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

[Leatherman]

You know the real prince and princesses on this thread are the ones that are not listening to the original poster. Long before this with many things that Square Enix has done has made me blink with the lack of planning and thought for customers. Just repeat to yourselves "FFXIV" if you need evidence.
To those posting that it was impossible for SE to set up a back up plan such as back up servers saying it is too impossible, that is something American business does daily.
The other real point is that some of you would be the same immature prince and princesses that would blithely post "Hate America first" post about "heartless" American Business.
The fact is SE is sometime questionable. Their lack of planning, Their lack of advertising for new player blood, their debuting a game that was not ready, and for as much as they copied to have the lack of content that they do is inexcusable.. any US business would be down the tubes at that point.
The problem in Japan is awful, it is something that makes me cry, but the lack of planning by SE part isn't hurting me. I have other things to do, but in the end it might hurt them badly. They need money now throughout the country and they have no real plan. The truth is from the wishy-washy announcement, I was pretty sure they would never come up again.
To keep customers if you are a real competitive business you find the contingency plan to keep it all floating during the bad times, If you don't think US business does it, I can name several right now for you, one of which I work for, and trust me. if they didn't plan for back up all over the world your lives would stop, so I know it isn't as impossible as some of you want to insist.
Besides I look at the time--long ago in past history with FFXI when they used to insist that there was no lag time for US players in trying to provoke first, because the servers were in the east..no indeed they said that complaint from US customers ( when trying to beat Asians at NM hunting) was a lie because servers were here in the US. That memory alone at this time makes me go huh???... search it out. that was the end result of questions in the early 2003--004 days of SE.

The original poster has a point. a good one, and if you weren't all just SE fan kids, you would note that yes. there is an issue. You might still play their games, you might still love the story line etc, but you would admit there are definitely issues with the SE business model.

Awesome post Noelie. Some people defend blindly and religiously because they grew up with it. But in a business point of view they have a lot to improve. Final Fantasy 14 is again an example of waste of energy, money and resources. And for others that say that we are lucky to have customer support for an ancient MMO? It's an old MMO but I haven't seen any drop on monthly fees due to outdated graphics and to the fact that it's an old game. They should have implemented the new graphics from 14 into 11 and listened to customers better about User Interface to make the game more manageable.

I personally think that Final Fantasy 11 has better graphics than World of Warcraft and yet WoW knows how to keep players playing and how to get new players to play an old game.

Ok, it's understandable the fact of not having multiple location backup servers, but it has given them plenty of time to move locations by now and get their service back online. That would be my business strategy call.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

That was my hole point, you described way better than me, thank you

Add more psyco babble next time. Work Freudian in there somwhere. lol

[Kindra]

He is not saying that the situation is a predictable nor is he faulting them for their choice. All he is saying is that in his opinion maybe a back up plan for something like this might be a good idea.

Se can't control mother nature any more then the rest of us can. Although I really wish someone would take her out!! I keep asking my BF to do it but yea... he wont ; ;.

Now don't think that I agree with this idea being done right now or anything like that. If SE was to decide to do something along these lines for the future then that's up to them. But people should be able to express this as long as its done in a polite way. Then people can discuss this type of thing.

[Yugl]

To begin with, i never meant about the servers not being on because of the disaster, i can totally understand that, and i have no argue about that, it´s way to obvious and reasonable why they did that.
i meant about the idea of not having an alternative after all of these years that ppl have been paying, when you have a world wide multiplatform business, you don´t have all the stuff that makes it work in one place, that is what i believe is wrong, i am sure other companies do that in order to ensure better and faster costumer support and service.

Now you're backtracking because the bulk of your example, which indeed, supplements your point, is directed towards the effect of the disaster. Namely, it's that the company did not prepare for the disaster. The first sentence already answers your problem, so read again. The rest of it explains why you made a terrible example. An expanded version of the first sentence is the following:

The goal of a business is to make money. Despite your claims, longevity of the servers does not always correlate with this goal. Given the uncertainty of FFXI's future (Given Pre-Abyssea FFXI conditions and FFXIV), it's not unreasonable to save money by maintaining servers in one country. In other words, they take a risk by saving money. It's done all the time in business, and in fact, statistically, it's in their favor (100% chance of saved money if you don't make the excess servers). There is also uncertainty in how players will respond to this crisis. Are people crying and whining? Sure. Does that mean all the people who cried and whined quit? Not necessarily. Does it mean that the money it cost them for April and unsubscribers equals or surpasses the cost for backup servers? Not necessarily. After all, how many backups would they need to suffice? It could have easily been the case that they backup servers in California and a different earthquake hits Japan and California. In that instance, the investment is wasted. In short, until you can provide us with the specific number of people who left due to this incident, how much it would cost them to backup the servers, logistical costs, and predict future natural disaster events (So that two server places will never experience a disaster), your "business analysis" is nothing but nonsensical rambling because you don't understand that the business world is a game of chance.

[Alhanelem]

I just have one question, which I feel ls legitimate.

Why is this thread still going on? I mean, really. The OP's opinion was discussed and addressed pretty fully in the first 4 or 5 20 post pages.

[Kindra]

Yugl you have a good point.

[Vedabe]

I'm beginning to think posts of this nature are made simply to cause drama. I've played this game for several years. Not once has SE ever closed down their servers like this. If this was an ongoing problem, I would understand the criticism. It is not. This is the first time there has been a disaster this size in any industry, and this is the first time they had to take drastic measures such as this. Seems reasonable to me.
I said it before in another post. Maybe you are right. Maybe SE hates their customers, maybe SE hates money, maybe nobody at SE has ever been to college and doesn't know as much as you. OR maybe a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami topped off by a nuclear crisis happened and they saw this as the best possible way to help take care of it. The only thing I would like to add is that in the future, would all those claiming to know how businesses of this nature should be run during times of crisis please reference us to your multi million dollar business and/or businesses so that we know you are truly the experts that you try to come off as online. Otherwise I'm gonna have to give SE a break on this one.

I think you are right at some point, it might seem that i think i know it all, wich to be honest most of the time i doubt about everything, but, i think objective criticism is the most powerfull tool, to grow, objective feedback it makes us grow.

Like i said b4, the best way to take advantage of bad times, is analyzing what i could of done, to don´t fall in the hole, is like attacking the issue with the most weapons i have at my resources.

And i think SE needs to do that.

[Vedabe]

For instance, i´ve just criticised myself, and i´ve realized i need to improve my english, cause i am having trouble getting to express myself with more acurrate words.

[Vedabe]

I just have one question, which I feel ls legitimate.

Why is this thread still going on? I mean, really. The OP's opinion was discussed and addressed pretty fully in the first 4 or 5 20 post pages.

Yup i think you are right, it´s getting tiring discussing this, and closely agressive too.

[Nu-Hir]

@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).

I wasn't going off of how much it costs to pay someone to be there. I was going off of how much that particular colocation host charges for the service. Considering that they have other clients, they can charge less than Minimum Wage to each client, since they'll be making more than enough over multiple clients to pay for the support staff.

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.

That's why I said I was lowballing it. I've never had to actually price bandwidth, and I was doing quick and dirty look up. I couldn't really find what I was looking for and pulled a number out of my ass. 40k seemed pretty low (since the ISP I worked at was paying 20k for two fractional DS3s). I just wanted a nice round number that seemed somewhat believable.