Quote Originally Posted by Farore View Post
I'll tell you what. If I hired some guys to build servers to accommodate all the people I need, and I hand them the figures that say we need oh, say 500k slots available, and they give me some cheap, poorly-done servers that house 125k, I'd fire them! There's no excuse to cheap out when you have so many people ready and eager to play, and pay! You do your job, and you do it right, or I won't put up with you. This isn't a Welfare job, you earn your right to stay (at least in my mind it's not).

My point is, WoW is running on nine year old code, nine year old hardware (probably not, but anyway), and they do just fine. At their launch, they had space for everyone, because they built their servers accordingly. They didn't work right, sure, but they were still big enough for everyone who wanted to play.

I just don't see much of a justified reason as to why Square did what they did, and why they take a three day weekend off, rather than pay the IT crew overtime to get the job done when it needs to be done. It just doesn't make me feel comfortable about the future business decisions regarding this game. I've loved Final Fantasy since the first one, I just hope it doesn't end here.
Well, for starters, only the NA support desk is taking Labor Day off. That doesn't include the server technicians.

Secondly, they thought they were building enough servers to accommodate the people they needed. They were mistaken. It doesn't mean their hardware is cheap. They had no way of knowing exactly how many people would buy their game. They, like any company, can only come up with an estimate based on trends, pre-order sales, etc. The disappointment of 1.0 caused them to grossly underestimate those numbers. This was, perhaps, their biggest mistake with this launch. I don't defend them for it, but I can understand how it came about. Since they have acknowledged, and are working to fix this mistake (albeit not as quickly as I would have liked), I don't hold a grudge against them, because many companies out there would never even admit they screwed up to begin with.

As for WoW, as you mentioned, nine-year-old code. The more advanced technology becomes, the less stable, typically. As I mentioned, WoW likely uses far less bandwidth per character, and for the world in general. That means its easier and cheaper to host more characters, and on older hardware, than it is for a more resource-intensive game like FFXIV. Blizzard has also had almost a decade to analyze and optimize their software to make it more efficient. FFXIV:ARR has had a couple of months (including beta).