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

[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?

[Nacht]

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.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

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.

[Basher]

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.

[Basher]

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

[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.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

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.

[Nacht]

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

[Nu-Hir]

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.

[JagerForrester]

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.