Temporary Suspension of the Services Due to an Earthquake

[Silvermane]

My thoughts and prayers are with all those in Japan, however this seems to highlight to me the Japan centric nature of FFXI, mantaince schedules etc always seem to favour Japan with us EU players getting royaly xxxx wiping out our gaming time for the whole day. Again, my thoughts are with all those who have lost friends and love ones as well as those of any lost or ingured

[Magnum]

I'm lost for words. After reading over 40 pages of Q_Qing, all I feel is a revulsion at those people, who are selfish enough to only think of their own personal gratification in this situation.

Final Fantasy XI brought people together, to co-operate towards a common goal, and to enjoy the global community for what it is.

Now is the time to help our fellow community, be it players or those in the real world.

My thoughts, prayers, go out to all of Japan, but that is not all.

I am a Carpenter by trade, I offer my services, if needed, in the rebuilding of a proud nation. I cant offer much money (which I have donated already), but if my services as a craftsman can help, please let me know.

[VxdragonxV]

To all the players in Japan. The TWISTED LS on Fenrir sends it's best wishes to you and your familys. Japan is a great place full of incredible people. You will come back from this disaster stronger as you always do. Our hearts are with you and your familys. Gods speed to you all.

p.s . Dont let the post of fools {Umbrion } get you down. True FFXI fans will wait any amount of time.

[RAIST]

Good grief... so many threads all over the place about people upset about servers being down. People really need to step back and look at the big picture here. If they love thier toons so much, they whould realize this move HAD to be done to preserve integrity of the DATA if nothing else--regardless of all the other social/political/economic issues. There is a closed thread where a poster cited details about the practical complications of having a system in place that would have allowed FFXI to stay up just before it closed. It really puts things in perspective about why SE would have had to shutdown eventually, even if the government hadne't asked the community to conserve power. Gonna copy/paste a post I made on that topic...hopefully it will make some of these Q Q people understand the complexity of the issue:

to continue Midnitelouie's point fromn a recently closed thread on this issue...

SE owns two complete subnets, and have 4 DNS servers to manage their own network. ie... It's a MASSIVE network. There are a BUTTLOAD of servers dedicated to running just FFXI. Your client taps at least 2 servers at all times while online. I have run netstat in the background to track IP's when having connection issues to help out with support and seen mine hitting as many as 4 servers at once when changing areas.

The point is--to have full redundancy to an offsite location would be a logistical nightmare, and quite frankly not cost effective for what we pay. They would likely have to be running their own private Fiber lines to keep the bandwidth up. This game relies heavily on UDP for data transfer, so there is no store/forward mechanic like what is built into TCP/IP (hence the skipping you get when running sometimes...packets are lost and people blink when a new packet is recieved showing them in a different location). The data loss recieved as is running across the current T1/T3 backbone shows how problematic redundancy would be. They would need a MASSIVE transfer rate to keep duplicate servers running in full time with instant failover support. This is just not practical.

Bear in mind, they have taken radiadion readings at the sites and they are equivalent to roughly 1 year's worth of normal radiation leaking out roughly in 1 hour at the plant. They have had to evacuate a 12 mile radius around the reactors having problems. As dense as the population is over there, thats around 200-300 THOUSAND PEOPLE being displaced. They are having to secure power for PRIMARY SERVICES first (health/emergency/communications services), putting them under the threat of rolling blackouts for secondary services--not a good thing for "nonessential" servers and networks. Your server might be up, but the ISP's routers could go down. Redundancy would be broken. Redundant networks could be caught in a loop of continuous failovers, and eventually the forest of servers will no longer be in synch. With the reduced manpower and reduced reliability of both the outside and internal network structures--it is best for ALL INVOLVED to go offline and try to find a better way of doing business. It's just the way things HAVE to be for now.

For all we know, they are already in the process of bringing a new datacenter online offsite somewhere. But we are talking about terabytes of data per server, and it will take time to set it up. Be patient...it will happen. They wiill be back on line somehow, some way, somewhere.

Raist

[Terrigenesis]

To all the people saying that SE should have backup servers in California because Japan is supposedly a "hot zone" for tsunamis, that solves nothing. California deals with tsunamis and earthquakes just as if not more frequently. Yes, Japan is in a precarious place being near a fault line but so is California. The San Andreas Fault is part of the same fault line as Japan, look up the Pacific Ring of Fire. It's a gigantic fault line that extends around the Pacific plate. Putting servers on the other side of the plate serves nothing. The earthquake that caused the tsunami appears to be right along where the Pacific plate and the north eastern part of the North American Plate along with the Filipino Plate come together. If you want something to blame, blame plate tectonics. Then again, if it weren't for those very forces, there wouldn't be life on this planet. Even though it's a natural occurrence, it's still a disaster. Stop bickering about what should of happened or what could have happened and find solace in the fact that people survived. Anyone that blames SE is equally at fault. If you knew it would happen, like you imply SE being stupid for not knowing it would happen, you are equally at fault for not doing anything about it. Neither we nor SE are gods, though I wish some of us were sometimes, it is not within human ability to be able to predict every event that will happen. Not even humanity as a whole would be able to defend against every possible occurrence. On top of that, Japan has the best tsunami warning system in the world. They have been dealing with them since before recorded time, they are the experts. As it stands, this is the limit of human technology and knowledge. If it weren't for the fact that Japan is so prone to tsunamis, the effect could be even more devastating.

[RAIST]

rolling blackouts schedule announced by power company...3 hour blocks for each zone:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp...1031406-e.html

Raist

[deckerd]

My thoughts and feelings go to everyone in Japan, the villages, the towns, the families, the families who have lost a loved one or a friend. I want you to know that everyone in the other countries are thinking of you all and that this should never happened to anyone.

To SE it is completely understandable why you'd shut down the service for a week, hell even if it was longer, its completely understandable, and my thoughts go to the SE Crew and their families, for giving up the power from the servers for the better of your country.

Don't listen to any of these hateful comments, they are rude and disrespectful. All this talk about "You should have backup servers" I find absolutely disgusting, the thought that people can think that even thought Japan have had a huge natural disaster and that lives have been lost, they should still have the servers up just so the other countries can get away from their "harsh" realities whilst you are living in hell right now.

Though its a global company which means everyone can use it internationally, the company is originated in Japan and it would be respectful for people to understand that even though it is "Global" company, they should be able to wait a week just so they can understand what is going on in Japan and not care about a week from their "Virtual Life."

P.S - The "Virtual Life" comment might be disrespectful, but I'm only disrespecting people who have made such comments.

People who understand this disaster and why SE had to make this decision, I'm glad to see some people still have hearts and can see sense.

[Sanjuu-Satsui]

I think this thread has gone in a circle at least twice.

Everyone who is donating: You rock^_^b GL Japan with recovering from this shity situation.

[deckerd]

I think this thread has gone in a circle at least twice.

I'm not sure if this was aimed at me. But...

I don't want to dig up old dirt, I just wanted to SE to know that even though people are saying heartless things, and even though they are saying sorry. They've said what they've said. It's still hurtful.

I just want SE to know that I respect their decision

[Sanjuu-Satsui]

No no Deckerd it wasn't haha ^_^ I just finished reading through the whole thread. Unfortunately Half of it wasn't even on topic so I skipped most of the Hate Bashing.

I'm just curious how people KNOW SE-Japan has ALL of the game servers. Even if SE-Cali has back-ups would it really make a difference? Doubt it. Might cause servers to come back online sooner I guess.

The people who really grind my gears are the ones who "have a life" yet spend time telling others to stop bitching and to get one of their own. I'll take this time to call them "special" lol.