SE should get what they never had

[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.