Servers are Down

[ShinChuck]

Seems like they're officially down. Thoughts and prayers go out to the Japanese people. Glad to see Square Enix doing their part to facilitate recovery!

[Punxsutawney]

Yep these natural disaster are terrible. I hope Japan, the Japanese people, and the Japanese economy the best of luck and a speedy recovery.

[AuctionGirl]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

[Hero]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it because the servers are only in Japan?

[origamikitsune]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

Short version, it takes weeks, if not months to plan that sort of change.

They have to purchase the servers, get them as close to their current servers in specs, re-program the game and all web-services to point to the new servers, and then they still have to transfer the data which in and of itself would take hours probably in order to do it without taking down already crowded data lines. MMOs are not small games. It is not like downloading an MP3 from iTunes.

Once all that is done, they have to test, debug, fix hardware, fix software, patch, test again, debug again, fix software, patch, test again, etc.

Right now, Tokyo is expecting mandatory rolling black outs, expecting to last up to three hours in some areas within the city. There is no way they would have had time to do it.

Edit: Also, assuming they were willing to use data centers owned by third party vendors at all, there aren't likely many data centers in the world outside of the corporate, government, or educational institutions that could handle that traffic. I can only think of a few.

[mimeh]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it because the servers are only in Japan?

You are right. It's a japanese game, made by japanese people and with japanese servers. Taking into account that they have an extimated death toll of more than 10000 people, I think their main priority is not that we can play in the rest of the world while their people is dying.

[AuctionGirl]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

Maybe they will learn from this experience as this shutting off the service could cause more people to quit and find another game to play. Just poor business judgment from SE that's all..

[origamikitsune]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

Even if they owned their own data center out of country, that could easily place their monthly internet bill in the tens of millions to maintain a live-ready backup.

[Mikita]

I think Square Enix realizes the implications of shutting down the servers for at least a week as this country tries to recover from the earthquake and its aftermath. They may also reconsider their BCP strategy in light of this disaster.

But we are in really bad shape in Japan right now.
I think SE has made the right decision under extraordinary circumstances and I applaud them for it.

I will miss being able to spend time with my friends in Eorzea. But I will be back when the servers come back online -- provided I don't die in one of these aftershocks that keep hitting us.

[Kiroh]

SE has no obligation to do anything with their servers, they can keep them wherever they want. If you don't like playing a Japanese game on Japanese servers from a Japanese company, then don't play.

To reiterate what I've already said in another post:

SE has the right to do whatever they want with their servers and their data, it's in the contract you agree to when you sign up to play. The fact that, in this case, they're doing it for a good reason simply means you have even less ground to stand on with your complaints. Grow up, you're not going to die just because you don't have a video game, people in Japan can (and will) die if they don't have electricity.