buisness have what is called a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan). This plan especially is important with an buisness that has a large network and infrastructure. The DRP can only plan for what they are known to have happen in the country. In order to have what they would call a cloned network to support a nation wide user base they would have to have it set up in another country. The point is they did not need a cloned network as SE's network never went down it did not fail so there was no reason to have one. They as most have said already were just complying with the need to conserve energy for the people as a nation. That is the most important thing.

To the originator of this thread I understand what you are saying from a buisness aspect yes a DRP is extremely important for a nationwide network service, however if your service never fails which in this case it still has not there is no need to spend more than needed. SE choose their DRP based on what they felt was needed. Their services still have not failed so from a buisness point the chose best for the company in terms of preperation and money. They are supporting their nation and giving back to their customers. Does not matter what buisness you are you can plan all you want but in the end you can not keep everyone happy even in a time like this.

---

Kudos, sir. /clap

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Basher

Raist you there? They charge you guys in the US how for your broadband? By the line usage or by the volume usage

---

It depends. DSL/Cable providers usually have differing tiers depending on how much bandwidth you want. Usually you get a set speed per month, then a bandwidth limit (comcast has a measly 250GB, i hate you comcast). I've seen some ISPs want to charge you for going over their bandwidth limit per month, so you can be charged by both speed and volume.

If you're going for dedicated lines, it depends on what you need. The ISP I used to work for had two providers, each provided us with 15mnps fractional DS3. The difference between the two was that our one from Time Warner was capped at 15mbps, and the one from I think it was Worldcom was burstable, meaning that we got charged extra from anything over 15mbps (the line speed we negotiated for our contract). In this instance we were both paying for usage and volume.

I was going to make a new thread about SE as a company and what I think they have done and doing, but since this thread already exists, I'm gonna stick my thoughts here.

SE made FFXI, and it is/was a successful product.
But... SE found out there was an upcoming problem, probably knew around the time they made ToAU. Limitations to expand.
They had to think of a solution, and their solution was FFXIV.

FFXIV ultimately is a clone to FFXI, as some would say, it is FFXI-2. It looking like a clone worried me even with new graphics and more customizable faces. That is as much as I know about FFXIV. I was not paying too much attention to FFXI or FFXIV at this time. One other thing I know about FFXIV is that it failed, exactly why is basically what I'm hearing is mainly the economy and for experimenting new things like they always do for their games, but it failed so bad that SE apologized for it.

Nevertheless, they lost money on making FFXIV. So now they are stuck with a game that is running out of space to release more entertaining content, and a game that was not entertaining.

They needed to fix something. I talked to a friend yesterday about dropping PS2 support, and it made me realize that it was going to take a whole lot more money than I thought it would. In other words, dropping the PS2 support is not very cost-effective. So they planned to fix FFXIV only. The base for the game is still there (storyline, jobs, etc.), they just need to tweak gameplay.

But how are they going to fix a game they lost money on, and now have to put more man-hours into. I don't think they have a whole lot of money to really play with. So, they turned to FFXI, their main source of profit right now.

Right now, I feel they are squeezing every last drop of their hopes and dreams onto FFXI by making it more attainable to be high level. They increased the LVcap, created Abyssea and made EXP gain nuts, created Empyrean Armor and Weapons, increased exp for non-Abyssea areas, and they commented on the Gym idea to fix skill ups. All this has pulled in new players.

I've seen a lot of new low level players around, as if they flocked in like a bunch of fruit flies to a fruit basket. SE ultimately increased the amount of fee money they are accumulating, to where it probably off-balanced the amount of players leaving because of the lack of new content for FFXI. But, SE does have a good plan, imo.

With the money ranking in with what they can with FFXI, FFXIV is in the process of being remade, and they will aim for the best of their ability towards this. This means that we may not see a future for FFXI because they are squeezing the life out of it for the sake of profits. And FFXIV will be reborn, with the hopes of it doing what FFXI could not, expand.

This is what I believe is happening. This is not fact, everything I said is a guess. I don't plan on replying to anyone about this, because I may be very well wrong about everything and have no solid evidence to back up anything I said. I am taking nothing but an educated guess here. I still enjoy FFXI despite what I believe they are doing to it though. You can deny any of this to be true, but you'll have to ask SE what they really are doing and trying to change my mind isn't going to do much good. For all who want to troll and flame this post, I recommend you to listen to Verse 1 of "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park.

One thing is true. You can either support SE right now in hopes they fix what is wrong or flame them and stop any kind of support they desperately need from their players. And they need even more support as they not only lost profits due to a failed product, but now losing profits due to the disaster and turning off their services to both.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nu-Hir

It depends. DSL/Cable providers usually have differing tiers depending on how much bandwidth you want. Usually you get a set speed per month, then a bandwidth limit (comcast has a measly 250GB, i hate you comcast). I've seen some ISPs want to charge you for going over their bandwidth limit per month, so you can be charged by both speed and volume.

If you're going for dedicated lines, it depends on what you need. The ISP I used to work for had two providers, each provided us with 15mnps fractional DS3. The difference between the two was that our one from Time Warner was capped at 15mbps, and the one from I think it was Worldcom was burstable, meaning that we got charged extra from anything over 15mbps (the line speed we negotiated for our contract). In this instance we were both paying for usage and volume.

---

KK. TY..

was gonna go through the costings of a temp server setup but then I realized it involved far too much effort for a saturday afternoon. Especially when theres a BBQ going.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nu-Hir

Usually you get a set speed per month, then a bandwidth limit (comcast has a measly 250GB, i hate you comcast).

---

They don't inforce it. I average 350-550g with no extra charges.

Ohhhhhhhh! Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong........... sounds familiar? someone needs a lollipop

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Basher

KK. TY..

was gonna go through the costings of a temp server setup but then I realized it involved far too much effort for a saturday afternoon. Especially when theres a BBQ going.

---

To give you an idea http://www.creativedata.net/index.cfm?webid=168

You'll be looking at the full rack price, let's assume 20 full racks (it's probably more): $14.7k/month
I would assume they'd want at least one person at the datacenter to babysit 24/7: $14.5k/month
I don't knwo what kind of decent contract you'd get from them on bandwidth, so I'm going to assume they'll use a third party and pump it in, let's round up and go for bust on an uber connection: $40k/month

I'm probably lowballing bandwidth, but that's up to almost $70k/month. To pay for that, you'd need subscriptions of over 5000 people, or roughly the population of two servers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tsukino_Kaji

They don't inforce it. I average 350-550g with no extra charges.

---

Yes they do. One of my co-workers got threatened to move to business class or he's losing his account for a year.

nicely done.

if mcdonalds closed for a week and a half but gave me a month of free food, id be okay with that

As a small buisness owner myself i do agree with the OP on a buisness side of things. BUT, I do also believe as a human being this is the wrong time to post something like this. Wait untill things are back up and running again over inn Japan then express how you feel.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alhanelem

It's not about not having a backup plan. what part of this don't you understand: They Voluntarily shut down the servers, sacrificing a month's worth of profits, in order to do it's part to help stabilize the situation in Japan?

They felt it was inappropriate to keep the service running in the given circumstances. It's not because they were FORCED to shut down the servers and had no plan for what to do if their service was disabled forcibly.

They very likely do have backup data in an offsite locaiton. But you're asking them to double the amount of equipment they need so that you can keep playing while the Japanese try to recover from entire towns being leveled and an impending nuclear disaster?

---

I'm really on the fence about both sides of this issue. If it was down RIGHT after the the incident, I wouldn't have said a thing. Personally though, with them having two days of service after the fact, they could have easily have sent most, if not all the server info to mirror servers in that time via the net. I think that's sorta what he's trying to say.

Stop trolling him peeps jeese . . . .Would it be a surprise to tell you that my family that lives in japan and there friends that play FFXI want it back up so they can escape some of the sadness ? Although they helped the community by cleaning and donating is there wanting the server back up wrong ? To put it short i talked to my family in japan this morning because i like to keep up to date on whats going on over there for my families sake. But i can tell you alot of there friends who also play this game want servers back up because it would help them escape the crisis that there going through. Not a complete escape but just enough of an escape to have somewhat of a peaceful day after cleaning up the mess of tragedy that hit them. I would say even if the servers weren't brought up for us at least it could be put back up for them so my family and other players of FFXI could have somewhat of a normal day in this time of crisis for them. Yes its JUST A GAME I know this but a lot of people have there thing smoking/ drinking/ exercise/ gaming/ art/ reading etc. This just happens to be there thing and there are a lot of Japanese that want the servers back up just like us. Just because people play a game 24 hours a day don't mean they don't have a life . . That's just how they want to spend there life. . . And doing something is better then doing nothing.

@Nu-Hir

I appreciate the effort, but I think your cost analysis may be a bit off. Typical markets start a generic Network Engineer at the equivalent of @$10/hour ($20k/yr)--14.5k doesn't even meet Minimum Wage in the US (7.25/hr, 40 hours/week = $15,080/yr). This wouldn't involve just one employee either--they do have labor laws, possibly even union restrictions in some areas (who knows), and you know.. they do need to sleep sometime. There will also need to be communications set up (ie, a phone perhaps), at least one terminal for the workers to use, among other expenses involved with highering employess (corporate needs for insurance, required UIB contributions to the government per employee, and various business related taxation/regulation).

And commercial bandwidth is a completely different animal. The same speed line as my residential line costs nearly 4 times as much per month simply because of the service agreement having a higher standard of service applied. If they have to build a circuit to you, it's an extra $200-300 initial setup cost--just for the SAME SPEED AS A RESIDENTIAL LINE. A dedicated dark fiber bundle can run upwards of 2k a month for a drop just one mile off the main trunk line. If you have to run say...10 miles, it could run upwards of 20k a month. If there is already a line nearby off the trunk that they can just tap and drop, the cost can be cut about 30%, but if they have to build to your site...you pay that full price, up to double that estimate depending on complications encountered along the route. Thats just to get the line to the site, then there are management services for breaking the connection out into the building, and whether you yourself are going to cut the lines to run throughout the complex and be responsible for their maintenance, or have the provider be responsible for that(upwards of $1 per foot per bundle PER MONTH to maintain them under the service agreement) and securing the ToS agreement and such (Quaranteed Quality of Service details like <10ms latency, guaranteed uptime and techinical response times, etc.). Regardless, you have to pay a hefty fee either way as you would need the right equipment and skillset for making fiber lines yourself, which again has a minimum market rate/hr for the technicians payroll. In the end a commercial line to support this large an operation could likely run more than 40k a month, depending on location and market. Remember, you have to account for the ongoing maintenance/operation cost for running this cost for TWO sites--source, and backup.

Raist