Can we have an update on the situation.

[Xeth]

Tepco To Raise Generating Capacity 20% By April-End

TOKYO (Nikkei)--Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) said Saturday that it will bring onstream by the end of April two fossil-fuel power plants halted by the March 11 earthquake, lifting its capacity 20%.

Tepco will resume operations at its Higashi Ogishima plant, powered by liquified natural gas, in Kanagawa Prefecture by the end of March and at its oil-powered Kashima plant in Ibaraki Prefecture next month.

By also boosting utilization rates at other fossil-fuel plants, the utility plans to increase its overall output to 42 million kilowatts by the end of April. This amounts to about 70% of its pre-quake level.

Tepco has a number of fossil-fuel plants that went out of commission after the quake, including ones in Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures. If the two resume operations, the firm's total capacity will rise some 6 million kilowatts.

The utility says it is not certain whether all plants will be up and running by the summer peak season.

Additionally, Tepco will raise utilization rates at currently operating plants by shortening inspection periods. It is also acquiring gas turbine power generation systems to ease the electricity shortage.

The company generally needs to supply 50 million kilowatts of power to meet demand in winter and 55-60 million kilowatts this summer.

Projecting a protracted power shortage, Tepco says rolling blackouts will be inevitable in Tokyo's 20 wards, excluding central business and office districts, in summer.

This article has me split, and having no idea how this will affect Square-Enix in the next week/months.

[Ter]

Hmm if there is going to be an extended outage SE might just decide to wind up their online offerings. FFXI is heading to the end of its life and the FFXIV has turned out to be a lot less successful than hoped. With the massive investment in FFXIV for little return I would imagine the upper management will be rethinking their desire to stay in the MMORPG market. I guess it had to happen eventually but it would be nice if we could have had one last party in Jeuno.
I will miss it but it will probably be good for me in the long run lol. I'm going to nip out and see what the real world looks like :-).

[Hiyoshroom]

Regarding the above... I don't think they will let XI or XIV die like that.
Honestly a laughable idea. This situation is something never before seen, and whoever is crying about moving servers should just look at the magnitude of the carnage cause by not only the earthquake, but in most part by the massive tsunami.

I am glad to see most people have been understanding and supportive. I don't mind even if I have to wait a week or two more, even a month. There are some people out there who will never get to play any game again, and not of their own accord, mind you.

[Kasune]

No news is not a good thing from a business perspective. Now I know this is a GAME. But let's take a service like oh.... phone service for example. Someone hits a pole and knocks out 7 city blocks of phone service. Now I don't know about your area, but in my area if I call the phone company and ask what's going on, they tell me what happened, when it will be back on, and that crews are out there doing the repairs as we speak. And 95% of the time, the time they give me when service will be restored, it is. That's because they are responsible people. and they understand that there are other phone service providers out there and you can take your money there just as easy as you brought it to them. They are "accountable". SE has never been known for it's "accountability" and that needs to change.

Now, before someone goes off on here and says "phone service is a necessity and a game is not" let me beat you to the punch. It's still a business. We pay for a service we expect to recieve without major downtime. And i'm sorry, but giving us a message that says "at least a week" is too dam vague. Bring this into focus SE. Tell us what you are doing to get the service we pay you for back up and running and give us a timeline we can rely on, not "at least a week".

These kinds of things are what kills businesses. SE is already struggling to make a dollar on their MMO's. FFXIV is a flunk, has so many glitches with it they have had to make it free to play while they work it out, and now FFXI is down. I fear that if the downtime for FFXI continues past a week, or more, then alot of your customers will be taking their money elsewhere, to an MMO that doesn't have a difficulty staying active during things like this. And a loss of players right now not only affects SE's bottom line, but in a negative way affects all the players.

People can argue with me all they want, but my thinking will not change, there is absolutely no reason why SE cannot give us an update at least every 2 days about the steps being taken to restore a service that we pay for.

[Removed by Moderator according to the FINAL FANTASY XI FORUM Guidelines.] How many times does someone need to tell people there was a major disaster in Japan. The electric company ASKED businesses to not use power so that power could go to something useful like hospitals and people without power!!! SE's servers aren't damaged...they're shut off. They're not bringing them back up til they get the ok to do so. They gave us March 22nd as an update date. Give them a break dude!!! If you can't understand this is a crisis then go play a different MMO!!! I'm sure SE realizes that the more down time they have the more it hurts their business...they're not idiots. I'm sure they are exploring all valid solutions and not just waiting for the power company to give the ok to turn the servers back on. Back off, let them take care of their country and their business. They will give us update!!!

[Ter]

I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they might close the service down. Right now they have two teams of developers sitting on their hands (a very expensive proposition) and if blackouts are going to feature through to summer they are going to have no income for the next three or four months. Their primary market (i.e. Japan) has had some major disruptions and the profitability of the US and European market is down 35% over the last 3 years from the change in exchange rates alone. Subscriptions are dropping on both services and if this outage is lengthy the figures will only continue to drop. It would be naive to think that this isnt at least one of the options on the table. A decision will be made based on what is financially more viable, there will be no sentimental feelings getting in the way. It costs a lot of money to keep a MMORPG going and right now SE has one making a loss (FFXIV) and another with shrinking margins (FFXI). It's just good business.
Lets hope the power issues get rectified so they don't have to make some difficult decisions.

[Harpalina]

Like I said earlier I don't care that the servers are down, Im playing FFXI now anyways. I just care how they treat there most loayl customers like crap and care even more that the customers always bend over backwards to make excuses for the company that abuses them.

I'm shocked no one pointed this out yet but...you're playing FF11 right now? What does the server look like? lol...

[Xeth]

I'm shocked no one pointed this out yet but...you're playing FF11 right now? What does the server look like? lol...

Probably playing it the way any addict would, go prowling for something against ToS. I wouldn't mention it, but it's not impossible anymore.

[annewandering]

Thanks Ter for your very informative posts! All I can say is WOW! Things are a lot more difficult to move servers, have duplicate servers, etc than i had any idea at all.
One thing for sure. We have learned a whole lot of things we were clueless about before. I did not know SE was so big. Sure it has FF but that can be run off a few servers right? lol. Ok I pictured maybe 50 max. I also figured it had a lot fewer employees. 1800 mentioned in someone's post just floored me.
It's a LOT more clear why shutting down the game for a bit is the better choice.

[Mattis]

I'm shocked no one pointed this out yet but...you're playing FF11 right now? What does the server look like? lol...

I am a programmer so I wrote my own server code.

[Dazusu]

I am a programmer so I wrote my own server code.

You know, HTML in Dreamweaver doesn't make you a programmer. Nor does PHP.