Original Article:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapc...ex.html?hpt=T2
It's difficult to say how this will effect Square Enix and the FFXI/FFXIV servers in the long-run. Although they are doing their best to conserve electricity, random (temporary) shut-downs of the servers may be inevitable.Quote:
Tokyo (CNN) -- The loss of two nuclear power plants means the Tokyo region will face the summer peak demand with a loss of about 20% of capacity, the plant's owner said Thursday.
Other utilities can supply only a limited amount of additional electricity to the Tokyo Electric Power Co. grid because Tokyo Electric runs power at a different frequency from the rest of the country, according to industry officials.
And with two of Tokyo Electric's nuclear power plants knocked offline since the March 11 earthquake that battered northern Japan, the company said it sees no alternative to a series of rolling blackouts across the Tokyo region.
Tokyo Electric, Japan's largest power utility, uses 50-cycle power, while most of the rest of the country uses 60-cycle electricity. Because of a lack of machinery, only a limited amount of about 1 million kilowatts can be converted and shared, according to industry officials.
Tokyo Electric said it doesn't yet know how the blackouts will be implemented but said the electric supply will be narrowed by as much as 10 million kilowatts, roughly 20%.
Short of the construction of new power plants, there is no end of the shortage in sight. Some mothballed facilities may be brought back online, but this would not compensate for the loss of the Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear plants.
Some blackouts have begun in eastern and northern Japan already.
Both plants have been shut down since the earthquake and tsunami, and Daiichi has suffered several explosions and leaked radioactivity into surrounding areas.
Building conversion facilities to share power from other grids would be almost as expensive as building a new power plant, a Tokyo Electric offical said Thursday.
What are your thoughts?
Tokyo - Rolling Blackouts through Summer
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04-01-2011, 02:41 AMGritTokyo - Rolling Blackouts through Summer
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04-01-2011, 02:45 AMBetelgeuzah
Well, the lack of proper lightning won't be a problem during the Summer but I bet they'll start missing their air conditioning starting June.
So expect frustrated, anguishing developer's comments during that time.
I can already see Yoshida's 13th letter: "It's 30 plus degrees outsides and my PC isn't helping a thing. You could boil an egg on my head. However, fortunately the artist team has gained inspiration to start the development on the new Hell-region." -
04-01-2011, 02:46 AMOnidemonThere is a simple solution to this.... Region dedicated servers. Have some servers in NA and Europe and leave the current servers for Asia. Yes i'm talking about splitting the players into their own region.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grit
This will reduce lag a lot and also NA and Europe won't be affected by these blackouts. It might seem unfair for the Asian players but from a business point of view it is better to save 2 regions then penalize everyone. In it's current state FFXIV can't afford much more down time.... -
04-01-2011, 02:54 AMVackashkenYou're becoming lamer by the day.Quote:
Originally Posted by Galamantyl
Aside from that - maybe we'll get lucky and they're finally decide to put servers somewhere else as well.
One can hope. -
04-01-2011, 02:56 AMCendres
No segregated servers, please no. I want to play with the world not with just NA, arrgghh please no. Thanks.
Shut it down if you have to, as fickle as gamers are you may 'lose' players to other games but that doesn't mean they won't come scampering back. -
04-01-2011, 02:57 AMLenDon't hold your breath on that one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vackashken
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04-01-2011, 02:57 AMVackashkenWho said anything about segregated servers?Quote:
Originally Posted by Cendres
Yeaaaaaaah, I know. Ah well...Quote:
Originally Posted by Len
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04-01-2011, 03:02 AMGalamantylAnd you're becoming an ass.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vackashken
Aside from that - it would indeed be nice if they just decide to move servers elsewhere. I'm sure there's other countries where hosting would in fact be cheaper too with acceptable maintenance levels as well. The only problem is performance might suffer for Japanese players. -
04-01-2011, 03:04 AMEekiki
This was to be expected, but I don't think it will affect SE too much. There are other ways to keep cool besides A/C.
Yeah, that's right, SE needs to install a swimming pool in their office! -
04-01-2011, 03:07 AMLerrisThe suggestion was put forward earlier in the thread.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vackashken
IMO, segregated servers are a bad idea. Global servers are part of the game's appeal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Onidemon
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04-01-2011, 03:08 AMArcell
Well I'm assuming they'll know the schedule of the blackouts and will likely treat it like a maintenance downtime. Servers will be off between these times, deal with it.
Also I believe someone here used the wrong wording for "put servers in other parts of the world." I don't think he was suggesting region specific servers, but instead to have servers in NA/EU. Unfortunately this is still unlikely to happen. I honestly don't care either way though, SE's gotta do what they gotta do. -
04-01-2011, 04:02 AMCendresOnidemon :3Quote:
Originally Posted by Vackashken
Region dedicated sounds a lot like separate servers to me. -
04-01-2011, 04:12 AMNuru
Maybe not separate servers, but wouldn't the server hosts be connected to the other regions? This way we could all get a great response time.
I really don't know if that is even possible though, I have no clue how servers work. -
04-01-2011, 04:44 AMSheliaUhm, well, this wouldn't be a problem if FFXIV's population per server was above 1000 people. lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Onidemon
As the servers currently are... if we separated into region-onry, there would be only like... probably less than a couple hundred per server... which is a total waste of a server. Besides, there's no real need for it. I don't mind playing with other people who don't speak my language.
Even if the game goes down for a little, it's not like any of us are missing much. lol -
04-01-2011, 04:52 AMMoth
This information troubles me :c
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04-01-2011, 05:33 AMMalakhim
As long as it doesn't impede any work being done currently I'm cool.
Otherwise oh geez... -
04-01-2011, 05:35 AMOnidemonWell it could be good once we get a solid player base. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Shelia
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04-01-2011, 05:58 AMAkumuI hope SE doesn't split up the players. Playing with such a diverse group is one reason I loved XI over other MMOs(besides enjoying the game itself). If something happens in Japan and they have to shut it down then I will just deal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shelia
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04-01-2011, 06:06 AMCoombahI agree, I can see it going back to alpha/beta play times..Quote:
Originally Posted by Moth
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04-01-2011, 06:11 AMGrit
There is very little chance that SE would consider moving the servers outside of Japan.
And there is even less chance that they would decide to segregate servers by region.. that ship has pretty much sailed.
Realistically, the devs are going to have to deal with the power conservation and rolling blackouts, while we deal with the servers going off-line from time to time. -
04-01-2011, 06:12 AMJinko
Move the servers to America, it would solve a lot of problems.
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04-01-2011, 07:02 AMGabbaGabbait would also create a lot more problems, such as whos gonna pay for the server farm and rent out the space to put it. electricity bill, plus they would basically have to live in america or pay some people to maintain their servers for maintenence. i would rather spend all that money and buy backup generators that can supply the servers with power for the hours that they go offline.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinko
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04-01-2011, 08:04 AMJinko
Who's guna pay for it, silly question isn't it ?
And yes they would need staff to run it but its only temporary and they could no doubt use staff from the NA division of SE. -
04-01-2011, 11:05 AMNabiri
Not that I think they ever will be, but IF the servers were separated by region I would quit. Wouldn't be able to play with my boyfriend, and losing the JP community... that would take too much away from the game for me. Wouldn't be very fun.
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04-01-2011, 11:12 AMKaedan
I think some of you might be confused. Please allow me to explain.
SE's servers aren't actually in any of the blackout zones. If they were, we'd be experiencing frequent server shutdowns while their turn for blackout came around (and even if they were in the blackout zones... we haven't had frequent shutdowns due to blackouts yet, so why would it change?).
But what they've done is reduced their power consumption to help alleviate the drain on the Tokyo grid in general.
So no, we won't have regular server downtimes, but the people who work in the building will eventually have to deal with no A/C come June/July. Though I'm sure their power consumption can probably handle a few rotating fans to help out. -
04-01-2011, 11:24 AMAbriaelNo. Thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Onidemon
One of the major point of appeal of this game is that it does NOT segregate the players by region, creating a truly international community.
Regional segregation is completely antiquated and surpassed in today's globalized internet, and developers segregating their players by region are actually doing a disservice to them.
By the way, using the consequences of a natural disaster to further your personal agenda is pretty much contemptible.
In any case. Rolling blackouts are not going to affect FFXIV in any way. Just as for the previous rolling blackouts it's extremely unlikely that the rolling blackouts will affect the Shibuya City area (where the server farm is located). It's the commercial heart of Japan, and the administrators of Tepco know very well that by shutting it down, even temporarily, they would do more damage than good, especially when they can blackout much less important areas, exactly like they did so far.
S-E shut down the servers as a volunteer act to help improve the situation in the emergency immediately after the earthquake. They have since found other ways to save the same amount of energy, so it's extremely unlikely that further rolling blackouts will affect FFXIV in any sizable way. -
04-01-2011, 02:46 PMMicrll
Ok, as a Computer Science Student about to graduate in a month let me add a few comments.
First off, as for the blackouts affecting the servers. Most fill blown data centers should be able to handle a few hours of scheduled blackout no problem, they are generally fed by battery power (or flywheel in some "green" data centers) and run off of the power that comes out of that rather than the power from the grid (tends to be cleaner energy anyways as you don't have to worry about short spikes / shortages). Most data centers will also have generators to keep the power going as the battery can only power the place for a short while.
Picture of the setup
http://eetdnews.lbl.gov/nl12/images/data-center.gif
In addition many of these data centers can remove themselves from the grid "on demand", a company I interned with had a deal with the power company that they could switch to generator power in times of peak demand by other users. I suspect that this would be the case with the our servers / data centers. As the power outages are scheduled they should be able to handle the switch-off fairly well.
Also I will point out that it IS possible to have created the game with "regional" servers that all communicate between each other. The idea being that US players connect to a US server 'node' which is the one communicating with the JPN and other regional servers on a dedicated line. Of course while this would speed up lag for stuff like UI and responsiveness it would slow down communications and interaction between servers on different nodes. This sort of setup similar to what IRC chat uses.
Of course while it IS possible to do this its something that would have had to have been designed at the very beginning to support it and I HIGHLY doubt we will see it happen ever with XIV. -
04-01-2011, 03:10 PMKaedanQuote:
Originally Posted by Micrll
While I appreciate your attempt to educate people, it's unnecessary. The simple fact is that the servers are not in a blackout zone. So the whole point is moot.