Next review date for servers, Tues 22nd JST

[Ilax]

I couldnt agree with this statement more.. We're like 5~ days in and I'm already dealing with the shakes... So.. 22days.. And.. ugh.. I cant imagine a life without XI.. I can give this solemn oath, I wont play WoW though. XD

That how any addiction work, same as smoking, the first week is hard, the second is also hard, but overall after 22day you loose the addiction. Not mean you wont come back in game, even after 7 month i left FFXI i ended to come back because of my room mate.

Is often when you take those break you look at it and say: Oh wow wtf i was doing there, too bad i am still too much addicted to look at it like that, but i already told my friend if i end to loose it again, nothing in the world will make me restart because i know more now. No i am not playing another cancer game like WoW, i'm just waiting see my addiction vanish, and tbh with you this might just be a good news for me...

[Runespider]

I agree. WoW is a solo game. :[ There is no game out there that has the community that XI does. I wont be going anywhere japan. :] Ill come crawling out of the addicts corner when you give us the go ahead. XD

Both games are pretty similar now, FFXI is also a solo game. Tried getting parties in FFXI recently? My sister started in FFXI a few months ago, she did FoV almost the entire way, had her flag up on and off too.

[cidbahamut]

But you're not being charged. Do you not find the reason for the game not being up reasonable?

I found the reason for the game going down for a week reasonable. But now they're extending the downtime and it is the extension that I find unprofessional. A week should be sufficient time for a corporation as large as SE to find an alternate means of maintaining uptime.

[Bizniztyme]

Again, the idea that SE has not taken into account these obvious statements is absurd. 2 weeks downtime is very rare in the mmo industry I agree with you. Something that is also very rare in any industry ever known to mankind is a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami, with end result of a possible nuclear meltdown that the country has to rush to prevent. Maybe you are right. Maybe SE just hates money. Maybe not a single person at SE has ever been to college and they need your infinite wisdom to run their company. But I'm just not convinced of that. I think they are doing what they can to secure their families, help their country, and then get things back to normal, in that order, because that is what most sane people would do.
As for leaving them to go to another game. I have no issues with that, I think if you're tired of waiting you should definitely jump ship, No good argument why anyone shouldn't do that. can always come back later anyway. I just don't get why its so hard to understand why they may need time during a crisis like this.

Very well said.

[Zyeriis]

I for one am done. Flame me all you like... We as a player base have dealt with SE's inept approach to everything for years now. I'll be taking my talents to Rift until a suitable replacement hits the market. Yes I feel for the country of Japan in this dire time. I feel nothing but contempt for a multi-million dollar company that won't make previsions for its' player base.

You told them to flame all they want. They did, don't respond in kind, that's trolling. Also, if you're going to leave, do so.

Sadly this is the case but as has been shown of late Square don't really have that great of a business sense, not only are they doing damage to their main title but there hope for the future one too. It's obvious they won't do what almost any other serious company would of done so we jsut have to hope (if we care about FFXI) that the damage done through loss of playerbase won't be as bad as almost everyone with any sense thinks it will. Having feelings for Japan won't stop people going off and getting into the mass numbers of other MMOs out there nor will it guarantee their return when Square turn things back on if they like what they test.

Only one other company took their game servers down and they got them back up in 3-4 days, just a matter of wait and see how it plays out now since common sense eludes most.

This logic is completely skewed that there's automatically going to be a decrease in the player base, especially a 10% one. Why? I think I can answer that easily: I am RETURNING to the game because of this disaster. Why? A conversation regarding the tsunami/quake, in a bar, veered into a conversation about how the ffxi and ffxiv servers are down, which veered into a conversation about great times you can have in ffxi and the current state of the game. I doubt I am the only person in the world to have a similar conversation. Common sense does elude most, as it is idiotic to make assumptions that there will only be leavers during the down time and that no previous players will be drawn back due to the ensuing conversations revolving around the disaster that has caused the servers to be shut off in the first place.

[Ilax]

I am RETURNING to the game because of this disaster.

Just a correction, you plan to return back ^^

[Zyeriis]

That how any addiction work, same as smoking, the first week is hard, the second is also hard, but overall after 22day you loose the addiction. Not mean you wont come back in game, even after 7 month i left FFXI i ended to come back because of my room mate.

Is often when you take those break you look at it and say: Oh wow wtf i was doing there, too bad i am still too much addicted to look at it like that, but i already told my friend if i end to loose it again, nothing in the world will make me restart because i know more now. No i am not playing another cancer game like WoW, i'm just waiting see my addiction vanish, and tbh with you this might just be a good news for me...

FFXI Addiction never vanishes. Psychology is pure theory and guessing. I "thought" I was over my addiction until a conversation in a bar about the tsunami/quake led to talking about ffxi (see my above post). I've lost track of how many times I quit the game, only until months later when the addiction would kick back in. I truly thought it would be different this time as my reasons for quitting were extremely different, based in fear rather than frustration. (Fear as in where the game was heading vs. frustration at the game at the time).

[Zumi]

Have to give them some time after all the earthquake and power problems. However that doesn't mean they should do nothing after all they are a business. If they see the Japan power problem is going to be around for several months they should be looking in to relocating the servers for example to their California office. If they don't want to lose their player base as time passes. There already is a lot of Japanese players back on PSN playing games online. Tokyo and a lot of the southern areas seem to be back as business as normal. FFXIV really doesn't matter as much because that game is going to need a relaunch anyway like when it is eventually released for PS3.

I agree. WoW is a solo game. :[ There is no game out there that has the community that XI does. I wont be going anywhere japan. :] Ill come crawling out of the addicts corner when you give us the go ahead. XD

If you say this it shows you never played the game. Leveling in WoW you can do solo or if you choose in groups through killing mobs in dungeons. Dungeons take 5 people. Leveling isn't the major part of the game its actually endgame. Then you get to endgame raids which require 10 or 25 people. WoW has hard modes to all their content to which like only the top 0.06% of the people will even beat. This stuff can't be soloed. Unlike FFXI where you can pop a brew to kill the hardest mobs currently in the game.

[Ilax]

FFXI Addiction never vanishes. Psychology is pure theory and guessing. I "thought" I was over my addiction until a conversation in a bar about the tsunami/quake led to talking about ffxi (see my above post). I've lost track of how many times I quit the game, only until months later when the addiction would kick back in. I truly thought it would be different this time as my reasons for quitting were extremely different, based in fear rather than frustration. (Fear as in where the game was heading vs. frustration at the game at the time).

I left FFXI 2 time, first time was 2 month, i come back since some frustration in the game was issue by SE.

The second time i was just too busy in RL to play FFXI and that lasted a good 2 month, at that point i had no wish at all to play again, but i figured to keep account active just in case... 7 month later my room mate told me how new update was nice or something like that... Go figure i try it and go back addicted....

I can't hide the true, if you look my account i have 20 job lv90, mandau + always got shits tons of gil, over 1,800+ day of playtime, but guess what? My social life got nuked to 0. So yeah with that kind of break, it make you think about it lol... Do you really think i will come back if i end to loose interest after 22day?

I can't talk for everyone, but i had nice social life pre-FFXI, i had my own computer company, ok it was not doing million/yr but it was way better then my current situation lol. For sure i can't blame all this to the game, but i can't stop thinking, what would be my life without it :P You have no idea how many time i told ppl in RL sorry wed and sun i can't because i have dynamis, then it was sky, then it was sea lol...

Anyways, you will find out one day* i am sure.

*Edit: My roommate stop playing FFXI, that make 2yr now, guess what he doing? He co-owner of a health care company, he do over 100k/yr and program software for Apple on his free time. http://blizzoid.net A free time that give him extra 120$/month, and is going up from time to time. Guess who refer him to that job? Me lol i was too busy play FFXI and run my own bizz back in that time.

[RAIST]

wow... had to go for some job interviews, come back and this thread has gone nuts.

Feel the need to clarify a couple things. I never stated SE was runninga T1--that was a RL example of a firm trying to pull a 20GB DB over a T1 taking all day. In reality, they tried all weekend but the conx kept dropping. They ultimately put it on a 1/4' tape and FedEx'ed it to us and we pulled into an old SQL server, than pushed it to the AS400 so they could work on it.

Second, you failed to recognize that it took them 12 hours to transfer one database in-house. Safe to assume, they may not necessarily be running on the latest and greatest bandwidth, or it is a MASSIVE amount of data. Even running a 650 Mbit conx (if they are forking out that kind of cash), you could still be looking at 4-5 hours per TB of transfer, depending on the overhead in the transfer (protocol, encryption/compression schemes, etc).

Communications are still having issues. While ISP's may still appear to be up, there could be unstable nodes, which could delay transfers if you have a lot of idle and retries during the transmission. I ran some tests the other night to Japan, and I had a lot of 200-250ms stalls, so depending on where you are going/coming from/to--there could be some issues with transfering that much data over the web. Simply put, there is a lot of unkown involved with going that route, and if you want to rate it as "mission critical", may not be the wisest thing to rely on in place of using actual media for the transfer.

No matter how you slice it up, it will take a considerable amount of time to completely transfer the operations to a new location. It's not just the transfer of data. There's lots of administrative tasks involved (business/legal/immigration/etc.) issues to consider. SE may not have a plan in place for all of this. They may have banked on just needing locally replicated servers with local backups. Who knows. Either way, it is a mute point.

They can't turn the servers on to do anything. They can't bring them up to transfer files. They can't bring them up to do a data dump to media to physically move (remember, it took them 12 hours just to move one database recently). Best case scenario, they take one of their last full backup sets (likely from last billing) and take that somewhere. That will STILL TAKE TIME TO SET UP AS THEY HAVE TO RESTORE ALL THE DATA, TEST IT, THEN CHANGE DNS FIRST.

Just give them time to work things out for heaven's sake.

Raist