Regarding the crisis in Japan and the FF14 forums.

[Abriael]

I got to love when people that know absolutely nothing about how a MMORPG operates flap their gums pretending to know.

"Backup" servers in another location (read in another nation) would solve nothing. Servers are useless without all the data of the characters inside them.

Transferring sensitive character data between one server farm and another is not a risk-free operation, it requires several days of preparation, and further days for execution. It's been done before (when a regional service of a game closed for good and operation had to be moved to the main server farm, not in case of natural disasters) and it was never instant.
This means that it's a completely useless operation unless the service outtage is very prolonged, because if the outtage is a week most or all of it would go just preparing to move character data to the backup farm and doing it.

This not to mention that, after the crisis, it would require a further outtage to transfer service back to the main server farm.

Let's not even talk about the costs of mantaining this backup server farm, since every FFXIV server (and every major MMO server) isn't just a server, but a server cluster made of several servers together. Servers that don't have only to be bought and installed, but also costantly mantained (because you can't just leave them locked up in a room waiting to be used).

So congratulation, not only you started a quite inappropriate thread for the time, but you also advocated a quite irrealistic idea. Good Job.

[Abraxai]

Server farms are rendered useless without a data backup to port over.. At best we'd all be playing the game with our characters at their progress a week ago..

A great philosophy to live by and follow:

Haters gon' hate.

Simple enough, yet true.

So what if development is halted? It's only gonna be a week or two. The world is a big place. Time is a long process. Go rent Dragon Age II and stop whining!

[Abriael]

So what if development is halted? It's only gonna be a week or two. The world is a big place. Time is a long process. Go rent Dragon Age II and stop whining!

Actually there's no word about development being halted. As far as i know workers in tokyo still go to work, and while there may be obvious and totally justified delays, I'm pretty sure that Yoshida and the others will pull up their sleeves and work hard to make the days out outtage bear at least some fruit.

Japanese are a die-hard people, and demonstrated it time and time in their history. I can easily guarantee that while the servers may be shut down, the development team will not remain idle.

[Abraxai]

"if" was a bit of a key word in what I was saying, to be fair. But I take your point.

[MarkH]

Hmmm, Mega you are right, you are not complaining about the server being shut down unlike a lot of people here. That's good, please by all mean keep talking about how the game could improve, we need that.

I guess your choice of words tick me off and in my mind I've lumped you with all the rest, and I do think that just because one doesn't know or doesn't understand doesn't give one the right to feel entitled, be demanding and complain that SE had inconvenient them.

Like other have said, it would be very difficult and costly to keep a back up server farm outside the country, especially when corresponding server from both have to in sync in real time as you play. I just do not see it as reasonable to expect them to do and complain that they don't. FFXI run fine enough for almost a decades with the system that they have.

[Mega]

^Thanks for hearing me out Mark. Look forward to future posts with you.