SE should get what they never had

[Kam]

Well, dispite what is currently going on in japan. I belive the severs may come back up with the first few patches to the battle system.
Tokyo is largely uneffected except for schedualed power cuts designed to allow buisness's to continue day to day trade. So, ASIDE from personal/family issues with the Devs and the general SE staff (praying they're all ok). They techincally have 1~4+ weeks to work on the current patches and some of the future game "theory" they have to go through before even sitting down to code anything. (Main Story direction, quests with CS, Ishgaurd, Chocobos, airships, the "jump" feature, black shroud redesign, area collision algorythms, ability redistruibtion/final battle system adjustments, there is lots and lots to do...)
I hope this is a blessing in-disguise for the future of 14. As a company they should be aiming to use this down time to their advantage.
NOT TRYING TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE TERRIBLE STATE OF THEIR COUNTY... but... SE has a temporary breather as far as ff14 developement is concernd. Good luck to them.
(This is after all one aspect -albeit a mid/longer term one- to helping rebuilding japans bruised ecnomomy. No?)

kam ^^

[Spuffin]

lol how can you say that this is an opportunity to put more time into their game.... The servers are down... I can guarantee most of them are not even working at the moment and they are with their families. The producer may be working from home but the crew most definitely is dispersed and probably not at their HQ.

"Our nation is literally falling apart!!! Quickly we can shut down the servers to every game and focus all of our attention on FF14 for the next couple of weeks while we ignore our community! None of you are able to lend helping hands nor attend family matters at this time... YOU MUST WORK!"

[Akumu]

lol how can you say that this is an opportunity to put more time into their game.... The servers are down... I can guarantee most of them are not even working at the moment and they are with their families. The producer may be working from home but the crew most definitely is dispersed and probably not at their HQ.

"Our nation is literally falling apart!!! Quickly we can shut down the servers to every game and focus all of our attention on FF14 for the next couple of weeks while we ignore our community! None of you are able to lend helping hands nor attend family matters at this time... YOU MUST WORK!"

lol I finally agree with Spuffin on something. While we were suppose to get 2 patches at the end of the month it has been delayed 1-2 weeks. The entire team is safe but some do have families in the affected areas and french and german localization teams also left. Analyzing the letter from Yoshi-P they are still at work but there pace has been slowed down a bit.

Also, the servers being down does not help SE work faster in anyway. So I would rather play while they fix XIV instead of waiting 6 months to a year to play.

[Shura]

I think the SE team and people affected in Japan should take as much time as needed before worrying about this game but i don't agree with the OPs proposal of leaving the servers down for months in order to get the game fixed faster. The reason is, as stated by others already it will NOT matter if the servers are up or down in terms of fixing the game. The Development team uses a "Test Server" to test the changes, test new content and fix bugs, once they are satisfied with certain changes made, they implement the change to the game servers through patches.

For those who still don't understand, let me explain it in an even simpler way; Lets assume the team is working on a brand new instance, this process will take 2 months to finish (random numbers, in reality takes alot longer to design a new instance).

Option A (Game Servers Offline) -
10 days to plan
10 days to design
30 days to code
1 day to implement(on test server
5 days to test
4 days to figure out and fix bugs

Option B (Game Servers Online)
10 days to plan
10 days to design
30 days to code
1 day to implement(on test server
5 days to test
4 days to figure out and fix bugs
1 day to implement on game servers

As you can see, whether the server is online or offline, the amount of time it takes to create content is the same; with it taking an extra day to implement the changes to the game servers through maintenance. I rather play for 6 months and wait 1 day for maintenance rather then not play for 6 months. Similar Process applies to ALL MMO games, no company or team does initial tests on the actual game servers, its all done on test servers to avoid the risk of any unintended problems that may arise from the changes.

Even with test servers there will be problems since everyones PC is not the same, but its in fact FASTER for the dev team to let players report bugs rather then testing the same change on 100+ different PCs with different Specs.

[sharky]

Assuming that everyone is level 50+ and have nothing more left to do in the game. I still have plenty of ranks and skills to level up, plus I like partying. I'm probably alone in finding the game enjoyable as it is right now, though it could use more content.

I don't think that the people who left FF14 are ever going to like it anyways. If they insist on always comparing everything to WOW you're always going to get 'Rift', an unoriginal WOW clone, which WOW people disliked BTW. So even if FF14 were redesigned to appease the unappeasable it's just destined to be panned anyway.