I need to get this straight

[Mirage]

When the game goes into 2.0 beta, non legacy players will not be able to play the classic client for the duration of 2.0 beta? So I am stuck without a game to play for however many months this takes? This is what I gathered from the chatter in my LS, I hope that I am just badly mistaken.

It's like telling a cigarette smoker, "sorry, we are improving the tobacco blend, you'll just be X months without a smoke until it's perfected."

Thanks for any clarification.

I hope you understand how an online service can in no way be compared to a physical product that you can freely stockpile in case of shortages.

Anyway, if you really want to use the tobacco analogy: If your favorite brand became unavailable for a month or two, don't you think you would change to the next best brand you know of until you could get your favorite again?

This is actually possible with MMOs too, considering how many there are on the market now. Some of them don't even have an initial cost of purchase.

As for an actual answer: The servers for version 2 are (supposedly) very different from the current ones, and the databases used to store all the characters in the current game will need to be converted to a format that the new servers understand. During this process, you can't change the contents of the database you're converting from.

Therefore, even if they took a copy of the database at the start of september and let us keep playing all through september while the database conversion was being done, everything you had done in the game since the start of that month would be lost in 2.0. There would literally be no point in playing, because your progress wouldn't be saved.

Therefore, we are offered a chance to play on the beta servers for v2 in the meantime, instead of having us keep playing in a game that won't be saved. Yoshida has stated that he intends the downtime between the v2 beta and the v2 launch to be as short as just a few days, but he also said that in a worst case scenario, it could take a week or two.