Where's OUR discount?

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Originally Posted by Ziyyigo-Tipyigo

Most likely, but can they at least be honest about it?

If this policy has been changed, we deserve to be told.

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Their policy hasn't changed. Its just how you view it. They're leaving it up to us as players whether we change games or not. They're not gonna force it, but in my mind, with the re-release and the change in the game mechanics (again, this is from what i've been reading), they do want us to move. XIV has better graphics, more character customization, etc. They won't do that for FFXI which is why I think they want us to move. I mean, I think of it like this. Say you're living in a slum lord's rent house. The landlord owns a house right next door. It's pretty house, with nice hard wood flooring, new paint, and in general it's a hundred times better than the one you're living in. He offers you up this house next door for a couple hundred more a month. You can choose to move and pay the extra rent for a better house, or you can stay, but either way, its up to you. He wants you to move because he gets more money out of it, but will be okay if you stay in the other house, because your still paying rent to him. That's how I view it.

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Originally Posted by RAIST

Also need to consider they've drastically cut the expenses to maintain XI, without reducing the costs to the consumer. Multiple server mergers, and they gutted the dev and support teams a while back, and have been reaping the increased profit from the XI sector since (hence the speculations that XI has been funding XIV development, as that is where most the personnel likely went).

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So your belief is that they're making mad bux off allowing FFXI to crumble? Well, I suppose there's no rule in business saying that you can't do that. I don't share your belief, but I'll acknolege it is a possibility.

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything. We can't even really seek legal action against them for siphoning money from FFXI to other projects (or just pocketing the money). They probably don't even read these posts, or if they do, they probably don't even really care. Even if we get a response from them, who's to say it's not a lie? So what can we really do?

As a side note, if it turns out they really are making bank by downsizing the work force, merging the servers, etc... I'd rather they just reinvest that money into FFXI than get a discount.

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Originally Posted by Yinnyth

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything.

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They're not required to, but it would be a Bad Idea to breed ill-will among the XI base while pushing desperately for goodwill from XIV players. It's only natural for XIV players to look at what's happening with XI to get a feel for what lies in their own future.

At any rate, it occurs to me that it is probably not a coincidence that the new 2012 timeline was published the same day as XIV got its new patch. It feels like management is at least trying to pay lip-service to the idea of supporting both games simultaneously.

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If this policy has been changed, we deserve to be told.

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?

2 years later, vanadiel is still persisting. You're not being told because it hasn't changed.

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Originally Posted by Yinnyth

So your belief is that they're making mad bux off allowing FFXI to crumble? Well, I suppose there's no rule in business saying that you can't do that. I don't share your belief, but I'll acknolege it is a possibility.

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything. We can't even really seek legal action against them for siphoning money from FFXI to other projects (or just pocketing the money). They probably don't even read these posts, or if they do, they probably don't even really care. Even if we get a response from them, who's to say it's not a lie? So what can we really do?

As a side note, if it turns out they really are making bank by downsizing the work force, merging the servers, etc... I'd rather they just reinvest that money into FFXI than get a discount.

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Well, it's not a difficult concept to grasp. You had 32 servers running and reduced it to 24, but kept roughly the same number of players. You no longer have to include any operational/maintenance/warranty costs for 1/4th of your servers--that includes payroll for employees that burned up time managing them, possibly even removing some personnel from the project and moving them somewhere else, along with those servers. That's another thing too, that hardware and manhours can now be repurposed elswhere. So, in this arena, you've had potentially a 25% savings with negligible loss of income.

Combine this with how we know for a fact that they have scaled back personnel working on FFXI and repurposed them elsewhere in the organization. Some of the many employess they've lost/let go in the past two years (as posted in their annual reports, there has been considerable reduction in personnel as a whole) could have also come from the FFXI project. Some employees may have been replaced, but as a whole, there has been a reduction in their work force. And yet, again....they've maintained income from FFXI despite the reduction in costs to have people available to work on it.

I would hazard a guess that the cost per player to maintain it now is significantly less then it was in 2005 when I got into it--broadband is cheaper per unit; initial investments for hardware has been paid for, upgraded, and probably that re-investment has been recovered by now as well; personnel demands are now lower to support it as it is (mostly) debuggged and for the most part running on auto-pilot now (it in fact feels like a lot of the support may be farmed out); and as far as we know has no major development projects in the works--at least not in the scope of the pre-WotG expansions that added completely new areas and such.

Simply put, it is costing them less and less to support the game, and those players are still paying the same rate now as they did 5-7 years ago.

Fenrir: 2 servers got merged, and there's still fewer people on the merged server after the merge than were on both servers before the merge. How can you dismiss this as "but kept roughly the same number of players"? You don't get to just toss out factors that don't reinforce your preconceived notions that FFXI is making someone a millionaire because they cut so many costs. If you really feel like their revenue has not dropped significantly, then I suppose that's the big place where we disagree and we can't really move on until we resolve that issue.

it seems like we have nearly double the players on our server. Certainly caused a bunch of drama with competition for camps/NM's and such shortly after the merger. It's still an issue, but less so in the older areas now that so many have moved on to VW and such. Perhaps it's just your server.

Regardless, some simple facts remain: revenues are still high, costs to support the game have remained constant or been reduced on a per server basis, and the number of those servers have been reduced, no major development in the works (in comparison to previous expansions). Thus operational costs have been reducedsimply because they are in more of a maintenance/reduction mode than expansion. Even if you loose a small % of your player base while cutting operational costs by more then that % when you were already pulling in crazy profits, you can still be increasing your profit margin. They had at least a 25% flat reduction in server maintenance contract costs alone, not to mention reductions in personel, power usage, etc.

Pretty sure there are still more than enough players generating more revenue than is needed to sustain these basic costs. Possibly even the same or more revenue still coming in now then there was several years ago when they were throwing more money into running FFXI. They may very well be pulling in a higher profit margin now simply because of the reduction in money they are putting into (not just reductino in servers and personnel, but a reduction in new development as well--have to factor that in there too).

No matter how you slice it.....they are now spending considerably less on this game than in the past while still pulling in a reasonable profit margin--possibly even higher profit than in years past because of the drastic cut in those costs in comparison to the number of players still paying them. The problem is this has resulted in providing a lower quality of service, without a commensurate reduction in the price charged to the players. Were this to happen to any other industry if competition comes in (and let's face it, some really good stuff is on the horizon), usually it results in loosing customers to someone else that either a.) provides the same value product for less, or b.) provides a better quality product (possibly even for the same price). To combat the losses, one of two things should logically follow: a.) reduce the price to make it a comparable value to the lower priced competition, or b.) improve the quality to better justify price--basically, make the product more attractive than the competition by either lowering the price or increasing quality.

Unfortunately, SE hasn't seemed to grasp this concept yet.......

um, Yinnyth, worlds merged not servers, each FFXI world is made up of multiple servers, some of the servers are 1 per region, others are 2 or 3 per region, and some of those servers from the old world in the merge were retained to reduce lag.

back to the policy thing, Squaresoft started with the policy that as long as there was maintained interest FFXI would remain open and maintained, that policy has not changed, they are reducing a lot of costs because people are leaving the game due to lack of interest.

now lets think about that for a moment, you have a product, you made a promise to keep the product available as long as there was maintained interest, now there is less interest than before but still quite a lot of interest remains, what do you do, if you keep your own costs at the same rate it will eventually kill the ability to keep it open, so you reduce the costs in whatever way will have minimal impact

So each region (ie Norvallen) is one server? And worlds are a cluster of these servers? I always had a suspicion that was how it worked, but never any proof. Well, I still don't have proof honestly, but at least I can cite you as the source of my info if I say that in the future. Thanks for the correction though, I thought I was using the proper terms.

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Originally Posted by Yinnyth

So each region (ie Norvallen) is one server? And worlds are a cluster of these servers? I always had a suspicion that was how it worked, but never any proof. Well, I still don't have proof honestly, but at least I can cite you as the source of my info if I say that in the future. Thanks for the correction though, I thought I was using the proper terms.

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If you run a tool to monitor network connections as you zone about you can eventually catalogue a list of varying IP's associated with each zone. For example, in Rang. Pass, pol.exe is currently connected to 202.67.54.125. I've never seen that IP pop up when I've had issues connecting in Bastok, Jueno, or Windy and I traced connections to try troubleshooting my connection problems.

Granted, seperate IP's doesn't necessarily mean each is a seperate server, as they could be hosted them in groups via VMWare with multiple NIC's in each server I guess. But, it would be a long enough list to exceed what could reasonably be run on just one server without running into some serious performance issues with 1200+ users logged in at any one given time for a particular world. Databases have a limit on how many connections can be made at once as well, so there is that potential issue as well. As large a scale operation as this is, it's reasonable for most any IT person to see there would be clusters assigned.